13 July 1931: the massacre at Srinagar Central Jail and Martyrs’ Day

The call to prayer

Shortly before one o’clock on the afternoon of 13 July 1931, in the compound of the Central Jail in Srinagar, a young man stood up to give the call to the midday prayer. Thousands of Kashmiri Muslims had come to the jail that morning to follow the trial of a man charged with sedition for telling them to resist their ruler. In the account handed down in Kashmir and recorded by Kashmir Reader, the man who called the prayer aloud, Khwaja Abdul Khaliq Shora, was shot dead by a policeman. Another man took his place and was shot in turn. The call was completed by one man after another as each fell.

The armed police of the Dogra maharaja, Hari Singh, fired for fifteen minutes. By the official count they fired 180 rounds. Seventeen people were killed on the spot and forty seriously wounded, five of whom died later. Twenty-two is the number Kashmiris remember. All of them were Muslims.

Kashmiris call them the first martyrs of their freedom struggle and date their modern political movement from that afternoon. Ninety-five years later the government that rules Kashmir from New Delhi has struck the day from the calendar and fences off their graves every July.

A people sold in 1846

In 1846 the British handed Kashmir to the Dogra ruler of Jammu, Gulab Singh, under the Treaty of Amritsar. Kashmiris have always called it a sale. In the words of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s telegram to the British Cabinet Mission a century later, the “land and people of Kashmir were sold away to servitude of Dogra House by British for seventy-five lacs of Sikh rupees”.

Under the Dogras the Muslim majority of the Valley lived as subjects without rights. Large tracts of land were given as jagirs to the ruler’s favourites, and the writer Ali Malik describes the peasants who tilled them as living in conditions “worse than bonded labour”.

The heaviest burden was begar, forced labour for little or no pay. Peasants on state land were seized to carry supplies for the army, above all on the mountain road to the garrison at Gilgit, from which, the researcher Muzamil Rashid writes, a porter had the “least chances for his return”. Pandits, pirzadas, Sikhs, privileged landholders and townspeople were exempt, so the weight fell on Muslim cultivators. Begar was abolished in principle in 1900 but kept for use “in the event of an emergency”.

Muslims were kept out of the state’s service. In 1930 a representation led by the young Sheikh Abdullah complained of the obstacles placed before “Kashmiri Muslim young men who were qualified and willing to join the services”. There was no elected assembly, no free press and no right to form a political party.

Weavers and silk workers

The jail killings were not the first time the Dogra state had fired on Kashmiris who asked for a fair living. On 29 April 1865 Srinagar’s shawl weavers, who earned about seven rupees a month and paid five of them in tax, marched to ask for a fair wage and the freedom to change their trade. A Dogra army column blocked them at the Haji Pather bridge. In the firing and the stampede on the bridge twenty-eight weavers were killed, according to the Kashmiri journalist Iftikhar Gilani. Their leaders, Rasool Sheikh, Ali Pal, Abdul Qudus and Sona Shah, were imprisoned in Bahu Fort and died there without any inquiry.

In 1924 the workers of the state silk factory in Srinagar, almost all of them Muslims, struck for better pay. They earned four annas a day. On 20 July the authorities quietly arrested twenty-five of them. About four thousand workers then gathered outside the Sher Garhi police station to demand their release; cavalry was sent against them and the police opened fire. Ten workers were killed on the spot and twenty injured, according to Kashmir Times.

That year leading Muslims of Srinagar gave the British viceroy, Lord Reading, a memorandum asking for the abolition of begar, the return of mosques and shrines held by the state, free primary education, a fair share of government posts, representation in a legislature and proprietary rights for peasants. The maharaja’s government punished its signatories. Khwaja Hassan Shah Naqshbandi’s jagir was confiscated and Syed Hussain Shah Jalali was dismissed as a zaildar. Khwaja Saaduddin Shawl, who had handed the memorandum to the viceroy, was surrounded by 150 policemen on 15 March 1925 and driven out of the state at Kohala, not to return until February 1926.

The spring of 1931

By 1931 young Muslim graduates of Aligarh Muslim University were meeting at a reading room in Fateh Kadal. On 29 April police officers in Jammu, among them Babu Khem Chand, stopped the sermon at the Eid prayers. In June a copy of the Quran was thrown down in a police search in Jammu, and on 20 June pages of the Quran were found in a public latrine in Srinagar. The Mirwaiz of Srinagar, Mohammad Yousuf Shah, told his followers: “If ten of us are arrested, other ten must be prepared to take our places.”

On 21 June a mass meeting at the shrine of Khanqah-e-Moula chose seven men to put the Muslims’ grievances to the maharaja: Sheikh Abdullah, Ghulam Ahmad Ashai, Mirwaiz Yousuf Shah, Mirwaiz Mohammad Hamdani, Syed Hussain Shah Jalali, Munshi Shahabuddin and Saaduddin Shawl. Prem Nath Bazaz, the Pandit historian of the movement, called it the most important meeting in the movement’s history.

As the meeting broke up, a man who was not among the speakers addressed the crowd. Abdul Qadeer was in Srinagar as the servant of a British officer, Major Butt of the Yorkshire Regiment. Accounts of his origin differ: he has been called an Afghan, a man from what is now Uttar Pradesh, and a Kashmiri from Gutli Bagh in Ganderbal. He told the crowd that requests and memoranda would serve no purpose. “We have no machine guns. But we have plenty of stones and brickbats,” he said, and pointing towards the palace he told them to raze it to the ground.

He was arrested on 25 June on a houseboat at Naseem Bagh and charged under sections 124-A and 153 of the Ranbir Penal Code, the state’s law of sedition. Crowds came to his trial on 4, 6, 7 and 9 July, and the government moved the hearings inside the Central Jail. On 9 July Hari Singh issued a proclamation to his subjects: “I have not made, and will not permit, any discrimination against any class of my people on the grounds of religion.”

Thirteen July

On the morning of 13 July between four and five thousand people gathered at the jail and asked to be let in to watch the trial. About two hundred got into the compound. The state had posted forty-four policemen there under their officers, twenty-two of them with rifles, along with 119 jail police carrying staves and nineteen more with rifles.

At about 12.45, as the time of the midday prayer came, the call to prayer began and the police arrested five men. Khaliq Shora took up the call and was shot; the man who took his place was shot too. The police charged with batons and the crowd answered with stones. One of the crowd, Ghulam Mohammad Halwai, a retired policeman, jumped on a police sergeant and seized his rifle, and a head constable shot him dead before he could use it. The governor of Kashmir, Raizada Tartilok Chand, then ordered the armed police to fire. In the words of the historian G. M. Lone, the governor “lost his nerve”.

By the official evidence, five of the forty seriously injured died later in the Jamia Masjid. The Daily Tribune of 28 July 1931 reported twenty-one dead. One of the dying men reportedly told Sheikh Abdullah: “I have done my duty and now you proceed ahead.”

The twenty-two

The list of the dead published by Kashmir Life in 2014 carries twenty-four names: Khaliq Shora, Akbar Dar, Ghulam Ahmad Rather, Usman Misgar, Ghulam Ahmad Bhat, Ghulam Mohammad Halwai, Ghulam Nabi Kalwal, Ghulam Ahmad Naqash, Ghulam Rasool Durra, Ameer-ud-Din Makayi, Subhan Makayi, Ghulam Qadir Khan, Ramzan Chola, Ghulam Mohammad Sofi, Naseer-ud-Din, Ameer-ud-Din Jandgaru, Mohammad Subhan Khan, Mohammad Sultan Khan, Abdul Salam, Ghulam Mohammad Teli, Fakeer Ali, Ghulam Ahmad Dar, Mughli and Abdullah Ahanger. Other accounts give twenty-one, twenty-two or twenty-three.

The martyrs were buried together in the graveyard of the shrine of Khwaja Naqshband Sahib at Khanyar, in the old city. It has been known ever since as Mazar-e-Shuhada, the martyrs’ graveyard.

Martial law and an inquiry

The maharaja’s government handed the city to the army. In the rioting that followed, rioters looted Hindu-owned shops in parts of Srinagar and killed three Hindus. Bazaz, himself a Kashmiri Pandit, rejected the claim that the protest had been aimed at his community: “The attack on the jail was in no way directed against the Hindus, and those who laid down their lives at the jail gate did so fighting against an unsympathetic government… It was a fight of the tyrannised against their tyrants, of the oppressed against the oppressors.”

On 14 July Hari Singh appointed a committee of inquiry under his chief justice, Sir Barjor Dalal, with two official members, B. R. Sawhney and Abdul Qaiyum. The Muslims of the state rejected it. Its Muslim member, Saaduddin Shawl, resigned on 19 July, and the man appointed in his place resigned too. Muslim leaders objected that Dalal called the Hindu leaders “representatives” and the Muslim leaders “so-called representatives”. Kashmir Reader records that his report blamed the riots on British intrigues going back to 1847. No one is known to have been punished for the firing.

Abdul Qadeer was sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment and was left in jail when other political prisoners were freed. The historian Fida Hassain wrote that he was murdered there.

A year of protest

Protest spread across the Valley and into Jammu. On 24 September the maharaja issued an ordinance that allowed arrest without warrant, the seizure of property and public flogging. The British Secretary of State for India, Sir Samuel Hoare, told the House of Commons he had seen press reports that flogging “was inflicted in a number of cases”, and that days after the ordinance there had been a further outbreak “entailing loss of life” at Shopian.

Women died too. Kashmir Life lists four women killed that year by the maharaja’s forces: Sajida Bano of Shopian, twenty-five years old and pregnant, Jan Begum of Nowshahra, Freechi of Baramulla, and Fazli, killed on 24 September. The historian Shahla Hussain, as reported by Kashmir Times, describes Freechi as a widow who marched in nearly every procession, threw a lit kangri into the face of an officer when the police beat women demonstrators, and was shot dead by the police along with four other women and two children.

Under British pressure the maharaja appointed a commission under a British official, Bertrand Glancy, to examine the grievances of his Muslim subjects. In October 1932 the leaders of the movement founded their first political party, the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference.

Martyrs’ Day from 1948

From 1948 the anniversary was an official holiday, Martyrs’ Day. For years two processions marked it, one led by the National Conference from Zaina Kadal and one led by the Mirwaiz from the Jamia Masjid, both ending at the graveyard, and the government held official functions there. It was one of the few days on which Kashmiris of rival camps honoured the same graves, though after the armed uprising began the leaders of the freedom movement were usually kept under restriction on the day.

In 2019 India revoked Article 370 and with it the autonomy of Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, which came under direct rule from New Delhi. On the night of 27 December 2019 the administration issued the holiday list for 2020. Martyrs’ Day and the birthday of Sheikh Abdullah were gone, and 26 October was added as Accession Day. In July 2020, for the first time since 1948, there was no holiday and no official function, and the political parties were kept away from the graves.

In September 2022 the Lieutenant Governor appointed by New Delhi, Manoj Sinha, made 23 September, the birthday of Maharaja Hari Singh, a public holiday, calling him “a great educationist, progressive thinker, social reformer”. The ruler whose police fired on the crowd at the jail now has a holiday. The men they killed do not.

Graves behind wire

On 13 July 2021 the authorities sealed the graveyard inside the Naqshband Sahib shrine and refused the National Conference and the Peoples Democratic Party permission to visit, although both had applied to the district magistrate. Mehbooba Mufti said: “Attempts to distort and rewrite Kashmir’s history is being done only to create a sense of defeat and helplessness amongst Kashmiris.”

When an elected assembly met again, the holiday list stayed in the hands of the Lieutenant Governor. On 5 March 2025, as a member asked for 13 July to be restored, Sunil Kumar Sharma of the Bharatiya Janata Party said of the dead of 1931: “They were not martyrs, but traitors.” The Speaker expunged the remark. The list for 2025 again left out the day, and a BJP spokesman praised the Lieutenant Governor’s “firm stand”.

On 13 July 2025 the elected chief minister, Omar Abdullah, and other leaders were placed under house arrest to keep them from the graveyard. The next day he left his car, walked more than a kilometre through the old city, found the gates locked and climbed over them to offer the fateha prayer. “The unelected government tried to block my way,” he said, and “we will come here whenever we feel like”.

On the ninety-fifth anniversary, 13 July 2026, the graves were again ringed with concertina wire and barricades and every road to them was sealed. The education minister, Sakina Itoo, went at 4.30 in the morning and was turned back by “heavy deployment of security forces and extensive barbed-wire barricading around the graves”. Mehbooba Mufti was kept away, and Iltija Mufti, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and the National Conference leader Ali Mohammad Sagar said they had been confined to their homes. “Graveyards may be sealed, roads blocked and people confined,” the Mirwaiz said, “the martyrs live in our hearts and our collective memory for all times.”

What 13 July stands for

The men killed at the jail gate in 1931 were demanding the right to pray, to be heard and to be governed with their consent. Their deaths opened the movement that gave Kashmiris their first party and their first assembly, and that in 1946 demanded that the dynasty which had bought Kashmir quit it.

For seventy years the day was common ground. Since 2019 it has been struck from the calendar, its graves fenced with wire and its dead called traitors in the assembly. When this article was reviewed the holiday had not been restored. The pattern the martyrs of 1931 first met has not changed: a ruler who answers protest with bullets, an inquiry that punishes no one, and a people denied the right to decide how they are governed.