One tense afternoon 77 years ago, 64-year-old Jagan Nath ordered his 18-year-old son Krishan Lal to take his pistol and kill him immediately. It was November 1947. War had broken out – the first round of what would become chronic conflict between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir.
Father and son were struggling to escape from Mirpur, a hilly region presently in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir. They had just been spotted by Pashtun fighters infiltrated from Pakistan’s North West Frontier province. The Pashtuns, fierce tribal fighters, were pressing the assault. Too weak to continue, Jagan Nath, the father, urged his son to escape.
Knowing that upon capture, as a non-Muslim, he would be tortured by the Pashtuns following close behind, Jagan Nath gave his son the unnatural order and, amid the bedlam with the Pashtuns closing fast, Krishan Lal lifted his pistol and fired a shot.
Krishan Lal was my grandmother’s younger brother, and Jagan Nath was their father. The memory of this desperate incident has been quietly passed down generations, though no one in the family ever dared broach the topic with Krishan Lal, who died in August 2022 in South Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar.
Year after year, residential colonies such as Lajpat Nagar in South Delhi or Jammu city’s western parts of Bakshi Nagar, Rehari and Sarwal are places where the months of November and December every year are a time of remembrance for victims of the 1947 violence. Every winter in India, agonising memories of 1947 are invoked and commemorated by people from Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (PAJK).
In this connection, the discipline of conflict resolution between India and Pakistan has often been monopolised by endless reiteration of official positions. The echoes of the multi-dimensional tragedy that had hit the areas to the south of Pir Panjal in J&K in 1947 continue to manifest in various forms even today and leave their impact on the subcontinental political, social and security landscape, directly or indirectly.
Annual affair
Every year, as winter sets in, first-hand accounts of Hindus and Sikhs start surfacing in local newspapers of the tragedy that unfolded in Mirpur and other parts of Pakistan-occupied K in 1947. The recurrent theme is the fall of Mirpur, an area on the other side of the Line of Control, that took place on November 25, 1947, a date on which the administrative apparatus of the princely ruler of J&K collapsed because of the Pashtun raid. There is often reluctance in discussing personal stories to avoid reopening old wounds in the public domain.
If one pays attention to the societal echoes of November-December on both sides of the border, one will notice that a multi-disciplinary study is required to understand the institutionalised memory on either side. Actually, there was near-complete migration of non-Muslims from across the Line of Control.
Some Hindu and Sikh families that had stayed on changed their religion to Islam. In this connection, Mahatma Gandhi’s remark that if he saw a ray of hope anywhere, it was in Kashmir, is often cited. He was right that the Kashmir Valley defied North India’s communal carnage by upholding communal peace. However, the multi-dimensional societal tragedy that unfolded to the south of the mighty Pir Panjal got largely eclipsed from popular imagination and policy discourse on Jammu and Kashmir. This has left a vacuum in the understanding of the various vectors that impact regional peace on both sides of the border. These vectors have to be unpacked.
In the case of my own family’s drama, it is told that Jagan Nath, my mother’s grandfather, ducked his son’s bullet in a flash of survival instinct. Krishan Lal was forced to leave his father to his fate as Pashtun fighters overran the area. He crossed the present Line of Control and ultimately settled in India’s capital, New Delhi. Krishan Lal posted many letters to his Muslim friends in Mirpur to know what happened to his father. None of them had any information. Among some members of Hindu religion, relatives go to Gaya, holy and historic town in India’s eastern province of Bihar, to perform the last rites of the dead whose bodies could not be cremated. Eventually, Jagan Nath’s family concluded he was dead and made the trip.
In the last quarter of 1947, a total of 31,619 Hindu and Sikh families migrated from across the Line of Control, of which 26,319 families opted to settle down within the State. A part of the community took refuge in various parts of the country, including the Pathankot area of Indian Punjab’s Gurdaspur district, the Yol area of Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, Agra town of Uttar Pradesh and in the Lajpat Nagar colony of New Delhi. Their migration took place in the midst of mob violence, arson and brutalities against women, including abductions whose victims were later forcibly made to change their religion and marry.
The tragedy is multi-dimensional as this writer has spent more than two decades in the sub-continent as well as the West tracing extant remnants of the 1947, which includes violence perpetuated on women amid the gruesome fighting and abductions that washed over my family and so many others, Hindu and Muslim alike.
In January 2006, this writer met former Hindu families in Kotli district across the Line of Control who had converted to Islam. They are locally referred to as “Sheikhs”. Not too different is the story of Habib-ul-Rehman, an official in the administrative machinery of the PAJK government, whom I met in the Mirpur area of PAJK. His father was a Hindu and had converted to Islam during the 1947 riots.
“Initially, it was difficult for my father to face the circumstances as his entire family had left, but then he developed new contacts. Anyhow, the longing still exists to meet our Hindu relatives,” Mr. Rehman summed up his family’s sentiments about the impact of 1947.
However, even in that period, several could not be reunited as that exercise required specialised interventions that can factor in societal conditioning. For instance, in the case of the abducted Hindu and Sikh women, they were forced to sever ties from their families and forget their blood relations forever. In the twilight years of their lives – they lived as Muslims and the wives of Muslims – the pain and wounds of the conflict remained fresh till they died.
Unresolved issue
Some of the abducted women managed to reunite with their blood relations, after the intervention of Red Cross. But the reunion left another unresolved, agonising tale. The women had to leave their offspring, out of their forced wedlock, on the other side of the Line of Control. Both shared their stories with this writer.
Social taboo on both sides of the religious and territorial divide deprived the reunion of the women with their off-spring. In one encounter with an old mother at her house on the Indian side, after her son living in Muzaffarabad approached me, the family, which included a son from a different father on the Indian side and daughter-in-law, requested me to leave the premises. The reason being that they did not want anyone to know that their mother had a son living across the Line of Control. The aged mother stood hapless.
Mirroring the 1947 memories of Sikhs and Hindus, November 6 is observed as a day of remembrance by the Muslim refugees and their families, in memory of those who had died in Jammu. On November 5 and 6, many trucks carrying Muslim migrants from winter capital Jammu on their way to Punjab province were attacked and massacred.
On 28 October, 2022, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) leader Khawaja Asif, who is Pakistan’s Defence Minister and from Sialkot area, where the maximum number of Muslims from the Indian side of J&K had settled down, raked up memories of 1947 in Pakistan’s national Parliament. He cited the familial tragedy of Pakistani anchor-journalist Hamid Mir, which resonated in the Pakistani social media space. In October 1947, Mir’s maternal grandmother Ghulam Fatima, who was from Jammu, was abducted in the communal frenzy as her bus ferrying Sialkot-bound migrants was ambushed near the border. According to Mir, she was never found.
Massive exodus
In 1947, there was also a massive exodus of Muslims from the plains of Jammu and Kashmir, where they were a numerical minority. The extent of that migration can be gauged from the changes recorded in the Census data. Jammu district’s Muslim population, which was 37% in 1941, came down to about 10% in 1961. The decrease in the Muslim population in Jammu district alone was by over 1,00,000. According to the 1948 West Punjab Refugees Census, the number of Muslims who migrated from Jammu and Kashmir — most of them from Jammu — was 2,02,600, the highest outside east Punjab. Muslims from the Jammu plains mostly settled in Sialkot and Lahore, though a number of families settled in other Punjabi cities such as Gujranwala and Faisalabad as well. The number of persons in Pakistani Punjab, including the succeeding generations of the 1947 migrants who have a linkage with Jammu and Kashmir, is estimated to be around 1.5 million.
While the popular discourse on Jammu and Kashmir on the Indian side is largely predicated on 1947 developments in the Kashmir valley, including the Pashtun raids, directed largely from the North West Frontier Province, on Baramulla district; the Partition trauma of Jammu Muslim families weighs heavily on Pakistani Punjab’s societal understanding of Jammu and Kashmir. This selective sifting and internalisation of historical facts, which disregards what happened in PAJK, have led to a unidimensional discourse in Pakistani Punjab, the most significant political unit of the country. This has had wider political, societal and security ramifications for the region.
The events of 1947, with particular reference to Jammu Muslims, are selectively interpreted by Punjab-based, J&K-centric terrorist outfits to gain social legitimacy. Propaganda material of Punjab-based terrorist outfits have often invoked the Partition riots in Jammu and Kashmir, including the tragedy that impacted Muslims, to raise funds and boost recruitment. In the last 30 years, Lashkar-e-Taiba, claiming to be fighting on behalf of Jammu and Kashmir, has mostly drawn recruits from eastern and central areas of Pakistani Punjab, where the bulk of Jammu migrants and their families are settled. Ajmal Kasab, the terrorist involved in the Mumbai attacks, was from Okara district near the India-Pakistan border.
In this connection, bridging the gap between perception and reality is important. One of the lesser-discussed achievements of the short-lived 2004-07 India-Pakistan peace process was the softening of the Line of Control that enabled many people to meet their families and reconnect.
In the short-lived process and liberal visa regime, there was a meeting of divided families as intended, but there were other surprises. In 2005, a delegation led by PAJK jurist Abdul Majeed Malick, who died in 2022, visited Bakshi Nagar in Jammu and Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi, where a large number of senior citizens who came from Mirpur area of PAJK in 1947 reside. This struck an emotional chord between the people speaking the same language, in contrast to more formal encounters in the Valley.
Another delegation of five PAJK migrants living in J&K visited their places of birth in Kotli district across the Line of Control in March 2006. They described their trip as an unforgettable emotional experience and thanked the PAJK Muslims for their warm hospitality, affection and respect. All of them were victims of riots in PAJK. The two engagements on either side of the Line of Control demonstrated the importance of people-to-people contact that can potentially mitigate the impact of the inter-generational Partition memories and trauma within a limited context.
Health impact
Also, there is little discussion around the health impact of inter-generational trauma. There are examples from other parts of the world that have a direct relevance to such potential studies that can be done in the area. In this context, New York-based professor of psychiatry and neuroscience Dr Rachel Yehuda’s work is significant as she has identified the mechanisms by which traumatic stress may permanently alter the physiology of children of Holocaust survivors, and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks.
Her work informs that descendants of Holocaust survivors may be more resilient in an adversarial situation. But it also makes them more vulnerable to higher levels of stress and anxiety or even depression. Such studies and the peer criticism of that work can be a good point of reference for relevant researchers to initiate similar kind of work which is customised to the sub-continental history and present-day reality.
Courtesy the work of Delimitation Commission that was formed after August 5, 2019, there is a focus on political representation of PAJK migrants as it recommended nomination of seats for the community in the J&K Legislative Assembly.
For years, there had been disparate efforts from the community to get political representation as well as enhanced economic relief. At the time of drafting the J&K Constitution, 100 seats were earmarked for direct elections from territorial constituencies. Of these, 25 were reserved for PAJK, which later became 24 seats, with a caveat.
Section 48 of the nullified J&K Constitution stated, “Notwithstanding anything contained in section 47, until the area of the State under the occupation of Pakistan ceases to be so occupied and the people residing in that area elect their representatives—(a) [24 seats] in the Legislative Assembly shall remain vacant and shall not be taken into account for reckoning the total membership of the Assembly; and (b) the said area shall be excluded in delimiting the territorial Constituencies under Section 47.”
Apart from the mandated work to delineate the 90 constituencies across J&K, which understandably received a lot of attention, the delimitation commission recommended that “the Central Government may consider giving the Displaced Persons from Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir some representation in the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly, by way of nomination of representatives of the Displaced Persons from Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir.”
Though the provision of nomination in J&K Legislative Assembly has been challenged in the court, it has raised interesting normative as well as practical questions about the broader scope of applicability of the suggestion in terms of the turbulent history of the sub-continent, international humanitarian law, the definition, and finally the rights, of nominated members in the legislative process.
While advocating for their rights, the descendants of PAJK migrants often invoke the term “refugees”. The term requires further understanding in the context of present theoretical framework governing international humanitarian law. The caveat is that various contextual provisions of international humanitarian law are anchored in the World War II experience, with particular reference to Europe.
For instance, the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees adopted on 28 July 1951 is the foundational tenet on the issue of refugees. In the oft-cited Handbook and Guidelines on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Section 88 says, “It is a general requirement for refugee status that an applicant who has a nationality be outside the country of his nationality. There are no exceptions to this rule. International protection cannot come into play as long as a person is within the territorial jurisdiction of his home country.”
The commission was right in using the term “migrant” in contrast to the “refugees” for the communities displaced from PAJK in 1947. In this context, historical timelines become important. With the end of British rule, the princely ruler, Hari Singh, proposed a standstill agreement to both India and Pakistan.
India insisted on prior negotiations with the J&K government, but Singh did not respond to the suggestion. On August 15, 1947, the Government of Pakistan accepted Jammu and Kashmir State’s offer for a standstill agreement.
The late Om Saraf, a veteran journalist and an eyewitness to important phases of this history, once told this writer that on the morning of August 15, 1947, he spotted “Pakistani flags over the offices of the post and telegraph department in J&K”. This was because as per the standstill agreement, the central departments of the State functioning within the Lahore administrative circle were to be under the jurisdiction of Pakistan.
However, the situation changed rapidly in the last quarter of 1947. On October 21, 1947, the princely ruler appointed Bakshi Tek Chand, a retired judge of the Punjab High Court, to frame a Constitution for the princely State. The infamous raid by Mahsud tribesmen to forcibly capture J&K left no option before the ruler except to accede to India on October 26, 1947.
The bulk of migration from PAJK thus took place after this date. The Indian position is that the entire J&K, including PAJK, became a part of India on account of instrument of accession signed by the princely State. Therefore, implicitly in line with the Indian position, the nationality of PAJK migrants never changed when they migrated — a necessary condition for the grant of refugee status. At the time of migration in November 1947, they were Indian citizens and that is why anyone who migrated from PAJK cannot be construed as refugees.
On the question of economic relief, this has to be again seen in the light of the specific context of PAJK migrants. Like in many Partition-afflicted families in the subcontinent, the first priority was to restore a sense of stability and security in the lives of these displaced communities from PAJK.
However, unlike migrants from provinces such as present-day Punjab or Sindh in Pakistan, these communities got relief — and not compensation — for the properties they left across the Line of Control. The logic is that as India is committed to get back that region, giving compensation would dilute its claim. These communities were rehabilitated in the 1960s in the western part of Jammu city, the winter capital of J&K, whereas in Delhi, one pocket they were rehabilitated in was the Lajpat Nagar area in South Delhi.
Within J&K, the areas of settlement for these communities was dictated by ethnicity, language, and, possibly, the preferences of the contemporary political elites. The bulk of present-day PAJK was a part of the Jammu province, which was much more populous than the Kashmir province before 1947.
In fact, the bulk of displacement of Hindus and Sikhs in 1947 was intra-provincial. The reality is different for the majority of displaced Muslims, for they settled in neighbouring Pakistani Punjab and not PAJK. However, even the Hindu and Sikh migrants from the Muzaffarabad district, which in administrative terms was part of Kashmir province before 1947, were not settled in the Kashmir Valley, where they had initially moved after violence forced them to leave. They were settled nearly 300 km across the Pir Panjal mountains, in Jammu city, which was culturally and linguistically relatively akin.
In addition, there is a conundrum in defining who constitutes migrants even from among the PAJK migrants. The youngest person from this category of people, who was born in PAJK, will be 77 years old. Practically, the beneficiaries of the nomination (to the Assembly) will be the second and third generations, born in different parts of India. There is also the question of those born to parents, one of whom did not belong to PAJK while the other did. Obviously, patriarchal model will violate Article 15 of the Indian Constitution, which secures citizens from every sort of discrimination by the State on the grounds of gender. Apart from these questions, the issue of ascertaining the number of nominations in the proposed J&K Assembly remains.
The Delimitation Commission has not suggested any particular number as yet. In the context of constitutional democracy, the issue of legitimacy of nomination over elected representation requires a separate discussion. For instance, the case of reservation for the Anglo-Indian community in State legislatures under the repealed Article 333 of the Constitution raised several controversies, particularly in the situation of a vote of no-confidence.
The higher courts had to adjudicate on this constitutional issue as the political executive facing a vote of no-confidence instrumentalised the nomination provision to boost its numbers. While in the 2024 J&K elections the National Conference was able to get the majority on its own, the ambiguity over the rights of the nominated members can have enormous ramifications in J&K, in case no single party is able to form a government in future elections.
Overall, for a successful conflict resolution model between India and Pakistan, the above granularities relating to displaced communities of undivided J&K on either side have to be comprehended. The context of migration or displacement in the winter of 1947 in J&K had its uniqueness as compared to other Partition-displaced communities both in terms of its effects as well as causation. And these complex realities continue to influence polity on either side of the border in their own way. Societal sensitisation and exposure to a nuanced understanding of history in this particular realm is one of the many required building blocks for any future concrete and sustainable conflict resolution model in the subcontinent.
(Luv Puri has authored two books on J&K, including Uncovered face of militancy and Across the Line of Control)
Published – December 06, 2024 11:58 am IST