Muslim Population in Jammu and Kashmir State: Before and After Partition

[ArainGang]

Sources include 1931 and 2011 Indian Census. I labeled those tehsils that saw major demographic changes. Full discussion can be found at the post below, questions and comments welcome as always.

 

[Nowshera]

So essentially there has been a uniform drop in Muslim percentage across Indian occupied Kashmir. Yet the only narrative I ever hear is about how the Pandits were driven from the valley....

Clearly the propaganda war is being lost

This map needs to be more widely disseminated. Although I would suggest some changes as it is currently not clear that the southern districts have lost their Muslim population

 

[Kambojaric]

Clearly the propaganda war is being lost

The narrative war has always been Pakistans weaker side. Indians/Dogras murdered hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris and nobody knows about it because we never bothered to bring it up. We should be making movies about this tragedy, highlighting it in news coverage. There is ample evidence and primary testimonies from neutrals in this area but we have never bothered to take the initiative.

Academics in the west and even in India have also highlighted the brutal massacres on a number of occassions e.g.

During September and October 1947, the Maharajah's Dogra led troops carried out a campaign of sustained harassment, arson, physical violence, and genocide against Muslim Kashmiris in at least two areas - Poonch, right on the border with Pakistan, and pockets of southern Jammu. Just as in the Punjab, precise numbers were impossible to assess. According to some sources, more or less the entire Muslim population of Jammu, amounting to around half a million people, was displaced, with around 200 000 of those disappearing completly, 'having presumably been butchered or died from epidemics or exposure' noted Ian Stephens, the editor of the Calcutta Statesman ...

India would deny that any holocaust had taken place, perhaps because it had secretly been providing arms to the Dogra side: the figures are open to question, but the fact that Muslim civilians were persecuted by the Maharajah's troops is not. C. B Duke the British Deputy High Commissioner in Lahore, went to assess the situation in the third week of October. He saw around twenty burnt out villages along the Chenab River inside the Kashmir border, and noted that many of them contained the ashes of a mosque - 'it was the Muslims who were suffering' he concluded. The Maharajah had ordered ethnic cleansing under the guise of a defensive strategy. Thousands of refugees, mostly Muslims from Jammu began to pour into Pakistan's Sialkot district, bringing with them sicking tales of atrocities ...

Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire By Alex von Tunzelmann

or

The Maharaja set upon a course of action whereby, in the words of the special correspondent of the The Times of London published in its issue of 10 October 1948 "in the remaining Dogra area, 237 000 Muslims were systematically exterminated unless they escaped to Pakistan along the border, by all the forces of the Dogra State headed by the Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs.
G.K Reddy, a Hindu editor of Kashmir Times, said in a statement published in The Daily Gazette, a Hindu paper of Karachi, in its issue of October 28, 1947: 'The mad orgy of Dogra violence against unarmed Muslims should put any self respecting human being to shame. I saw armed bands of ruffians and soldiers shooting down and hacking to pieces helpless Muslim refugees heading towards Pakistan ... I saw en route State officials freely distributing arms and ammunition among the Dogras

page 246, Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement edited by Anjali Gera Roy, Nandi Bhatia