Srinagar, July 14 -- By Raqif Makhdoomi

Start with the number, because the number tells you everything: Seven and a half million Nanakshahi rupees.

That was the price the British East India Company set on Kashmir in 1846, the sum Gulab Singh paid under the Treaty of Amritsar to take ownership of a valley and everyone living in it.

Slavery had been abolished on paper in India three years earlier, in 1843. The ink was barely dry when the Company sold a population anyway, human beings folded into a real-estate transaction between an empire looking to recoup war costs and a warlord looking to expand his kingdom.

Call it what it was: a colonial fire sale, with people as the inventory.

This is where the story of Martyrs Day actually begins...