He was neither a Hindu nor a Muslim, but a British Christian. Journalism brought him from Britain to India, and through hard work and ability, he became editor of the renowned English-language daily The Statesman of Calcutta in 1942. His access extended not only to the corridors of British power but also to the drawing rooms of the leading figures of the Congress and the Muslim League. Yet these connections never influenced his writing. His name was Ian Melville Stephens, and he was close to both Mahatma Gandhi and Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
What Stephens wrote after the partition of 1947 about the massacres in Bengal, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir is still regarded as an important and authoritative historical record. As long as Gandhi lived, Stephens faced little trouble in Calcutta. After Gandhi’s assassination, it became difficult to write the truth in Nehru’s India. His reporting on the killings in Jammu and Kashmir, and his criticism of the Indian government’s Kashmir policy, proved intolerable to the world’s largest democracy. In 1951, under pressure from the Indian government, the editor of The Statesman of Calcutta was forced to resign and return to Britain.
Indian government wanted him out because Stephens had prominently reported the organised massacre of Muslims in occupied Jammu on November 5 and 6, 1947, and had continued to follow the story for the next three or four years. Even today, when the bloodshed of partition is discussed, usually only Bengal and Punjab are mentioned. Jammu and Kashmir is left out. Stephens was one of the few journalists who gave equal weight to the killings in Bengal in 1946 and in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir in 1947. He put the number of Muslims killed in Jammu alone in October and November 1947 at 237,000, a figure higher than the number of Muslims killed in Bosnia (1995) and Gaza (2026) in the recent past.
Stephens repeatedly wrote that the Indian state had patronised an organised massacre in Jammu and Kashmir to turn the Muslim majority into a minority, and that no investigation was being held. Patel began pressing The Statesman of Calcutta’s management to dismiss him. The management could not withstand the pressure for long, and Stephens left the paper. But he then wrote books, and in them made a permanent part of history the very truth that the Indian government had him fired to conceal.
Stephens had witnessed at close quarters the massacre in Calcutta in August 1946 and the violence in Noakhali in October 1946. He spent considerable time in Noakhali with Gandhi, who stayed there for many days to quell the riots. He was aware of the role of the RSS in the violence in Bengal and Bihar, so when the massacre took place in occupied Jammu in November 1947, his pen began to pursue the RSS. He discussed the killings with Indian and Pakistani officials, including Jinnah.
After sacrificing his job, he wrote Horned Moon, a travelogue about India, Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir that also mentions the Jammu massacre. In a second book, Pakistan, he set out the details of the killings. Every year on November 6th, when Jammu Martyrs Day is observed, Stephens is remembered as the man who saved this horrific massacre from disappearing into the dust of history.
When Stephens began exposing the massacre carried out under the patronage of the Indian state, some Indian intellectuals described it as a reaction to the October 1947 invasion of occupied Jammu and Kashmir by Pashtun tribesmen. The historical record contradicts this claim. The RSS had planned a similar massacre in Lahore in July 1947, much like the one carried out in occupied Jammu on November 5th and 6th.
Dr Saeed Ahmad Malik’s book 1947 Ka Muslim Qatl-e-Aam (The Muslim Massacre of 1947) records that Maulvi Ziauddin, a cousin of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and a member of the Congress, learned that the Congress and the RSS had together planned a massacre of Muslims in Lahore. He passed this information to a Muslim officer of the Lahore police. One day in July 1947, police from Mochi Gate police station raided Shah Alami Gate and arrested the RSS commander Raja Ram Singh with weapons and hand grenades. Teja Singh, a retired judge of the Lahore High Court, was also involved, using Walton Airport to bring weapons from Delhi to Lahore. Under the plan, 200,000 Muslims in Lahore were to be killed. It could not be carried out in Lahore, but a few months later it was carried out in occupied Jammu.
On 19 July 1947, the Muslim Conference, an ally of the Muslim League, resolved at its Srinagar session to accede to Pakistan. The Dogra army of Maharaja Hari Singh then began massacres in several parts of Jammu and Kashmir. In response, Muslims rose in revolt from Poonch, Bagh and Muzaffarabad to Mirpur. On September 6, 1947, on the orders of Major Khajoor Singh of the Dogra army, the Muslim Conference leader Syed Khadim Hussain Shah was publicly shot dead in Bagh. In those same days, Muslims were killed in the Ustad da Mohalla and Pathanan da Mohalla neighbourhoods of occupied Jammu. The Dogra army and the RSS had begun burning Muslim villages around Jammu well before the Pashtun tribesmen arrived in October 1947.
Chaudhry Rahim Dad, former Chief Justice of the Azad Kashmir Supreme Court, writes in his Urdu autobiography Naqoosh-e-Rahim that in 1947 he himself contacted the tribesmen through a Pashtun from Kohat named Nazir Gul to fight the Dogra army, and also arranged rifles for them. The Muslims of Jammu, by contrast, were unarmed. Their leader, Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, was in jail, and Muslim police officials in Jammu had been disarmed by the Dogra army. The weapons of Jammu’s Muslims were confiscated, and they were promised safe transport to Sialkot in lorries. The betrayal and the massacre that followed were documented, with the help of eyewitnesses, by Muhammad Yusuf Saraf, former Chief Justice of the Azad Kashmir High Court, in his book Kashmiris Fight for Freedom.
In 2004, I heard many harrowing accounts of the massacre from an eyewitness, Ved Bhasin, editor of the Kashmir Times of Srinagar, when he visited Pakistan with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He was a young man in 1947, and when he was asked to join a private army formed to kill Muslims, he refused. He passed away in 2015. The paper is now edited by his daughter, Anuradha Bhasin, who has recently written A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370. She argues that the BJP government is pursuing a plan to turn the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir into a minority. Reading it, one understands that the massacre that began on November 5th and 6th,1947 continues in Jammu and Kashmir even today, and that there is no one to stop it.
The writer is a senior journalist, anchor, and columnist, associated with Geo News. He posts on X@HamidMirPAK
