The Landing: A Black Day in Kashmir

The Landing: A Black Day in Kashmir


27 October 1947 is not a line in a textbook for Kashmiris; it is a scar cut into the collective soul. On that day Indian troops landed at Srinagar’s airfield and began an occupation that has now outlasted three generations. Kashmiris call it Black Day, the moment their right to decide their future was stolen. Partition left every princely state three choices: join India, join Pakistan, or risk independence. Kashmir, with its Muslim-majority population and trade arteries that ran westward to Lahore and Rawalpindi, logically belonged with Pakistan. Yet its Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, hesitated.
Months of popular revolt against his autocracy exploded in the Poonch uprising of late 1947. Singh, facing the collapse of his authority, signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October—after Indian troops were already airborne.

Whether the document was coerced, antedated, or outright forged is still debated by historians; what is undisputed is that no Kashmiri was asked. The next morning, Indian soldiers secured Srinagar airport, then the city, then the valley. What Delhi called a “temporary defensive deployment” became a permanent occupation. Within weeks the matter reached the United Nations. Resolutions in 1948 and 1949 affirmed Kashmir as disputed territory and promised a free, impartial plebiscite.

That promise still waits to be honored. Seventy-six years later, the landing has metastasized into the densest military grid on earth—one soldier for every eight civilians. Checkpoints slice through orchards, schools, and graveyards.

Curfews arrive by text message; pellet guns blind teenagers; mass graves lie inmountain ravines. The Public Safety Act and Armed Forces Special Powers Act , Unlawlegalize detention without trial and lethal force with impunity. Every October 27, Kashmiris respond with a total shutdown—shops shuttered, traffic absent, streets filled only with protest chants and funeral processions. The trauma is cumulative. Grandparents who watched Indian troops march in 1947 now watch their grandchildren face the same rifles.

Families are split between those who stayed and those who fled to Azad Kashmir or farther abroad. Children grow up speaking of “freedom” before they learn to spell it. The psychological siege is complete: a 2022 Médecins Sans Frontières study found nearly half of all adults suffering from PTSD.

Yet Black Day endures as more than mourning. It is a calendar of resistance. Each 27 October, despite barricades and bans, Kashmiris stage rallies, wave Pakistani flags, and paint slogans on shuttered shops: “We want plebiscite, not pellets.” The internet is flooded with videos of women banging pots on rooftops and students marching through misty campuses. These acts keep the UN resolutions alive in public memory, defying India’s narrative that Kashmir is an “integral part” settled by elections and development funds. Memory here is weaponized. Grandmothers recount the exact sound of Dakota aircraft overhead; fathers remember the first crack of a .303 rifle; teenagers stream 1947 photographs on TikTok with captions “We are still waiting.” Black Day is thus a living archive, a refusal to let the past be fossilized into nostalgia. It is a reminder that occupation is not just the presence of troops but the absence of choice.

The landing continues every dawn when convoys roll through the Srinager Jammu highway, and other road in Kashmir valley , Chinab and Pirpanchal valleys every dusk when loudspeakers announce new restrictions. Yet so does the resistance: in whispered poems, in graffiti that reappears overnight, in the stubborn planting of flags on deserted bridges. Until the promise of a plebiscite is redeemed, 27 October will remain Kashmir’s unfinished sentence—an annual ellipsis that demands the world complete what it began in 1947: let Kashmiris choose their destiny, in peace and with dignity.



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