He was neither a Hindu nor a Muslim, but a British Christian. Journalism brought him from Britain to India, and through hard work and ability, he became editor of the renowned English-language daily The Statesman of Calcutta in 1942.
His access extended not only to the corridors of British power but also to the drawing rooms of the leading figures of the Congress and the Muslim League. Yet these connections never influenced his writing.
His name was Ian Melville Stephens, and he was close to both Mahatma Gandhi and Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. What Stephens wrote after the partition of 1947 about the massacres in Bengal, Punjab, and Jammu and Kashmir is still regarded as an important and authoritative historical record.
As long as Gandhi lived, Stephens faced little trouble in Calcutta. After Gandhi's assassination, it became difficult to write the truth in Nehru's India.
His reporting on the killings in Jammu and Kashmir, and his criticism of the Indian government's Kashmir policy, proved intolerable to the world's largest democracy. In 1951, under pressure from the Indian government, the editor of The Statesman of Calcutta was forced to resign and return to Britain.
The Indian government wanted him out because Stephens had prominently reported the organised massacre of Muslims in occupied Jammu on November 5 and 6, 1947, and had continued to follow the story for the next three or four years. Even today, when the bloodshed of partition is discussed, usually only Bengal and Punjab are mentioned; Jammu and Kashmir is left out.
Stephens was one of the few journalists who gave equal weight to the killings in Bengal in 1946 and in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir in 1947. He put the number of Muslims killed in Jammu alone in October and November 1947 at 237,000, a figure higher than the number of Muslims killed in Bosnia (1995) and Gaza (2023-24) in the recent past.
Stephens repeatedly wrote that the Indian state had patronised an organised massacre in Jammu and Kashmir to turn the Muslim majority into a minority, and that no investigation was being held. Sardar Patel began pressing The Statesman of Calcutta's management to dismiss him.
The management could not withstand the pressure for long, and Stephens left the paper. But he then wrote books, and in them made a permanent part of history the very truth that the Indian government had him fired to conceal.
Stephens had witnessed at close quarters the massacre in Calcutta in August 1946 and the violence in Noakhali in October 1946. He spent considerable time in Noakhali with Gandhi, who stayed there for many days to quell the riots.
He was aware of the role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the violence in Bengal and Bihar, so when the massacre took place in occupied Jammu in November 1947, his pen began to pursue the RSS. He discussed the killings with Indian and Pakistani officials, including Jinnah.
After sacrificing his job, he wrote 'Horned Moon', a travelogue about India, Afghanistan, and Jammu and Kashmir that also mentions the Jammu massacre. In a second book, 'Pakistan', he set out the details of the killings.
Every year on November 6th, when Jammu Martyrs Day is observed, Stephens is remembered as the man who saved this horrific massacre from disappearing into the dust of history.