Every July 13, the people across the state of Jammu Kashmir ( Indian occupied Kashmir, Azad Jammu and Kashmir people come pay homage to martyrs of 13 July 1931. Butt. . It is Kashmir Martyrs’ Day—a commemoration not just of the 22 men cut down outside Central Jail in 1931, but of the moment the valley’s political consciousness was born.

That afternoon, a crowd of families, students, and clerics gathered to demand redress from the Dogra Maharaja’s arbitrary rule. The state answered with gunfire. The killings were a rupture: they exposed the chasm between a feudal order and a people demanding citizenship. In the outrage that followed, nascent political movements found their vocabulary and their urgency. The martyrs became the foundation stone of modern Kashmiri identity—proof that dignity is not granted, but claimed.

But commemoration is never merely backward-looking. In the Kashmiri imagination, martyrdom is not fatalism; it is a summons. The dead become a moral benchmark: if they died for justice, the living are obliged to finish the work.

That work has grown heavier across decades of unresolved conflict. The Indian occupation of part of Jammu and Kashmir by military means in 1947, against the will of the people, and the subsequent militarized governance in Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoJK) have caused huge loss of life and property and profound emotional injury. Nearly 300,000 Muslim martyrs fell in the early violence and its aftermath, with roughly double that number forced to migrate to Pakistan and Azad Kashmir. In the last 36 years alone, nearly one hundred thousand more have been martyred amid the ongoing struggle, thousand displaced from their homeland.

The 5th August 2019 unilateral abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A—and the annexatory manner of its execution—did not merely alter legal statutes; . The Indian government’s action to integrate Indian-occupied Kashmir with the Indian Union at gunpoint was a reversal: the people of IoJK were again turned from citizens into subjects. The subsequent removal of the gazetted holiday for July 13, the restrictions on graveside visits, the detention of leaders barred from paying homage: these are not administrative footnotes. They are signals. For a people who define their history as a struggle against arbitrary power, 2019 felt like a reversion to the very subjecthood the martyrs of 1931—and the countless who followed—died resisting.

We must not lose the human dimension to polemic. The dead of 1931 were fathers, sons, workers; so too were the hundreds of thousands who have fallen since 1947. Their families’ grief is the bedrock of this ritual. Commemoration acts as social glue—transmitting stories across generations, transforming private sorrow into collective resolve.

Yet memory must guide policy, not merely inflame it. Honoring the martyrs cannot mean perpetuating cycles of vengeance; that would betray their sacrifice. True honor means pursuing truth, demanding accountability, and building institutions that make future bloodshed unimaginable.

This requires practical commitments: safeguarding civil liberties, restoring political voice, creating forums for grievance, ending militarized rule that treats an entire people as subjects rather than citizens, and fostering a pluralism where communities remember their dead without weaponizing them against one another. The unity of 1931—when ordinary people of different backgrounds stood together against state violence—remains our most vital resource.

On this Martyrs’ Day, the processions and prayers reaffirm a simple, radical ethic: that Kashmiri dignity is non-negotiable, and that governance must answer to the governed. To remember the fallen of 1931, of 1947 and after, and of the decades of militarized occupation is to vow, again, to build a future where such killings—and such silencing—are consigned to history.

The Writer is chairman Kashmir Institute of International Relations ( KIIR) and can be reached at saleeemwani@hotmail.com