By Auqib Javeed
Srinagar: His head is bloodied and bandaged. A hand broken by an iron rod is in a sling. Despair and shock are evident on his baby face.
This was the photo of a 10th-standard Kashmiri student, 18-year-old Tabish Ahmad Ganie, that went viral after he and his brother, Danish Ahmad Ganie, a 10th-standard dropout, were battered by a shopkeeper and two others in the town of Vikasnagar, 40 km west of Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, on 28 January 2026.
Speaking over the phone from his temporary home in a rented room in Himachal Pradesh, Tabish, who accompanied his father to Uttarakhand during the winter holidays, told Article 14 he was struggling to come to terms with not just the attack but the religious and ethnic profiling.
“Tu Kashmiri Muslamaan hai (You are a Kashmiri Muslim)?” the shopkeeper, identified by police as Sanjay Yadav, said, according to Tabish, who had 12 stitches on his head, his left arm in a sling.
Like thousands of salesmen and labourers who stream out of Kashmir to earn a livelihood in a state with one of India’s highest youth unemployment rates, the Ganie brothers had joined their father over the last four years in the 17-hour journey from their home in the north Kashmir frontier district of Kupwara to Vikasnagar.
The attack on the Ganie brothers was the latest of many by Hindus and Hindu groups since the 22 April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack on Kashmiris in north Indian states, especially in Uttarakhand and Haryana, both governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Himachal Pradesh, run by the Congress.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.