Muslims ‘in constant fear’ amid hate campaign in India’s Himachal Pradesh

Farhan Khan says he still feels a chill down his spine when he recalls the day an anti-Muslim rally was held in his sleepy town in northern India’s Himachal Pradesh state.

On September 17, the 26-year-old tailor opened his shop in Solan as usual at about 11:30am when two men wearing saffron clothes approached him. One of them recorded the encounter on his mobile phone.

“They pointed the camera at my face, hurling abuses and demanding to know why I had opened my shop. Then, another group of men joined them and they all turned violent,” Farhan told Al Jazeera.

He said he was then “dragged by the crowd” to help identify more Muslim-owned shops in the area. “I identified five or six shops and urged them to close,” he said.

The scenic state of Himachal Pradesh, a popular destination for Indian tourists escaping the brutal summer and autumn heat of northern India, has been on edge for more than a month after far-right Hindu groups demanded the demolition of a mosque in the state capital, Shimla. That demand soon morphed into a larger anti-Muslim campaign aimed at instituting an economic boycott against them and even included calls to drive Muslims out of the state.

‘Locked myself in house for two days’

According to a report in The Hindu newspaper, a clash between a Shimla resident and some labourers in Shimla district’s Sanjauli town over the payment of wages on August 31 snowballed into religious tensions within days.

On September 10, residents in Sanjauli, led by some Hindu groups, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council or VHP), gathered outside the five-storey mosque in the middle of the town, claiming it was an illegal construction and therefore should be demolished.

The VHP is a member of a nationwide network of right-wing Hindu groups, spearheaded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association or RSS), a secretive paramilitary organisation formed 100 years ago which advocates for the conversion of a constitutionally secular India into a Hindu state. The RSS is also the ideological fountainhead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and counts him among its millions of lifetime members across and outside India.

The campaign against the Sanjauli mosque soon turned into broader anti-Muslim protests across Himachal Pradesh, a state where only 2 percent of the population is Muslim and where religious hatred on such a scale has not previously been seen, unlike several other north Indian states.

On September 11, a day after the demonstrations outside the mosque, Hindu groups marched from neighbouring Malyana town to Sanjauli and submitted a list of demands, including removing all “illegal” migrant workers and “illegal” mosques and other religious structures belonging to Muslims. The next day, in an apparently conciliatory move aimed at defusing tensions, the mosque’s management handed a letter to the municipal commissioner, asking him to seal the allegedly illegal part of the building.

Meanwhile, rallies were held across Himachal Pradesh. They included hate speeches against Muslims and calls to boycott their businesses, to stop hiring them as workers and to avoid renting houses to them, Amid widespread fear within the community, many have fled the state.

“My Hindu landlord is a good man but he asked me to vacate the shop as soon as possible since he was being pressured by the Hindu outfits,” Farhan told Al Jazeera, adding that close to 50 other Muslim migrants had left for their hometowns in other states.