Nanda Nagar, Uttarakhand, India — Every morning at 8am, Ahamad Hasan pulls up the brown shutter of his dry-cleaning shop on the banks of the Nandakini river, which runs through the remote Himalayan town of Nanda Nagar in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

He neatly hangs dry-cleaned clothes in plastic covers on the pink walls of his shop. Then the 49-year-old waits for customers.

Until September 2024, by lunchtime, he would have had between 20 and 25 customers come by, leaving their sherwanis, suits, coats, pants and winter wear. Some would sip a cup of tea with him while discussing politics and jokes, sharing their smiles and sorrows. Most of the customers were Hindu, a few, Muslim.

But on this day, fewer than five Hindu customers visit his shop by noon. And he knows there’s no point waiting for a Muslim customer.

Hasan is the last Muslim man in town.

For generations, 15 Muslim families called Nanda Nagar home. It’s where Hasan was born and raised, where his family received invitations for Hindu festivals and hosted neighbours on Eid. He has collected wood for Hindu funeral pyres and shouldered the bodies of his Hindu friends.

That all changed last September in an explosion of anti-Muslim violence triggered by a Hindu girl’s allegation of sexual harassment, but rooted in a broader shift in sentiment against the minority community that Hasan had noticed since COVID-19.

Hate-filled slogans and marches culminated in physical assaults against Muslims, as their shops were destroyed. Fearing for their lives, the town’s small Muslim community fled in the cover of night.

Only Hasan returned, with his wife, two daughters and two sons, adamant that they could make it work in the only place he knew as home. But the family lives in fear.

Their Hindu neighbours don’t speak to them. He no longer goes for walks along the river like he used to every evening. He does not let his kids and wife meet anyone. And he worries about more violence breaking out.

“I just go to my shop and come back home. This is our life now,” Hasan says. “After spending my whole life in this town, I feel like I am a ghost. I am completely invisible. Nobody is even talking to me.”

‘Beat Muslims with shoes’

Nanda Nagar is a 10-hour drive from India’s capital New Delhi. Located near the India-China border, the town is nestled at the confluence of the Nandakini’s tributaries, and has a population of about 2,000 people. The river Nandakini is one of the six tributaries of the Ganges river, and is considered holy by Hindus.

After Hasan’s grandfather migrated from Najibabad, a town in Bijnor district of neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state in 1975, their family settled in town. Hasan was born a year later.

Life was largely peaceful, he recalls, until 2021. During the coronavirus pandemic, Muslims across India were vilified because of conspiracy theories spread by the Hindu far-right groups that accused the community of deliberately spreading the virus through their religious practices and by holding large gatherings. The far-right called it “Corona jihad”.

Suddenly, Hasan felt his Hindu friends grow distant. “Before COVID-19, there used to be so many people in our home on Eid, and on Diwali we used to get so many invites from our friends. But after COVID, this stopped,” he says.

But the events of September 1, 2024, were a tipping point.

A week earlier, on August 22, a young Hindu pupil accused a Muslim barber, Mohammad Arif, of sexual harassment while he was opening his salon. The barber soon fled the town.

On September 1, the town’s shopkeepers’ association decided to rally to condemn the alleged harassment of the pupil and demand police action. Hasan, along with other Muslims in the town, participated in the protest. “We went because otherwise the Hindus would allege that we support crimes committed by Muslims,” he recalls.

However, the crowd soon started chanting anti-Muslim slogans, threatening violence.

“As we were walking along with protesters, anti-Muslim slogans were raised such as ‘Mullon ke dalaalon ko … Joote maaro saalon ko’ [the pimps of Muslims should be beaten by shoes],” he says.

As the rally reached the police station in Nanda Nagar, a group of protesters grabbed a 30-year-old Muslim man, Harun Ansari, and started beating him. Hasan said many Hindus justified Ansari’s beating by alleging that Muslims in town had helped the accused barber, Arif, to flee.

In a phone interview from Najibabad, where he moved after the assault, Ansari says that he received multiple injuries in his head. “I just remember being dragged by the crowd. After that nothing was visible to me,” he recalls.

After Ansari was beaten, all the other Muslims, including Hasan, fled from the rally and locked themselves in their houses. A mob of hundreds of people came and started pelting their houses with stones.

Hasan says the Muslim families kept calling the police for help. “But no one came.” He also called his Hindu friends. “They were not even picking up my call,” he says.

The Muslim families stayed indoors until late evening when the mob went away. That night, as the clock crossed midnight, Hasan quietly made his way back to his shop, which is in front of his house.

He saw that the shutter of his shop was broken and twisted. Dry-cleaned clothes were strewn across the street like confetti. The counter, a sturdy wooden table where he kept savings worth 400,000 rupees [$4,600] in a locked drawer, was shattered – the money stolen. He had saved that money for his children’s marriages.

Fragments of the name board of his shop, The Hasan Drycleaners, were thrown like debris on the banks of the Nandakini.

“I will never forget that day,” Hasan tells Al Jazeera, while showing photos of his vandalised shop.

But the following day would be even worse.

On September 2, an even bigger protest was organised by Hindu far-right groups, who called for people from other towns to also assemble in Nanda Nagar. “There were thousands of men and just 60 or 70 policemen,” says Harun, the man who was thrashed the previous day. “Despite our complaints, no extra police force was called.”

Darshan Bharti, a Hindu far-right leader known for his hate speech against Muslims, also visited Nanda Nagar that day. After his speech, “the mob went on a rampage and vandalised our properties,” says Hasan. They destroyed a makeshift mosque and threw a Muslim resident’s car into the river. Bharti did not respond to Al Jazeera’s questions on his visit to Nanda Nagar and on the violence that followed.

“All Muslim families of the town hid on the top floor of my house while the crowd was pelting stones. I still get shivers recalling that day,” Hasan says. His house has iron grills and a gate, and is a multistorey building, which made it a safer choice for the Muslim families to shelter in.

Arif, the barber accused of sexual harassment, was arrested that day from Uttar Pradesh after police registered a formal complaint against him on September 1. Arif was remanded to police custody for a week and then released on bail.

However, the police informed the Muslim families that they could not take responsibility for their safety any more. In the dark, officers escorted them into police vehicles and dropped them off in a nearby town.

For most Muslim families, it was the end of life in Nanda Nagar.

But not for Hasan. “This is my home. My birth and upbringing, everything about my life, including my identity, belong to Uttarakhand,” he says, adding that all his identity documents list Nanda Nagar as his address. “My entire family lives in Uttrakhand.

“Where will I go now?”

‘A total boycott’

From the neighbouring town where the police left them, Hasan and his family made their way to Dehradun, the state capital situated 266km (165 miles) away.

After a few days in Dehradun, Hasan and 48-year-old Mohammad Ayyum, who was also from Nanda Nagar, petitioned the Uttarakhand High Court on September 26, pleading for protection.

The High Court ordered the senior superintendent of police (SSP) of Chamoli district, where Nanda Nagar is located, to “ensure that law and order is strictly enforced and no untoward incident occurs targeting any particular community”. The SSP is the most senior police officer of the district responsible for law and order.

“After the High Court granted us protection, I thought I could now go to Nanda Nagar, but no other Muslim family was ready to accompany me out of fear,” Hasan recalls.

Hasan’s brother used to run a salon in Nanda Nagar. “But his landlord threatened him that if he did not vacate his shop, he would throw his belongings out,” Hasan says. Other relatives who live in Gopeshwar, a larger town in Chamoli, did not offer his family any support, Hasan says.

“After a lot of thought, I decided I must go back, as everything – including my house and shop, was in Nanda Nagar.”

Hasan added that his wife was more courageous than he was. “She went to Nanda Nagar with our kids first. I came to town later. Despite fear, she told me if we do not go back, we would lose our livelihood.”

To be sure, the family still faces a dilemma. Hasan has contemplated moving his family to Dehradun after their daughter completes school. However, his wife believes that if they move anywhere else, their house and shop will be taken by locals.

Hasan finally reached Nanda Nagar on October 16, only to find a Hindu man had also opened a dry-cleaning shop facing his shop, as direct competition.

He tried to get his shop repaired but no Hindu workers were willing to help. “It’s a total boycott of Muslims”, he says. “They have spread so much fear that no worker is ready to even repair our shop. The workers told me they have been instructed by the Hindutva groups not to help the Muslims.” Hindutva is the Hindu nationalist ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a paramilitary organisation and leader of a large number of bodies including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Hasan eventually managed to open his shop after repairing it himself. But no customers would come. He dialled his previously regular Hindu clients, but they refused to come. Anyone who came would be threatened by “Hindutva goons”, he says, and told to instead go to the Hindu dry-cleaner.

“That day I realised that even dry-cleaning has a religion.”

A smile, finally

Hasan’s family, too, has struggled in a new Nanda Nagar – one in which their religion makes them stand out.

His 16-year-old daughter was bullied in school, he says, “because of her religion”. One of her classmates told her that she should be expelled from the school because she’s a Muslim.

“It stopped when we reached out to the principal with a complaint.”

Justice, for Hasan and the Muslims who fled the town, remains elusive. After the September 1 attack, Uttarakhand Police registered a formal complaint based on what Nanda Nagar police station chief Sanjay Singh Negi observed that day.

“I saw that 250-300 people were loudly abusing ‘a specific community.’ When I tried to stop them, they pushed me aside. Then, I called my seniors and asked for additional police force,” Negi wrote in his complaint. He then wrote that the mob started vandalising shops of Muslims and also vandalised a mosque.

“The agitated mob was targeting a specific community due to which the women and kids from these families started screaming in fear.” Negi wrote that members of the mob were carrying sticks, shovels and iron rods. Still, Uttarakhand Police have not arrested anyone so far. Al Jazeera reached out to the Chamoli district’s Superintendent of Police Sarvesh Panwar but has not received any response.

In some ways, Nanda Nagar is a microcosm of a broader shift enveloping the state of Uttarakhand. Under Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami of Modi’s BJP, the state has witnessed a surge in hate crimes and discrimination against Muslims in multiple cities. In town after town, far-right groups have launched campaigns to pressure Muslims to leave, in many cases successfully.

Shops belonging to Muslims are ransacked or burned. An economic boycott is unofficially instituted. And often, Muslims also face physical violence. Most recently, Dhami’s government notified the rules of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) that stops Muslims and other religious minorities from pursuing religion-based personal laws in the state.

Courts have stepped in on several occasions, but some activists believe they need to do more. “Courts of our country don’t realise the magnitude of oppression Muslims are currently facing,” says Khursheed Ahmed, an activist based in the state’s capital Dehradun who helped Hasan file a petition in the High Court. “The oppression is on all fronts – physical, emotional, financial.”

Still, recently, Hasan has found a glimmer of hope.

On February 19, more than five months after the September violence, one of the Hindu men who led the anti-Muslim protests came to Hasan’s shop. His wife was managing their shop at the time. The Hindu man had brought a coat and trousers and asked if they could be quickly dry-cleaned.

Hasan’s wife then asked him, “You called me sister and you wanted Muslims to go?”

The man replied: “Forget what happened. Your work is very good. That’s why I have come to you.”

Hasan smiles as he recalls that incident. “I saw this day because I didn’t go and I put up a fight,” he says.

The pain of broken friendships still hurts. “When Muslim families came back to take their belongings, the people with whom we used to sit and laugh were taunting us,” he says. “They questioned why we returned. It broke my heart. While physical violence has subsided, the silent social violence continues.”

But Hasan refuses to give up on the future. Or, on Nanda Nagar.