The Battle That Ensured Kashmir Was a Part of India

Kashmir bore the brunt of the Partition primarily between October and November 1947, when thousands of Kabalis, and mercenaries from Pakistan’s army came plundering, looting and massacring thousands of people in a attempt to conquer it and accede it to Pakistan. 

One important reason, and an often overlooked one, of why Kashmir is still a part of India, is the Battle of Ichhahama and Attina, which was fought between the Sikhs of these villages with the kabalis and Pakistani Army. 

The following is the excerpt from my book, Those Who Stayed: The Sikhs of Kashmir.

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Budgam, Kashmir, October-November 1947.

The Kabalis kept moving towards Srinagar Airport. They were keen on capturing the airport as it was central to their plan of occupying Kashmir. Kashmir was connected to the rest of India through two roads and the airport. Both the roads were closed due to bad weather. So, it was important for the Kabalis to capture the airport as it was the most feasible route for the Indian army to come to Kashmir for the counterattack.

The Kabalis moved from Baramulla and took the shortest path they could to reach the airport. It was through the lower reaches of Budgam district and it avoided the main city of Srinagar. The route, unfortunately, had two of the most populated villages of Sikhs, Ichahama and Attina, on it.

When the Kabalis were raiding Baramulla, a lot of survivors and escapees had come to the Budgam district for refuge. With them, they brought the eyewitness account of what had happened and the warning of what could happen if the Kabalis were to raid their villages.

More than two thousand people had come to Ichahama alone, including a few hundred Pandits. It was a big village with over two hundred household units, and the influx of such a large population had made the village population swell to around 4000 people.

The refugees were given space in the houses and the halls of the gurdwara, while the whole village brought food stock to the gurdwara, where they cooked food in bulk for everyone.

During my interviews, I came to know some astonishing facts. One Karan Singh, who was the president of the local gurdwara of the village Ichahama when I interviewed him, was a child at the time of the attack. He told me he ‘remembered the story clearly as if it happened just yesterday.’

We were told that the village would be attacked soon, so the adults had set up three barracks on the three sides of the village. We were expecting an attack from the north side, the side on which Baramulla was located. There was one elder named Sardar Ujagar Singh. He, with help from some others, had made a canon out of a propeller shaft of an old Chevrolet car. Most of the adults were helping to set up barracks and filling the gunpowder in the topidaar (muzzle loading) and buckshot guns.

By morning, the first shot was heard from the expected direction. The barracks were well prepared for it, and they fired a shot back in the direction. Nothing happened for the next one hour or so. They heard fire shots, but none of those shots came to their village.

According to what I have read in the news reports from that year, and later heard retelling by different historians, the number of attackers who raided the village was around a thousand. Three different contingents of invaders had assembled to launch an offensive on the village. The first one was under Captain Sherkhan’s command, which took the shortest route and reached first. There were around four to five hundred men under his command. The second contingent of similar strength was led by Major Khursheed Anwar, who had just captured the Pattan area of the Baramulla district, a strategically important place to counter the Indian army, which had started to join the fight. The third was a special column led by Latif Afghani, with one hundred highly trained National Guards who were the heroes of ethnic cleansing during the partition. The three columns had camped on the northern and northwestern sides of the village, but their first target was a close-by village called Dalwash.

It was in the mid-morning, between ten and eleven, that the gunfight erupted on the northern side of the village, where a fortified and well-trenched barrack was set by the Sikhs. Other eyewitnesses and survivors validated the story told by Karan Singh.

When the firing from the same direction started again, it lasted for an hour before going silent again. The barrack closest to the side fired back in between. They stopped it so they can surround the village from all sides. Within an hour or so, the village was surrounded from all three sides and we could hear the attackers firing from all the sides. The other barracks also returned the fire. Several people got injured in the firing. There were a lot of bodies lying on the grounds.

Ujagar Singh fired a shot from his canon, which stopped the attackers for some time. His canon was made from a shaft, and when fired it became red hot, and he could not fire from it until it cooled down fully. Otherwise, it would burst and kill him and others around it. In between, some of the Kabalis entered the village but were immediately killed either by swords or guns. Casualties began to pile on both sides. Their rifles were also confiscated and then used against them. The battle lasted for three hours. Then everything went silent when the raiders retreated. A lot of our Sikhs perished in the battle, but there was a huge loss on their sides as well.

The invaders had a great lust for loot, arson, and abduction. The losses were infuriating for them. The only thing they achieved so far was the deaths of their comrades. The pay for being mercenaries was the loot, which was their only remuneration. Money, ornaments, precious metal, and young women. Anything else they destroyed mercilessly, massacred. This was the second time they were facing the battle, the first at Muzzafrabad, where they were delayed for four days, and now in Ichahama, which delayed them another day.

The next morning, just after sunrise, the invaders launched another offensive. This time they were loaded with machine guns and heavy mortar. They bombarded the village for half an hour but did not get any response. They sent in a small exploratory party to see what was happening in the village, but to their surprise, they found the village deserted. There were bodies of the dead and the wounded were lying all over the village, including their own fellow raiders.

The preceding night after the invaders retired to their respective camps, the villagers and the refugees, some three thousand in number, wounded and injured had escaped from the village towards the Narbal camp of the Indian army which had already started coming to Kashmir from 27 October. There were less than 700 troopers who were flown to Srinagar. Most of them were then sent to different areas to fight the Kabalis. One major party had stopped the Kabalis coming from Pattan, while a troop of fifty was posted at the airport to defend it in case the army failed to contain the Pattan thrust. This party had made its camp in Narbal.

The Ichahama raid was completely fought by the Sikhs without any assistance from the army. They delayed the march of Kabalis towards the airport by more than thirty-five hours. The airport was less than fifteen kilometres away, a mere three to four hours’ distance.

Similarly, the village Attina, which was smaller than Ichahama, had somewhere between six hundred to thousand refugees. Its own population was less than a hundred households. They had opened up the gurdwara for the refugees, along with their own houses. There was only one mansion in the village where around forty to fifty people took shelter.

When the Kabalis came, the villagers, with their few guns, started to fire back, They held the small party of Kabalis at bay till sunset while the villagers fled through the other route. Women and children who took refuge in the two-story mansion next to the gurdwara, fed by the fearful stories of the survivors, set fire to the house they were in and self-immolated themselves.

The importance of these battles and the sacrifices of the Sikhs were never acknowledged. It was not hard to imagine that had those invaders, who were hell-bent on liberating Kashmir from India, not met any resistance anywhere, they would have reached the airport before the Indian army even made it to Kashmir. They would have taken it easily. The two days that they battled the people of Ichahama provided enough time for the Indian army to assemble their troops. Only on the third day, the army troopers of 4 Kumaon under Major Somnath Sharma came to fight the already miserable Kabalis. It was only on 31 October that Major Somnath Sharma, who was given Param Vir Chakra for his sacrifice fighting the Kabalis, landed in Kashmir airport. On the first and second of November, when the Sikhs fought against the Kabalis and delayed their forward march, all the Indian forces were concentrated on the attack at Pattan and were completely unaware of this contingent of Kabalis who were marching towards the airport. Only after 3 November, when the survivors and refugees started coming from that side, three parties of two hundred men each from the Indian army went to survey the Budgam area. Out of those three, only one party of 200 men under the command of Major Sharma camped at Budgam. Major Sharma’s party came under attack from the Kabalis, whose number was cut to 700 from 1500 after the battle with Sikhs. The attackers were already injured, and their spirits had taken a hit. They still managed to overpower Major Sharma’s party, in which Major Sharma lost his life. Meanwhile, reinforcements had come to aid the army, and finally, the Kabalis were pushed back.
Sikhs, instead of being heroes, paid a heavy price for defending themselves. They became the villains in the eyes of the local people who viewed them with contempt because they were said to hinder Pakistan’s plan to capture Kashmir. The majority of the locals were Pakistan sympathisers. Until the middle of the 1980s, Sikhs were not treated well. There were social boycotts, taunts, glares, everything that made the Sikhs feel like culprits.

And what felt like salt in their wounds was that the contribution of Sikhs in saving Kashmir was never acknowledged. Though it did not hinder Sikhs from developing, it did put them in a dilemma as to what their existence in Kashmir meant to the country and the state.

Bupinder Singh Bali is a writer and educator based out of Kashmir.