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Line 162: ==Persecution of local Christians== {{Further|Violence against Christians in India#Jammu and Kashmir}} In late October 1947, leading into the Kashmir Conflict of 1947, tribal invaders, mostly from colonial India's [[North West Frontier Province]], now part of Pakistan, had stormed Baramulla attacked the church, school, and hospital, killing the Mother Superior and Assistant Mother [[María Teresalina Sánchez|Sister M. Teresalina Joaquina FMM]].<ref name="Whitehead2007">{{cite web |last1=Whitehead |first1=Andrew |title=Black day in paradise|url=https://www.ft.com/content/ea0995c8-7b7c-11dc-8c53-0000779fd2ac |publisher=[[Financial Times]] |accessdate=31 March 2020 |language=English |date=19 October 2007 |quote=The attackers, Tom would later learn, had been tribesmen from the barren hills of Hazara and Waziristan. And their ransacking of St Joseph’s mission, in the riverside town of Baramulla, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, was part of a jihad to claim Kashmir – a Muslim-majority, Hindu-ruled state – for the new nation of Pakistan. ... On the day of Tom and Biddy Dykes’s death, Lord Mountbatten, the first governor general of independent India, had accepted Kashmir’s accession. That morning, as the tribesmen ransacked St Joseph’s, the first Indian troops were airlifted into the Kashmir valley. By the end of the day, about 300 Sikh soldiers had been flown in to the tiny landing strip outside Srinagar. Some had advanced to within hailing distance of the Catholic mission at Baramulla, and could hear the cries and see the flames as the town was plundered. Indian soldiers have been in Kashmir ever since, in what has become the country’s most disaffected state. As Indian troops started to repel the Pakistani tribesmen, the Dykes boys and the other survivors at the mission, their numbers swelled by local non-Muslim refugees, were confined to a single hospital ward, about 80 people in all.}}</ref><ref name="Webster2007">{{cite book|author=John C. B. Webster|title=A social history of Christianity: North-West India since 1800|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9BUQAQAAIAAJ|date=15 November 2007|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-569045-3|page=276}}</ref> [[Jim Borst|Fr. Jim Borst MHM]], who has been working in Jammu and Kashmir since 1963, including serving as the principal of [[St. Joseph's School (Baramulla)|St. Joseph's School]], was given a Quit India Notice from Kashmir's Foreigners Registration Office in 2004.<ref name="Relations2005">{{cite book|author=Senate (U S) Committee on Foreign Relations|title=Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, 2004|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=04dlwzB2SvcC&pg=PA638|date=August 2005|publisher=Government Printing Office|isbn=978-0-16-072552-4|pages=638–}}</ref> | |||