Hamid Mir: The Jammu massacre of 1947 and today’s Kashmir policy are one continuum
File photo: Bahu Fort, Jammu — a present-day view of the city, not a photograph of the 1947 events.
November 6 is Jammu Martyrs’ Day, and to mark it Hamid Mir has written a column in Jang with a blunt title: Who Will Stop This Massacre? The column looks back, but its question is about the present.
A British journalist’s testimony
At the centre of Mir’s account is Ian Stephens, the British Christian journalist who edited The Statesman of Calcutta from 1942 and was close to both Gandhi and Jinnah. Stephens documented the organised massacre of Muslims in Jammu on 5 and 6 November 1947. Mir puts the death toll at 237,000.
Driven out in 1951
Stephens paid for his reporting. In 1951 he was forced out of India, and Mir says the pressure came from Vallabhbhai Patel, the home minister of the day. The reporter was expelled; the record stayed.
The question today
Mir’s real point is that the project never ended. In his telling, the drive to turn Jammu and Kashmir’s Muslim majority into a minority continues today under the BJP. He also recalls that the RSS had planned a similar massacre in Lahore in July 1947. The column ends where it begins — with the question of who will stop it.
This analysis is based on Hamid Mir’s column “Who Will Stop This Massacre?” (Daily Jang, 5 November 2026).
Source: https://jang.com.pk/news/1630573
