The political struggle of Kashmiris to decide their own future, from the uprising of 1931 and the promise of a plebiscite to the mass movements of 1990, 2008, 2010 and 2016.
On 13 July 1931 the police of the Dogra maharaja Hari Singh fired 180 rounds into a crowd of Kashmiri Muslims at the Srinagar Central Jail and killed twenty-two of them, some, in the account handed down in Kashmir, as they stood one after another to complete the call to prayer. The Muslims of the state rejected the maharaja’s inquiry, and no official is known to have been punished. Since 2019 the administration appointed by New Delhi has abolished the Martyrs’ Day holiday and sealed the martyrs’ graves every July.
After the maharaja’s police killed twenty-two people at the Srinagar Central Jail in July 1931 and months of shootings and public floggings followed, Hari Singh, under British pressure, appointed a commission under B. J. Glancy to examine the grievances of his Muslim subjects. Its report of 1932 admitted that the Muslim majority had been discriminated against and led to the return of shrines, promises on schools, jobs and land, and in 1934 an assembly in which most members were not elected and the ruler kept every power. No official is known to have been held to account for the killings, and the demand for a government answerable to the people grew out of what the inquiries refused.
In May 1946 Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference told the Dogra dynasty to quit Kashmir, declaring that the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846 was a sale deed that gave the maharaja no right to rule and that sovereignty belonged to the people. The maharaja’s government handed the Valley to the army, jailed Abdullah for sedition and fired on demonstrators, killing almost twenty people on a single day and a woman leading a procession in Anantnag. No one is known to have been held to account for the killings, and the vote on Kashmir’s future that Abdullah demanded in 1946 has never been held.
In 1947 the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who had been rising against Dogra rule since 1931, were divided without being asked. A revolt in Poonch, a raid by tribesmen organised from Pakistan and the massacre of Muslims in Jammu ended with the maharaja acceding to India on three subjects, and India accepted with a pledge that the people would decide. That reference to the people never came: the ceasefire of 1 January 1949 left the state split between India and Pakistan, and the plebiscite promised by India and the United Nations has never been held.
In 1947 and for years afterwards India promised, in letters, broadcasts, parliament and the Security Council, that the people of Jammu and Kashmir would decide their own future by a free vote, and the United Nations made that promise its own in Resolution 47 of 21 April 1948 and the resolutions that followed. India then withdrew from the pledge, and the vote has never been held. The resolutions have never been rescinded, United Nations observers are still in Srinagar, and no one has been held to account for denying Kashmiris the vote they were promised.
On the night of 8 to 9 August 1953 Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the elected prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who had begun to speak of a free choice for Kashmiris, was dismissed without a vote in the assembly, arrested at Gulmarg and replaced by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, under a plan that the American ambassador reported Jawaharlal Nehru had approved. Police fired on the protests that followed across the Valley, and counts of the dead run from three to two thousand. The inquiry never reported and no one is known to have been held to account; Abdullah was held for most of the next eleven years and was never convicted of anything.
Maqbool Bhat, who founded the movement for a Jammu and Kashmir independent of both India and Pakistan, was imprisoned by both states and hanged by India in Tihar Jail on 11 February 1984, on a death sentence passed sixteen years earlier. Days after a group linked to his movement kidnapped and killed an Indian diplomat in Britain, his mercy petition, pending since 1977, was rejected, two of his brothers were arrested and he was buried inside the prison against his wish. His remains have never been returned, and the Indian government has never answered his family’s requests for them.
In March 1987 a new opposition alliance, the Muslim United Front, contested the assembly election in Indian-occupied Kashmir with mass support in the Valley, and the count was falsified to hand victory to the National Conference and the Congress, the parties allied with New Delhi. The Front’s candidates and polling agents were beaten, jailed and tortured, and within two years several of the young men who had worked in its campaign were leading the armed uprising. No inquiry is known to have been held and no official has been charged.
After the rigged election of 1987 young Kashmiris took up arms for independence, and in the winter of 1990 the Valley rose in mass unarmed marches for azadi, carrying their demands to the United Nations observers in Srinagar. India answered with direct rule, the shooting of marchers, a law that shields its soldiers from prosecution, torture centres, disappearances and renegade militias, while Pakistan armed the fighters and steered the movement towards accession, and armed groups killed Kashmiri Pandits, political opponents and other civilians. Estimates of the dead run from about 41,000 to nearly 100,000, and the Indian government has refused every request to prosecute its soldiers under the special powers law.
On 19 January 1990 New Delhi sent Jagmohan back to govern Kashmir, the elected chief minister resigned rather than serve under him, and the state passed under the direct rule of a governor answerable only to the Indian government. His four months brought night raids, curfews, the massacres of Gawkadal, Handwara, Zakura, Tengpora and Hawal, the expulsion of the foreign press and the departure of most Kashmiri Pandits. No official was ever called to account, and Kashmir stayed under direct rule until 1996.
Mohammad Afzal Guru, a former fighter from Sopore who had surrendered and lived under the eye of the police Special Task Force, was convicted of conspiracy in the attack on India’s parliament of 13 December 2001 on circumstantial evidence, after a trial in which he had no lawyer of his choosing, and was hanged in secret in Tihar Jail on 9 February 2013. His family learned of it from television, his body was buried inside the prison and has never been returned, and three young Kashmiris died in the protests that followed. The police officer he accused of sending him to Delhi with one of the attackers was arrested with armed men in 2020; no inquiry into his account is known to have been held.
On 8 July 2016 Indian forces killed Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old commander of the Kashmiri armed group Hizbul Mujahideen who had taken up arms at fifteen, months after Indian security personnel beat him, and about two hundred thousand people came to his funeral. The Valley rose in months of protest that India’s police and paramilitary forces met with bullets, pellet shotguns, curfew, a communications blackout, thousands of arrests and a newspaper ban; around a hundred people were killed and thousands injured or blinded. No member of the forces is known to have been prosecuted for any of the deaths or blindings.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani, for decades the most prominent leader of resistance to Indian rule in Kashmir, died on the night of 1 September 2021 in the Srinagar house where India had confined him for most of eleven years. Indian police forced their way into the room where his body lay, took it from his family at about 3.10 am and buried him before dawn in a grave they had prepared, with, his sons say, no member of his immediate family present and the Valley’s telephones and internet cut. The police then registered a case under an anti-terror law against his family for covering his body with the Pakistani flag; no one has been held to account for the seizure of the body.
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