I. Ahmed Wani
On November 7, 1947, in the ruined town of Baramulla, a 19-year-old National Conference worker named Maqbool Sherwani was tied up and shot by tribal raiders. His crime was that he had lied to them. For days he had sent the invading lashkar down wrong roads, told them Indian troops were already in Srinagar, and bought the Valley the hours it needed. He rode from village to village on a bicycle, putting up posters that called for Hindu, Muslim and Sikh unity and urged people not to give the raiders food or shelter. When they finally caught him, they offered him his life if he would renounce his stand. He refused. On the same day, at Shalateng on the outskirts of the city, the raiders were broken and turned back. Sherwani never saw it. He had already paid.
Today, 79 years later, his anniversary arrives with news from across the Line of Control that should make every Kashmiri sit up. In Rawalakot, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, security forces moved before dawn on Thursday to clear a five-month sit-in at the town’s bus terminal. The Joint Awami Action Committee, a coalition of traders, lawyers, students and transporters, says three of its workers were shot dead and 21 injured. The police say armed protesters fired first. A political party in exile alleges heavy machine guns, armoured vehicles and drones were used, and that a house near the terminal was set ablaze. The administration has banned gatherings of two or more people. Internet, phone and power lines have reportedly gone dark. Mosques in the town are said to be calling people to the sit-in at D-Chowk, where the committee claims it is sitting with the bodies of its dead. Some reports put the toll far higher; none of it can be independently verified, because no independent reporter is being allowed to verify it.
These are claims and counter-claims, and a newspaper must say so. But some facts are not in dispute. The committee was declared a terrorist organisation under the Anti-Terrorism Act on June 5. Within days, nine people, including three policemen and a Frontier Constabulary man, died in clashes around the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalakot. A Rangers man was killed near the same bus terminal in July. Six United Nations human rights experts have publicly questioned the terror label. Students from colleges in Muzaffarabad have joined the agitation, and the protest has spread well beyond Poonch. And the demands that started it all were not about flags or borders. They were about the price of flour, the cost of electricity, jobs and property rights. This is a movement that was born in 2023 over the price of wheat. A 38-point charter of ordinary grievances has been answered with a proscription order and, if the accounts from the ground are even half true, with weapons meant for a battlefield.
This is where history speaks. On October 22, 1947, the tribal lashkar crossed into the state at Muzaffarabad. Within days they had sacked Baramulla, taken Uri and were within reach of the Srinagar airfield. In Baramulla they stopped to loot. The convent and the mission hospital were attacked, nuns and patients were killed, the bazaars were emptied, and the homes of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs alike were stripped. Mirpur fell a month later, on November 25, and its minority population was slaughtered. The raiders came in the name of liberating Kashmir. They looted it instead. That is what “liberation” looked like when it was delivered by men who did not have to answer to the people they claimed to free.
The delay at Baramulla, bought in part by Sherwani’s lies and in part by the raiders’ own greed, gave the Maharaja time to sign the Instrument of Accession on October 26 and gave Indian troops time to land at Srinagar on October 27. Those few days decided the fate of the Valley. A 19-year-old on a bicycle had a hand in it.
Sherwani understood something before most of his generation did. He had seen the raiders up close and knew they were not saviours. He chose to stand between them and his city. Edmund Burke’s line fits him exactly: the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Sherwani did something, and it cost him everything.
The people of Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad and Mirpur today are discovering what Sherwani discovered then. The power that promised them freedom treats them as subjects, not citizens. When they ask for bread, they get a proscription order. When they sit in the street, they get drones. When their leaders negotiate and win assurances, as they did in 2023 and again in 2024, those assurances are quietly forgotten and the next round of anger is met with the next round of force. George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The people across the LoC are being made to repeat 1947 in slow motion, one police operation at a time.
Nelson Mandela wrote that to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. By that measure, the territory that calls itself “Azad” has never been free. It has an assembly it cannot control, a budget it does not write, and a security apparatus that answers to Rawalpindi, not to Rawalakot. Its people have spent 79 years being told their freedom is just across the mountains, in our Valley, while their own has been quietly taken from them at home.
This is not written in triumph. The dead of Rawalakot are Kashmiris. Their mothers mourn in the same language as ours. Martin Luther King Jr. said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and a Kashmiri on this side has no business being indifferent to a Kashmiri on that side. We should raise our voice for them, and we should demand that the world’s human rights bodies look at Poonch with the same attention they have always reserved for Srinagar.
But sympathy is not the same as confusion. For decades a section of our own people has looked across the LoC and seen a promise. They should look again this week and see what that promise delivers to those who already live under it. The slogans that once echoed in our streets are now being chanted in Rawalakot, against the very state those slogans invoked.
Sherwani’s grave in Baramulla carries a simple lesson. He did not die for a slogan. He died because he refused to let outsiders decide the fate of his town. That refusal is the writing on the wall. It was there in 1947. It is there in Rawalakot today. We ignore it at our own cost.
