Brigadier Pritam Singh The Saviour of Poonch

Prof. Paramjeet Singh

paramjeetsingh6350@gmail.com

There is a photograph that used to hang in the homes of Poonch's older families for years after the siege was lifted. Not a political figure, not a local dignitary but a soldier: Lieutenant Colonel Pritam Singh of 1 Kumaon, whom the people of the town had come to call Sher Bachha, son of a lion. Popular affection in a frontier town is not easily earned, least of all through a year of encirclement, artillery fire, near-starvation, and the daily arithmetic of shrinking ammunition stocks. That it was earned tells you something about the quality of the officer. That it has been so largely forgotten by the national memory tells you something about the Republic's habit of losing its own history.

The defence of Poonch between November 1947 and November 1948 is one of independent India's least-commemorated military achievements. For almost exactly a year, a frontier town in the newly acceded State of Jammu and Kashmir was encircled by hostile forces, cut off from every road to the rest of India, and left to sustain a population swollen by displacement on stocks that, at their lowest point, could last barely ten days. That it did not fall owes itself substantially to a single decision taken on 21 November 1947, when withdrawal was not only the easier but the more defensible option, and Pritam Singh chose instead to hold.

A Town Already at the Edge

The Poonch of late 1947 was no ordinary frontier settlement. The region had supplied large numbers of soldiers to the British Indian Army through both World Wars a martial tradition that would prove crucial when Pritam Singh needed men who already understood soldiering. Partition transformed this heartland into a fault line. Following Jammu and Kashmir's accession to India in October 1947, tribal raiders and irregular forces backed by Pakistan pushed toward Poonch from multiple directions, and the town began absorbing refugees even before the siege fully closed in. The besieged population is generally placed at close to fifty thousand, of whom between thirty-five and forty thousand were refugees. Pritam Singh was not defending a garrison; he was defending an entire displaced society compressed into a single town.

The Decision to Stay

Pritam Singh had already distinguished himself at the Battle of Shalateng, where the raiders' advance on Srinagar was checked, before being ordered toward Poonch. When 1 Kumaon entered the town on 21 November 1947, withdrawal was being seriously considered at higher headquarters. The heights surrounding the town were dominated by hostile forces; the existing State Forces garrison was under severe strain. Pritam Singh chose to stay, and then chose to fight - not passively from behind walls, but actively from the surrounding ground outward, contesting the heights through continuous patrolling and counterattacks to deny the besiegers the observation and firing positions that would have made the town untenable. To do this with a force far too small for the task, he raised entirely new formations from the local population and from refugees sheltering in the town: the 8th and 11th Jammu and Kashmir Militia, formed from men with no prior military obligation but every personal stake in the town's survival. These units would later be absorbed into the regular Indian Army and survive today as the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry.

"He was not defending a garrison. He was defending an entire displaced society, with food stocks that could last barely ten days."

Six Hundred Yards Against the Clock

By the closing weeks of 1947, one question overshadowed all others: how would Poonch survive with the roads closed indefinitely? Pritam Singh's answer was to look upward. He summoned the town's elders and explained the arithmetic: existing rations would not last ten days and asked for labour to convert a narrow mule track into an airstrip. The response was overwhelming. Between six thousand and ten thousand refugees and residents, including women and children, turned out to work. Bibi Nanki, one of those who laboured on the site, was remembered for encouraging fellow refugees in the simplest of terms: that this strip was the difference between life and its absence. The six-hundred-yard surface was completed in under a week, under conditions that included the real threat of enemy fire on the working parties, with Indian aircraft strafing positions overlooking the site so that construction could continue.

The gamble was vindicated on 12 December 1947, when Air Commodore Mehar Singh 'Baba' Mehar Singh to the Air Force landed a Harvard aircraft on the still-raw surface, accompanied by Air Vice Marshal Subroto Mukerjee. A Dakota carrying artillery and reinforcements followed that same evening. What began as a single near-reckless landing rapidly became a sustained logistical lifeline: Dakota aircraft flew food, ammunition, mountain guns, and medical supplies into Poonch, and flew refugees, the sick, and the wounded out on the return legs. On a single day in mid-December 1947, close to thirty thousand kilograms of arms and supplies were delivered from Jammu. The manoeuvre required to bring transport aircraft into so short and exposed a strip through narrow mountain approaches acquired its own name among Air Force crews of the day: Poonching a word that has since entered the informal vocabulary of Indian military aviation history.

Governance Under Fire

What distinguished Poonch from a straightforward military operation was that Pritam Singh's responsibilities quickly extended far beyond the perimeter. A besieged garrison cannot function if the population inside it is starving or in disorder; for want of any other authority capable of providing administration, Pritam Singh provided it himself organising rationing, managing shelter for a refugee population many times the town's ordinary capacity, and preserving communal order in a town surrounded by a conflict that had, elsewhere in the region, degenerated into massacre. That last point deserves emphasis: the defence of Poonch was not simply a matter of holding one community's positions against another's advance. It was an effort to keep an entire mixed, displaced, frightened town functioning as a civil society in the middle of a communal war and it succeeded, sparing Poonch the kind of violence that overtook other towns in the region.

In March 1948, sustained medium artillery fire was directed at the airstrip itself, halting flights and threatening to sever the town's only lifeline. Pritam Singh was seriously wounded in the bombardment. A rumour of his death briefly circulated. He refused evacuation, recovered, and organised a raid on the very gun positions responsible for the shelling.

Relief, and an Unresolved Epilogue

The land route to Poonch was finally forced open by Operation Easy, fought under Brigadier Yadunath Singh in November 1948. The relief column advanced through difficult mountain terrain, capturing Mendhar en route. The junction with the Poonch garrison is placed in operational accounts on 20 November 1948; after almost exactly a year of isolation, the road was back. When the relieving force arrived, it found not a broken outpost but a functioning, defended, administered town.

Three years later, in 1951, Pritam Singh was court-martialled and dismissed from service on charges of alleged misappropriation of property. The circumstances remain genuinely contested. Some contemporaries and later writers have argued that the proceedings reflected professional jealousy provoked by his extraordinary local popularity; others take the outcome at face value. Full documentary access to the court-martial record is unavailable, and it would be irresponsible to declare either interpretation settled. What can be stated with confidence is the striking disproportion between the reputation he earned in Poonch where households kept his photograph for years and the obscurity in which he lived out his later life, largely unrecognised by the state whose frontier he had held.

A Name That Ought to Be Remembered

The most enduring image of the Poonch siege may not be a soldier in a trench but thousands of exhausted refugees building a runway on which their own survival depended; or a wounded commander refusing evacuation to organise a raid on the guns shelling that runway; or a Dakota descending under fire onto six hundred yards of freshly cleared earth. Each of these moments traces back to one decision taken by Lieutenant Colonel Pritam Singh on 21 November 1947, when withdrawal was the easier and more defensible option, and he chose instead to hold. The Poonch-Rajouri belt today is served by roads and telecommunications that make it easy to forget how fragile that connectivity once was, and how directly its restoration depended on one officer's refusal to abandon a town that trusted him enough to build an airstrip with their own hands. Brigadier Pritam Singh is owed, at minimum, an accurate and permanent place in how the Republic remembers the defence of its frontiers in the year of its birth.

(The author is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, Cluster University Jammu.)