By Samra Khaksar
Some wounds bleed silently through generations not because time cannot heal them, but because history refuses to acknowledge them. November 6, 1947, stands as one such unhealed wound in the story of Kashmir; a day when the plains of Jammu turned into a killing field, when the land that once symbolized harmony was engulfed in the flames of organized massacre. While the world remembers 1947 as the year of independence and partition, for the Muslims of Jammu, it marked the beginning of annihilation a genocide that sought to erase not just people, but the very idea of their belonging.
The bloodshed that occurred in November 1947 did not happen in isolation. As Alastair Lamb carefully reconstructs in Incomplete Partition, the events were a product of a structural failure that occurred in the wake of Britain’s rushed exit from the subcontinent. The 3 June Plan left India’s princely states suspended between two new dominions, without a clear progression for accession. In Pakistan’s semiautonomous complex, Jammu and Kashmir was the most precarious of all – a Muslim-majority state ruled by a Hindu Maharaja, where economically and geographically was pulled towards Pakistan, but it was politically drifting. What was most important to Britain at this time, Lamb notes, was its troop withdrawal, not stopping a humanitarian crisis. Kashmir was outside the jurisdiction of the Boundary Force, and what it meant ultimately was more than just a political blunder, but a human disaster on a nearly incalculable scale.
The seeds of the Jammu massacre were sown in this chaos.Maharaja Hari Singh, determined to protect his throne as pressure intensified, deployed state forces and RSS volunteers against the region’s Muslims during the period of 5 to 20 September 1947. Lamb indicates in his archives that there was “a deliberate programme of ethnic cleansing.” Close to 200,000 Muslims were massacred, and over 500,000 were forced to seek refuge across the border into Pakistan, which had just been created. Trains carrying hope and life arrived in Sialkot as death convoys soaked in blood. It was openly stated in the bazaars of Jammu that not a single Muslim was to be left alive to threaten the Dogra dominion.
Prem Shankar Jha, in The Origins of a Dispute, corroborates this dark reality: “Between 5 and 20 September 1947, in a series of events publicly discussed in Jammu’s bazaars, over 200,000 Muslims were expelled from the province by the RSS and the State forces.” This was not an outbreak of rioting; it was systematic slaughter that was planned out with chilling precision. The houses were set ablaze, the men were shot or hacked to death, and the women, the silent witnesses of history, endured terrible violence. It was one of the largest but least celebrated genocides during the partition of South Asia, drowned out by the cacophony of political narratives and by the deafening silence of the rest of the world. Moreover, as Victoria Schofield notes in Kashmir in Conflict, the Jammu massacre cannot be considered solely a communal tragedy; it was a strategic consequence of purposefully accorded violence in Jammu as part of an unparalleled strategy to facilitate the issue of accession. ‘By modifying Jammu’s demography, the Maharaja was attempting to solidify his power while at the same time foreseeing an alteration in communal balances in favor of the Dogra state’s accession to India.’ It is crucial to recognize that this mass displacement of Muslims was not merely collateral damage; it was the basis upon which a political arrangement was subsequently leveled. In other words, the blood of innocents is what was used to write the accession document.
However, perhaps a greater tragedy was the global apathy that followed. No Nuremberg followed Jammu. No tribunal of conscience sprang up to record the suffering of the victims. The same international community that would, in a few years, mobilize for the rights of Europeans turned its gaze from the valleys of South Asia. The mass killings were diminutively termed the “partition violence,” as if somehow their political intent and moral significance had been erased with this subtle description. As Lamb correctly states Kashmir’s fate was trapped in a “constitutional cul-de-sac,” a legal no-man’s-land created by Britain’s unfinished partition and India’s opportunistic occupation.
By the end of October, this situation had spiraled out of control. The Poonch uprising was largely organized by ex-servicemen who had been demobilized by the Maharaja, mixed with the pain of refugees escaping the Jammu massacre. The “tribal lashkars” that entered Kashmir on October 22, 1947, were not foreign invaders but men avenging their massacred families. Under historical scrutiny, the Indian narrative of “tribal invasion” is rendered untenable. This was not a conspiracy organized by Pakistan; it was a response for the genocide that had taken place in Jammu, a last-ditch effort to stop that from happening in Kashmir. But it gave India the justification it needed to militarize its intervention intervention which India had been planning long before the first lashkar had reached Baramulla. V.P. Menon had already carried a draft Instrument of Accession to Srinagar in late September. The Indian Defence Committee was drafting plans for an airlift operation ironically call “Operation Gibraltar” weeks before any act of invasion. Hari Singh’s October 26th signature was not the action of a sovereign state choosing its future, it was the last desperate action of a ruler who had already lost his state. And with that signature, Kashmir’s tragedy was set in motion – militarily, politically, and morally.
The massacre of Jammu thus stands as the unacknowledged prologue to the Kashmir dispute. It was the event that transformed a political question into a humanitarian catastrophe. It was not just about the loss of territory but about the erasure of identity. The Muslim-majority Jammu that once connected the Valley to Sialkot was transformed into a demographically engineered silence zone. And while the United Nations debated plebiscites and resolutions, the people whose voices mattered most had already been buried or exiled.
Seventy-eight years later, the ghosts of Jammu still linger. They live in the stories of the survivors who crossed the border with nothing but their grief. They echo in the silence of the graves that no one visits, in the villages where no call to prayer was heard again. They remind us that the Kashmir issue did not begin with tribal raids or military airlifts, it began with the blood of innocents betrayed by empire, ambition, and indifference.
As we commemorate Jammu Martyrs’ Day on November 6, we are not just recalling a forgotten massacre; we are confronting the moral failure of the modern world. The Jammu tragedy asks us to rethink the narratives we have inherited to question who writes history and who gets erased from its pages. It demands recognition, not as a footnote in partition history, but as a central chapter in the story of Kashmir’s unending pain.
The question now is not whether we remember the Jammu massacre , the question is, after knowing all this, how long will the world continue to live comfortably with its silence?
The writer is a student of Strategic Studies at National Defence University and a research Intern at Kashmir Institute of International relations. She is also an active member of HEAL Pakistan , a youth led non governmental organization.