Today is November 6, on this day in 1947, a caravan of Muslim refugees from Jammu set out for Sialkot. This caravan, consisting of women, children, and the elderly, departed from Jammu with dreams of a bright future and hopes in their hearts. However, the caravan never reached Sialkot.
Sheikh Abdullah, the Chief Executive of Jammu and Kashmir and commander of the Indian forces in the region failed to provide any military security for the caravan. Taking advantage of this situation, armed Hindu and Sikh militants stopped the caravan between Deghiana and Samba, separated the young women, and then killed all the other members of the caravan—including the elderly, men, and children—with bullets and axes.
A few people managed to survive, hiding amidst the dead and injured, and when the attackers believed all were dead, they took the women and fled. The surviving individuals managed to reach Sialkot after hiding and avoiding further attacks.
According to the testimonies of the survivors, this ill-fated caravan consisted of thirty buses. This incident of mass killings, looting, and abduction marked the peak of the attacks by armed Hindu militias on the Muslim refugees from Jammu, which had been occurring sporadically since September. In remembrance of the Muslims killed during these attacks, November 6 is observed as Martyrs’ Day of Jammu in Pakistan and the so-called Azad Kashmir. The day condemns the massacres of Muslims in Jammu, highlighting the widespread violence and the abduction of many women.
These killings were not limited to the refugee caravans alone, as many villages and towns in Jammu were also targeted by the terrorists. Nearly half of the Muslim population in the Kathua district was affected. The killings of hundreds of Gujjars in Mohala Ram Nagar and the burning of the Raipur village in the Jammu Cantonment area in September are part of this ongoing violence. The massacres of Jammu are undoubtedly a criminal act by the Hindus against the Muslims and should be condemned in the strongest terms.
The responsibility for this massacre also lies with the Jammu and Kashmir administration, led by Sheikh Abdullah, who failed to provide protection for the Muslim refugee caravans on November 6. It is essential to understand why and how these horrific incidents of killing and violence occurred on November 6. When these events took place, Sheikh Abdullah was the head of the administration.
He cannot absolve himself from responsibility for the massacre. On November 9, a similar attack on a Muslim refugee convoy was repelled by the army, resulting in the death of 150 attackers. After this, no such attacks occurred on any convoy. This clearly means that if the protective measures of November 9 had been implemented on November 6, the massacre could have been prevented.
However, in the tragedy of our national history, historians have written about these events with extreme bias, without making any effort to analyze the actual nature of these events and their causes. This is a significant flaw, as the partition of the Indian subcontinent was an extremely ill-conceived and impractical step, intended to sow discord among the people of the subcontinent and keep them divided, perpetually under British colonial control and global imperialism.
Has anyone ever wondered why, in 1947, people who had lived peacefully together for centuries, despite their religious differences, suddenly became bloodthirsty enemies of each other? The answer lies in a British conspiracy, which created an atmosphere of misunderstandings, rumors, and hostility among the public, leading to the violence, looting, and massacres of 1947.
The November 6 massacre in Jammu was part of this larger narrative. When the British decided to partition the subcontinent, Maharaja Hari Singh, the last ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, rejected the partition plan and proposed an independent and fully sovereign Jammu and Kashmir. The British disagreed with his plan, fearing that an independent state of Jammu and Kashmir could thwart their grand scheme. To undermine the Maharaja’s proposal, the British began conspiring against him. They orchestrated “Operation Gulmarg” under the supervision of General Frank Messervy, the British Army Chief of Pakistan, which resulted in the tribal invasion of Jammu and Kashmir on October 22, 1947.
The massacre of November 6, 1947, was also a consequence of the British divide-and-rule strategy. The British were extremely biased in their actions, manipulating the narrative in the media and by historians to distort the events of 1947. British newspapers like The London Times twisted the events of November 6, while editors like Ian Stephen and Harris Alexander, in their works, also presented a biased view of the massacre. Harris Alexander and Ian Stephen both reported the death toll in the Jammu massacre as 200,000, while *The London Times* claimed it to be 237,000. Many Muslim and Pakistan-affiliated historians have suggested that the actual number of victims was more than 500,000, but this remains a controversial claim due to the political agendas of different factions during the partition.
The survivors who managed to reach Sialkot after the massacre described the caravan as consisting of thirty buses. Based on this, readers can estimate how many people were part of the caravan. Muslim and Pakistan-oriented historians often exaggerate the scale of the massacre to support the idea that Hindus and Muslims could never live together in Jammu and Kashmir and that the partition and creation of Pakistan were essential for the survival and progress of Muslims. However, this is a baseless and fabricated propaganda aimed at dividing Jammu and Kashmir on religious lines and ultimately annexing its Muslim-majority areas to Pakistan.
In reality, the root cause of the massacres in Jammu in November was the incompetence of the Jammu and Kashmir administration. Had the government ensured proper protection for the refugee caravans, such massacres could have been avoided. The November 1947 massacre in Jammu was part of a larger pattern of violence that occurred in the aftermath of partition, particularly in areas such as Western Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Jammu and Kashmir, where Muslims perpetrated violence against non-Muslims in retaliation for earlier attacks. Since April 1947, Hindu refugee caravans fleeing from the violence in Rawalpindi, Attock, Murree, Bannu, and Hazara began arriving in Jammu, fueling further animosity.
Following the creation of Pakistan, over 160,000 Hindus from Pakistan’s western districts migrated to Jammu, and by mid-September 1947, over 65,000 Hindu refugees had arrived in Jammu city alone. These refugees brought with them tales of Muslim atrocities, which were amplified by the media as part of the British strategy to incite hatred and division. This created a deep-seated animosity among Hindus towards Muslims, which played a significant role in the violence that ensued. Another contributing factor was the presence of Sikh military units from the Indian army who fled to Jammu, bringing arms with them, which were used to seize land and property from Muslims.
Written by: Sameena Raja, Jammu and Kashmir
