When Baramulla bore the brunt of tribal raid

( Kashmir Rechords Exclusive)

Following the tribal raid of October 1947, Pakistani hordes were in Kashmir Valley for 13 days to cause large-scale mayhem, arson death and destruction. But to the people of Baramulla, these 13 days were like 13 years.  Baramulla town had to withstand the worst of the ruthless ways of the tribal militants.

The town was ransacked and pillaged repeatedly, houses destroyed and people  mercilessly killed- not only Hindus, Kashmiri Pandits or Kashmiri Sikhs, even the Christian Missionaries were not spared during these traumatic 13 days. “The raiders had made a little distinction between the victims’’, notes eminent lawyer and writer, K L Gauba in his famous Book “Inside Pakistan’’ (1948).

Gauba is not sure as to how many of innocent lives were lost in Baramulla. “But from all accounts, it must have exceeded 1,000. Among them were  Lt Col. and Mrs. Dykes, besides four Sisters of Mercy and a Mother Superior of the Convent of St. Joseph’’, recalls this author.

He refers to a `little child belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Dykes, who was thrown down a well. All the Sisters of Mercy were lined up and were about to be shot, when a Pakistan Officer, better informed than the others, called it off on the ground that it might involve Pakistan in international complications’’, says Gauba.

Quoting captured tribesman, Gauba says the raiders killed the Europeans on the day of their entry into the town. On the same day, they smashed the local Hospital and Post Office and held many hostages.

Maj. Khurshid Anver was leading the invaders. Another officer was Maj. Mohammed Aslam’, mentions Gauba, who put the strength of the raiders in Baramulla between 3,000 and 5,000. “But apparently, the same men did not stay all the time. They came in waves and while some arrived, others left which, probably, accounted for the repeated looting of the same sections of the town. The loot was carried away in Lorries that went in the direction of the Frontier Province at night’’.

The book `Inside Pakistan’ mentions that about 100 Lorries were lined up in Baramulla on the night of their departure. Some invaders rode in Tongas while the others walked.

Gauba says “in their 13-day occupation of the third largest town in the Valley, the invaders denuded it of everything. “There was not a grain of rice or a yard of cloth left.’’

The road from Baramulla to Uri was strewn with the wreckage of trucks and Lorries left behind by the raiders. Most of these trucks bear the number plate F.P.H. (Frontier Province Hazara). Sometimes they bore the number plate P.B.R. (Punjab).

On the propaganda front also, the raiders had used methods that must have meant considerable preparations. Leaflets printed at the Jilani Press; Lahore, were distributed in tens of thousands in the villages. Apart from Major Khursheed Anver, two other officers whose names were also well known and who frequently figured in the messages intercepted by Indian Intelligence were Major Mohammad Gulsher Khan and Captain Sharief.

Massacre at St Joseph’s Mission Hospital Baramulla

Andrew Whitehead in his book “A Mission in Kashmir’’,  says the survivors of the attack, joined by some local families who had sought refuge at the mission – about eighty people in total – then endured ten days in captivity in the hospital’s Baby Ward. “They were joined by a British war correspondent, Sydney Smith of the Daily Express, who happened to be in Kashmir, arranged a lift with the Indian Army towards the frontline, and then was captured by the tribesmen. Father George Shanks, the senior priest at the school, emerged as the leader of the beleaguered group.

The ordeal, Andrew says ended around the time when the Indian Army took Baramulla under control  on 8 November 1947 and it has been under Indian control ever since.

The killings at St Joseph’s were not the bloodiest episode of the tribesmen’s invasion. In all, Andrew says, several hundred people were killed during the three weeks that the Pakistanis were present in the Kashmir Valley. But the attack on a Baramulla hospital, the desecration of a place of worship and the killing of foreigners all contributed to make the Baramulla massacre the most notorious aspect of these opening salvos in the Kashmir conflict.

News despatches from Baramulla in 1947

“The havoc they wrecked on Baramulla is not very well known’’. A despatch by Robert Trumbull of New York Times of November 10 described what happened in Baramulla.

As per this despatch, Baramulla had been stripped of its wealth and young women before the tribesmen fled in face of the advancing Indian troops. Surviving residents estimated that 3,000 of their fellow townsmen, including four Europeans and a retired British Army Officer, Colonel Dykes, and his pregnant wife, were slain. The raiders had also forced 350 local Hindus into a building, with the intention of burning it down.

Max Despott, an Associated Press photographer, described on November 2 that he had seen more than 20 villages in flames while flying over a section of Kashmir Valley extending within 20 miles of Srinagar. The villages had been set afire by the invaders who were scouring the valley and moving in the direction of Srinagar.

Sydney Smith of Daily Express of London had stayed in the Baramulla hospital for those fateful 10 days. He too had filed a report on the raiders’ attack on the convent. The raiders had come shooting their way down from the hills on both sides of the town. They climbed over the hospital walls from all sides. The first group burst into a ward firing at the patients.

According to Raghvendra Singh, former Secretary in the Ministry of Culture, Government of India in one of his write-ups for ANI, the raiders had not initially touched local Muslims, to begin with – perhaps they wanted to win their sympathy.  However, after a few days they turned on everybody that came their way. They started wholesale loot, arson and orgy. They burnt the property of the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims without any discrimination. They killed children, old men and women, and committed rape on every young woman, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh alike. The raiders also took valuables like silver and gold ornaments, shawls etc. when they left.

The Times of London reported on November 11 that the Baramulla residents seemed delighted to welcome the Indian troops.