What Omar Abdullah's 'Martyrs' Day' Stunt Reveals

On 14 July 2025, Omar Abdullah climbed a cemetery gate.

It was the sort of act made for television and Twitter: a visibly agitated former Chief Minister, defying police orders, hauling himself over a boundary wall with cameras rolling. His father, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, watched nearby as the younger Abdullah pushed through a clutch of uniformed men to enter the burial ground of Naqshband Sahib in Srinagar.

The occasion was Kashmir’s so-called “Martyrs’ Day”, officially observed for decades on 13 July until it was struck off the list of state holidays after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. Omar’s public display of defiance and his insistence that the dead of 1931 were “our Jallianwala Bagh” was both calculated and deeply revealing.

It was not just about legacy or history. It was about narrative. And more dangerously, about reawakening a deeply communal memory that has been kept dormant, though never fully erased.

For all the noise around Martyrs’ Day, few outside Jammu and Kashmir seem to know or remember what the martyrs of 13 July 1931 were actually fighting for.

And who they were fighting against.

The Dogras: A Hindu Respite in an Islamist Storm

To understand the outrage over Omar Abdullah’s political stunt, one must step back centuries.

Long before the Dogras arrived, Kashmir had already suffered a brutal civilisational upheaval. The valley, once a cradle of Hinduism, was dragged into a slow but relentless Islamisation beginning in the 14th century.

The process was neither peaceful nor organic. This author has written about it here.

Whether it was under Shams-ud-Din Shah Mir or Sikandar Butshikan (“Sikandar the Idol-Breaker”), Hindu temples were razed, Sanskrit manuscripts were destroyed, and entire communities were either converted or driven out. By the time the Mughals took over in the 16th century, Kashmir was no longer the land of rishis; it had become a militarised outpost of Sunni Islam.

It is this long arc of suffering, this erasure of an ancient Indic civilisation, that the Dogra rule interrupted, however briefly. And that interruption is precisely what the Islamists of 1931, and their ideological descendants today, still resent.

When Maharaja Gulab Singh, a general in the Sikh Empire, took control of Kashmir in 1846 as part of the Treaty of Amritsar, it marked not just a dynastic change but a profound civilisational shift.

For the first time in nearly 500 years, a Hindu ruler governed the valley.

The Dogras were not secular in the modern sense. They were unapologetically Hindu monarchs, but they were not despots. In fact, their rule brought a measure of stability, legal reform and religious accommodation that Kashmir had not seen under its previous Islamic rulers.

Temples were rebuilt. Cow slaughter was banned in public spaces. Sanskrit schools were revived. For Kashmiri Pandits, still clinging to fragments of a shattered past, Dogra rule was a rare respite, a time when they could breathe without looking over their shoulder.

At the same time, the Dogra state retained Muslim officials in positions of administration and offered religious freedom far more generously than the regimes that had preceded it. Yet, despite this inclusivity, resentment simmered among sections of the Muslim population fuelled less by economic hardship than by a deeper civilisational disquiet.

That a Hindu could rule over Muslims was seen by many not merely as a political setback, but as a theological insult.

It is this ideological wound, not just class consciousness or colonial grievances, that set the stage for the 1931 agitation. The movement against Dogra rule was not rooted in liberal democratic aspirations. It was, from the beginning, about reversing a civilisational tide.

About restoring Muslim rule. About ending what they saw as the unnatural interlude of Hindu sovereignty.

The 1931 Agitation: Not Anti-Monarchy, But Anti-Hindu

On 13 July 1931, a crowd gathered outside the Central Jail in Srinagar where a fiery Islamic preacher, Abdul Qadeer, was being tried.

Qadeer had openly called for revolt against the Dogra state. His fiery sermon at Shah-e-Hamadan mosque on the banks of the Jhelum was openly seditious and communal. He urged the Muslims of Kashmir to rise against the “infidel ruler”, to “drive out the infidels”, to demolish their temples, to slaughter cows in defiance of law and to treat the Hindu king’s authority as void under the Quran.

This was not about land, wages or justice. This was about jihad. And it worked.

As the day progressed, the crowd outside the jail turned increasingly belligerent. His arrest had electrified the Muslim population of the valley, already radicalised by sermons and secret gatherings. When the prison authorities refused to allow an unauthorised mob to enter, protestors attempted to storm the gates. Police resisted.

The Dogra soldiers, cornered and outnumbered, opened fire after multiple warnings issued by the District Magistrate. Twenty-two rioters died.

These are the so-called “martyrs” of 13 July.

What is rarely mentioned is what followed. In the days after the firing, the valley erupted in targeted violence, nothing short of a pogrom. Shops and homes belonging to Kashmiri Hindus were looted and burned from Bhori Kadal to Alikadal. Temples were desecrated. Women were molested. Property worth lakhs was destroyed. And account books were burned in a deliberate attempt to erase economic memory.

Vicharnag, a Hindu settlement a few miles from the capital, was ravaged. Pandit families, already a shrinking and fearful minority, were terrorised into silence. And it did not stop at Srinagar.

Take the example of Madhav Koul, a Kashmiri Hindu nazir who was brutally killed on 24 September 1931.

A false rumour spread that a Pir (Muslim religious leader) was being prosecuted in the Shopian Munsif court on charges of seduction. A frenzied crowd gathered at the Munsif court, seeking to release him by force. Fearing the worst, Madhav Koul rushed to warn Hindu shopkeepers to shut down and return to safety, as most were from nearby villages like Bhatpara.

But many hesitated. Their children were still trapped in the local school.

Koul, selfless and resolute, assured them: “Go. I’ll bring the children.”

He entered the school, rescued the children, and escorted them to safety. But as he made his way toward the court building, he was cornered at Kila Bagh by a howling mob. There, in a grotesque act of cruelty, he was tortured to death. His eyes were gouged out, his body mutilated, and left as a warning to others.

It was allegedly the first time in Shopian’s history that the police were forced to open fire.

Incredibly, the killers of Madhav Koul, men like Khalil Banday, Mohammad Sultan Nengroo, and Mohammad Wani, were later declared "freedom fighters" by Sheikh Abdullah’s government after 1948. Their families were awarded pensions by the state while Koul’s name was erased.

The 1931 agitation did not demand democracy. It demanded Muslim dominance. Its leaders wanted Shariah courts, Islamic education, and an end to what they saw as the humiliation of being ruled by kafirs. Their slogans were not "freedom" or "equality" but were cries of religious vengeance.

To call these men martyrs is to erase the terror their uprising unleashed. To romanticise their deaths is to endorse the violence that followed.

This is the history of Omar Abdullah climbed a wall to revive.

Martyrs’ Day Is a Separatist Day

For a minute, let us go back to Sheikh Abdullah.

Because at the heart of the scholarly gymnastics used to project the 1931 agitation as a nationalist moment is Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the man often dubbed the “Lion of Kashmir”. Yet, in 1931, that lion roared not for democracy or pluralism, but for power built on religious identity and communal mobilisation.

After the Shopian riots, after the Vicharnag massacre, after the desecrations and the lootings, Sheikh Abdullah was arrested for complicity in the uprising. He was tried, convicted and jailed. But within a few months, he was pardoned by Maharaja Hari Singh in a move that was meant to pacify tensions but ultimately proved naïve. Released in 1932, Abdullah wasted no time in laying the foundations for a long political career built on appeasing Islamic sentiment.

When he finally rose to power, his first acts were not to deliver justice to victims like Madhav Koul or restore dignity to Kashmir’s Hindus.

Instead, he institutionalised the memory of the 13 July rioters as “martyrs”. He cemented that version of history in the education system, the state calendar, and the collective imagination of Kashmir’s Muslims. He rewarded families of convicted killers, renamed public spaces and ensured that any competing narrative, especially the Hindu one, was buried beneath the bureaucratic weight of state legitimacy.

For decades, 13 July was observed in the valley as “Martyrs’ Day”. Wreaths were laid, speeches delivered, and public offices shut down. But despite the official pomp, it was never a day of inclusive mourning. It was not for all Kashmiris. It was not for the Pandits who had survived centuries of persecution. It was not for the Sikhs, nor for the Dogras, nor for the thousands of non-Muslim officials who had helped build the modern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

It was, and always remained, a day of sectarian memory, a remembrance wrapped in the language of resistance, but rooted in a very specific political project: the idea that Muslim rule in Kashmir was the norm, and Hindu rule a historical aberration.

Martyrs’ Day, in this sense, was never really about justice. It was about reasserting a religious claim over the territory of Kashmir, one that sought to delegitimise the very idea of Hindu kingship and, by extension, Hindu belonging.

Even more insidiously, it lays the groundwork for future discontent by portraying the state not as a space shared by multiple communities but as one that was stolen from its rightful Islamic custodians.

When the Jammu and Kashmir administration stopped officially commemorating 13 July after the abrogation of Article 370, it was not an act of historical erasure. It was an act of historical correction. It marked a break from decades of state-sponsored sectarian memory. It acknowledged that peace in the valley cannot be built on a lie.

By seeking to revive this day, by literally climbing over locked gates to pay homage, Omar Abdullah was not honouring the dead. He was reviving the cause they died for: the undoing of Hindu authority in Kashmir.

It was a wall-jump not just against the Union Government but against the very idea that Kashmir has moved on from the identity politics of the past.

The invocation of the 13 July rioters as “Kashmir’s Jallianwala Bagh” is not mere romanticisation of a false history. It is the repackaging of a violent Islamist rebellion as an Indian freedom struggle, dangerously equating British colonial repression with the rule of a Hindu king. The message, whether intentional or not, was clear: the Hindu ruler was the foreign occupier, and the rioters who chanted against him were the heroes.

This is more than narrative manipulation. It is incitement through nostalgia, designed to reawaken separatist instincts cloaked in the rhetoric of remembrance.

For a valley still healing from the wounds of insurgency, this is a perilous path.

What This Means for Kashmir’s Last Hindus, and Jammu

For the few thousand Kashmiri Hindus still living in the valley, and for the many more displaced in Jammu and across India, the revival of Martyrs’ Day is not a symbolic act. It is a chilling reminder of what once was, and what could be again.

These are families who still live under the shadow of the 1990 exodus. Many of them carry not just memory but evidence of threats, murders, rapes and property seizures that were justified in much the same terms now being echoed by today’s “martyr worship”. Their wounds have not closed. In many ways, they were never allowed to.

What Omar Abdullah did this July was reopen a wound that the valley has never allowed to scab.

By resurrecting the 1931 narrative, the Abdullahs and their political allies are doing more than defending a historical position. They are signalling to radical elements that the old fault lines are fair game once again. They are implying that the Hindu is still the outsider, and that justice can only begin when that outsider is erased from history, from memory, and if necessary, from the land itself.

The message reaches further than Srinagar. In Jammu, too, there is unease. The memory of the communal massacres in Rajouri and Mirpur, the rising demographic anxieties in districts like Kishtwar and Doda, the creeping influence of separatist-adjacent networks in educational and religious institutions, all of it forms the backdrop to this moment.

The question now is not just about what happened in 1931, or even in 1990. It is about what sort of future Kashmir is being pushed toward.

For peace to survive in Jammu and Kashmir, truth must matter. Not a curated, selectively secularised version of it. But the whole truth, one that includes the blood spilt at Vicharnag and the tears shed by displaced Pandit mothers in Jagti.

Martyrs’ Day is not a day of Indian nationalism. It is a day of Islamist revanchism.

And the attempt to rehabilitate it must be called out for what it is: a direct threat to the fragile pluralism that still clings to life in the valley.

There are moments in history when a society is asked to choose: between remembering and mythologising, between justice and revenge, between truth and convenient fictions.

Kashmir stands at such a moment again.

We must remember that Kashmir is not merely a piece of land, it is a civilisational frontier. It was the home of Abhinavagupta and Lalleshwari, of Shaiva mystics and Sanskrit scholars, of Pandits and their temples. To surrender its history to those who weaponise memory against coexistence is to betray not only the Hindus of the valley but the soul of India itself.

The Dogra rulers gave the Hindu civilisation of Kashmir one last lease of life. It is this legacy, not bigotry, not oppression, but cultural survival, that the 1931 “martyrs” rose against.

Let us not dishonour the real martyrs, the ones who died in 1947, 1990 and after, by endorsing the narrative of those who dream of a Kashmir without them.

The choice before us is simple: Either we build a future rooted in truth. Or we watch the valley fall again to the lies of the past.