The Jammu massacres of 1947

A province on the border

In the autumn of 1947 the Jammu province of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir ran from the plains beside Punjab to the hills of Poonch and Mirpur. Taken as a whole it had a Muslim majority: about 61 per cent in the census of 1941 by the most common count, 53 per cent in another. In its eastern districts Muslims were a minority: Jammu district had about 450,000 people, some 170,000 of them Muslims, and in Jammu city about 16,000 of some 50,000 inhabitants were Muslim, according to Ved Bhasin.

The state was ruled by a Hindu maharaja of the Dogra dynasty, Hari Singh, who had not decided whether to join India or Pakistan. The leader of the Muslim Conference in Jammu, Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, was held in the maharaja’s jail throughout 1947. By the middle of September some 65,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees from the areas that went to Pakistan were in Jammu city with their own accounts of slaughter. Politics in Jammu, Bhasin recalled, was “completely polarised on communal lines”.

Disarmed and surrounded

What followed was prepared. The state ordered Muslims to surrender their weapons, demobilised Muslim soldiers of the state army and discharged Muslim police officers, while arms went to Hindus and Sikhs. Bhasin found soldiers giving rifle training to young volunteers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist organisation, at Rehari in Jammu. Troops of the Sikh princely state of Patiala were in Jammu before the accession and built bunkers in Hindu houses. Curfew was imposed on Muslims, while armed bands moved freely; the Kashmir Times wrote in 2025 that curfews were imposed “not to protect the victims but to trap them”.

When Bhasin and other young activists tried to form peace committees, the governor of Jammu, Lala Chet Ram Chopra, summoned him and warned him of “dire consequences”. “It is not the time to form peace committees and work for peace but to defend Hindus and Sikhs,” he was told. By 7 October the maharaja’s government had placed four leading newspapers under pre-censorship, banned papers from outside the state, forced Kashmir Times to close and interned the correspondent of the Associated Press. The killing that followed took place where the outside world could not see it.

Village by village

On 14 October activists of the RSS and Akali Sikhs attacked the villages of Amrey, Cheak, Atmapur and Kochpura, killing Muslims and burning their houses. Within days the attacks spread across the districts of Jammu, Kathua, Udhampur and Reasi and the jagir of Chenani. Two Englishmen of the Friends Ambulance Unit, Horace Alexander and Richard Symonds, were commissioned by the governments of India and Pakistan to examine the killings. Their report, published in the Civil and Military Gazette on 18 December 1947, covered ten incidents up to 9 November, four of them before the accession. In every one, the report said, the killers included “State” or Dogra troops.

The report estimated that about 8,000 Muslims were killed near Kathua on 20 October and 15,000 near the Akhnoor bridge the same day. It said that at Maogaon on 23 October Dogra troops took the women and belongings of 25,000 Muslims awaiting evacuation and machine-gunned the rest, and that at Samba on 22 October, soon after a visit by the maharaja, state troops took away the women of 14,000 besieged Muslims and slaughtered the men; only 15 survived. Bhasin recorded large-scale killing in Udhampur, Chenani, Ramnagar and Reasi, and in Kathua killing “with women raped and abducted”. In Reasi the killing began on 4 November when an armed band of 500 to 600 men arrived; the writer Balraj Puri, who was there, said the hand of the administration was clearly visible. In Udhampur the killers burned alive Muslims who had gathered in the house of Colonel Abdur Rehman. At Ramnagar the tehsildar, Chander Udhay Singh, supervised the killing. He was suspended and later reinstated.

The convoys of November

In Jammu city the Muslim quarters of Talab Khatikan and Mohalla Ustad were besieged and cut off from water and food. On 5 November the government told the besieged Muslims to assemble at the police lines at Jogi Gate to be taken to Pakistan for their safety. That day the first batch, several thousand people in Bhasin’s account and several hundred in Khalid Bashir Ahmad’s, was loaded into some 40 to 60 lorries under military escort. Near Chattha, on the edge of the city, armed men of the RSS and Sikh refugees were waiting; in Khalid Bashir Ahmad’s reconstruction the lorries were diverted towards Digiana. “They were pulled out of the vehicles and killed mercilessly with the soldiers either joining them or looking as idle spectators,” Bhasin said. The attackers carried off young women; the daughter of Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas was among those abducted, and was later recovered.

On 6 November a second batch was loaded and met the same end; Khalid Bashir Ahmad writes that these lorries were turned towards Samba. Shabir Ahmad Salahria, thirteen at the time, survived with wounds to his arm, head and back; his parents were killed, and he estimated that 600 to 700 people died that day. A headmaster, Abdul Aziz Bhat, was holding his elder daughter, Masooda, when a bullet severed his thumb and passed into her body, killing her on the spot. Nazir Ahmad, who was eight, saw young Muslim women from the Ustad Mohalla camp “being dragged by hair” into army trucks. Very few of those who boarded the lorries reached Sialkot.

What the witnesses saw

Ved Bhasin, later the founding editor of Kashmir Times, was a seventeen-year-old student leader in 1947. In his account, published by Kashmir Life, he wrote that the RSS was joined by armed Sikh refugees “who even paraded the Jammu streets with their naked swords”, and that the state did not stand aside: “the Maharaja’s administration helped and even armed the communal marauders.” He told his daughter, Anuradha Bhasin, that “the Maharaja’s army and Patiala army took positions inside the Hindu houses and fired bullets at Muslims”. A colleague of his found a girl of eight or nine crying beside the bodies of her parents in the Ramnagar rakh.

Others said the same. G. K. Reddy, the expelled former editor of the Kashmir Times, told the Civil and Military Gazette that he saw “armed bands of ruffians and soldiers shooting down and hacking to pieces helpless Muslim refugees”. G. C. Bali, a senior intelligence officer, wrote to Nehru that Dogra and Rajput soldiers were “torching villages like rioters, abducting women and raping them”. Qudratullah Shahab, the first Muslim officer of the Indian Civil Service from the state, wrote that the maharaja had decided to wipe out the Muslim population of the province. According to a report placed before the United Nations, a ziladar, a local revenue official, heard Hari Singh order “that the Muslim were to be exterminated” and saw him shoot two or three people.

The maharaja’s prime minister, Mehr Chand Mahajan, told a Hindu delegation that they should demand parity with Muslims. When one of them asked how, given the difference in numbers, Mahajan pointed to the Ramnagar rakh below, where bodies of Muslims still lay, and said: “the population ratio too can change.” On 25 December 1947 Mahatma Gandhi said in public that “the Hindus and Sikhs of Jammu and those who had gone there from outside killed Muslims”, and that the maharaja was responsible. The state administration denied that it had any role.

Counting the dead

No official count was made. The Times of London reported on 10 August 1948 that 237,000 Muslims “were systematically exterminated”, unless they escaped to Pakistan, by the forces of the Dogra state “headed by the Maharaja in person”, a figure that counts the expelled with the dead. Pakistan’s representative, Sir Zafrullah Khan, repeated it to the United Nations Security Council on 8 February 1950. Horace Alexander put the dead at 200,000 in The Spectator of 16 January 1948. Ian Stephens, editor of The Statesman, wrote that half a million Muslims were eliminated from the area.

The incidents in Alexander and Symonds’s report account for about 70,000 deaths, and a West Punjab compilation of refugee testimony in 1948, cited by Snedden, recorded 118,459. Pakistan’s official calculation was 50,000. The historian Ian Copland gives about 80,000, Christopher Snedden between 20,000 and 100,000 and Justice Yusuf Saraf between 20,000 and 30,000. Bhasin, often cited for 100,000, wrote only that the number “runs into several thousands”. Abducted women are counted at 5,000 by the Muslim Conference, 13,360 in the West Punjab compilation and 25,000 in other estimates, which Saraf thought too high.

The survivors fled west. More than 100,000 had reached Sialkot by 20 November 1947, according to the Pakistani newspaper Nawa-i-Waqt, and over 200,000 by late November, according to a report cited by Khalid Bashir Ahmad. A Pakistani count in mid-1949 found 333,964 refugees from the Indian-held parts of the state. Dawn reported in 1951 that 500,000 had come in three waves up to early 1949, and a Pakistani government publication of 1952 gave 600,000.

Families across the border

The Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir has told how his mother’s family left Jammu by bus for Sialkot. Outside the city the bus was stopped by armed men who killed all the males in front of the women and children. “My grandmother Ghulam Fatima told my mother, Mumtaz, to hide under the dead bodies,” he wrote. Ghulam Fatima was last seen “defending herself with a stick in her right hand and her little son in her left hand” before she was dragged away. Mumtaz and her sisters were rescued in November 1947 from a road near Kathua “full of dead bodies”. Their father searched for his wife for years. She never returned.

Mehmood Ahmad Khan was six or seven in Reasi when five of his family were killed and his mother drowned trying to save his sisters. A Hindu hid him; later a Brahmin, Birbal, took him in, converted him and renamed him Gulaboo. In 1983 he visited his sisters, who had survived and reached Pakistan. Razia Begum was abducted at fifteen or sixteen and forced into marriage. Israr Ahmad Khan, a retired police officer in Jammu, told Al Jazeera in 2017 that many of his relatives were killed and others escaped to Pakistan, where they still live. “The incident divided families,” he said. “There were a lot of Muslims in Jammu but now you won’t find many.”

Their descendants are still counted as refugees. In the assembly of Azad Kashmir, the part of the old state held by Pakistan, twelve seats are reserved for refugees of 1947 and 1965 from the part of the state under Indian occupation, six of them for Jammu. In 2021 some 434,000 people were registered as refugees from the Jammu division, scattered across Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan. The Joint Awami Action Committee, a rights alliance in Azad Kashmir, campaigns for the seats to be abolished as a means of “electoral engineering”; on 7 June 2026 the Azad Kashmir Supreme Court advised that they can be changed only by constitutional amendment.

The door that was closed

In 1982 the elected legislature of Jammu and Kashmir passed a law to let them come home. The Resettlement Act allowed anyone who had been a state subject before 14 May 1954 and had left for Pakistan after 1 March 1947, together with their spouses, widows and descendants, to apply for a permit to return, on an oath of allegiance. After a presidential reference, the Supreme Court stayed the Act on 1 February 2002. No authority was ever appointed under it and no one returned. In 2019 the Reorganisation Act that dissolved the state listed it among the laws repealed, and on 22 April 2025 the Supreme Court closed the case because the law no longer existed.

“Actually, the violence of that massacre in 1947 continues,” the Kashmiri rights defender Khurram Parvez told Al Jazeera in 2017. “Those who were forced to migrate to Pakistan have never been allowed to return.”

Killings in the west

The killing did not run one way, and Kashmiri witnesses say so. “The communal violence that gripped Jammu was not altogether one-sided,” Bhasin wrote. “A large number of Hindu and Sikhs too were butchered in some parts of the region, particularly in Rajouri, Mirpur and areas now under Pakistan.” At Rajouri, held by rebels and raiders from 7 November 1947 until April 1948, armed gangs surrounded the town and carried out mass killing, looting and rape, and Hindu women died in mass suicides and killings to escape abduction; armed men killed fleeing Hindus at Qasgumma and Alibeg. When Mirpur fell on 25 November 1947, tribesmen and Pakistani troops killed Hindus and Sikhs who had sheltered there and raped and abducted women. Snedden records allegations, which he calls unverifiable, that 20,000 were killed and 2,500 abducted, and the rebel leader Sardar Ibrahim Khan acknowledged that Hindus were “disposed of” there.

These were Jammu’s people too. Bhasin’s own conclusion was that “a communalist and killer has no religion. It was the humanity that was the victim of communal fanatics.” In the Kashmir Valley, he noted, communal peace held through those months.

What the census recorded

No census was taken in the state in 1951. When one was taken in 1961, the Muslims of Jammu district numbered 51,847, against 160,158 in 1941: about a third. In that district, the 1961 census report recorded, 155 villages inhabited until 1947 had been deserted through mass migration, and in Kathua the number of uninhabited villages had risen from seven to 43. In the towns of Kathua the Muslim share of the population fell from about 31 per cent to just over 2 per cent. By 2011 Muslims were 7.1 per cent of Jammu district, against 39.6 per cent in 1941, and the Jammu region left on the Indian side, part of a Muslim-majority province before the killing, had a Hindu majority.

The first demographic engineering

For Kashmiris, Jammu in 1947 is the first time the population of part of the state was changed by force and kept changed. Snedden, as summarised by the researcher Sajjad Hassan, names the motives as revenge and demographic engineering. No one was tried. According to the Kashmiri historian Khalid Bashir Ahmad, not a single FIR was lodged and no inquiry was ordered; his own requests for the records under the Right to Information Act went unanswered. Some of those named as organisers rose afterwards: the RSS leader Chuni Lal Kotwal became a minister under Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. Sajjad Hassan calls the impunity of 1947 a template for what came after.

Jammu is now part of Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, and Muslims are a small minority in the district where they were once two in five. In Azad Kashmir and Pakistan the day of the second convoy, 6 November, is a day of remembrance. When New Delhi abolished the permanent resident law in 2019 and opened residency, land and the voters’ list to people from outside, Kashmiri writers pointed back to Jammu, where the make-up of a province was changed within weeks and never restored, and where the law that would have let the expelled return was itself repealed.