Really informative. I am new to this forum and enjoying reading all the information provided by the respected members of this forum.
Here is an account of alternate history of the same incidents.
1
Hyderabad 1948 compels a fresh evaluation of the theology of India’s independence and partition
"The past is never dead. It is not even past": William Faulkner
During a longish period of incarceration following the Indian army action in Hyderabad state soon after Independence, Mohammad Hyder – scion of an influential family of civil servants in the court of the Nizam – wrote up his recollections of the months of tumult that ended in the forced integration of the province into the Indian Union. Hyder was collector of Osmanabad district in 1948 and was among a number of civil servants who were held without charge following the army action, before being released unconditionally. Since his release, he was hopeful of being rehabilitated in the bureaucracy of the India Union on grounds of what he thought, was an upright and efficient record of service in the state of Hyderabad. But that wish remained unfulfilled. Even with reconciliation being the stated commitment of the new political dispensation in Hyderabad, the shroud of suspicion that enveloped his years of service under the Nizam was never quite dispelled.
It took Hyder a while to realise this, leading perhaps to a slight fading of the immediacy of recollections written down in prison. As his son Masood Hyder (hereafter Masood) recounts, Hyder soon afterwards went into exile and his notes languished in neglect for over two decades. In 1972 he was coaxed into revisiting his long neglected manuscript and working it into a more concise narrative. Masood helped in the process and in 1972 Hyder reviewed the entire manuscript. He died in 1973 aged fifty-eight. It took another three decades for the book to emerge in print, for reasons to do with Masood’s personal and professional preoccupations. 2
Perhaps that long lapse of time has contributed inadvertently to the topicality and relevance of Hyder’s book.1 The months since its publication have brought a rush of events that make a re-examination of its subject matter that much more important. Hyder has disturbed the placid surface of the post-independence consensus on Hyderabad just a little. Others, as we shall see, have posed much more troubling questions, all of which in conjunction, suggests that there is a deeper history buried in the selective assemblage of facts that is the mythology of the modern Indian nation-state.
1 Mohammed Hyder,
October Coup, A Memoir of the Struggle for Hyderabad, Roli Books, Delhi, 2012.
India of course is not exceptional in having a foundational mythology undergirding its sense of nationhood. Every nation constructs a myth and gets its history quite deliberately wrong, to cement the solidarity of its elite strata and fashion the ideological template to recruit broader citizen loyalty, including from sections consigned to the blind side of that history. But nations change with the times. Elite solidarities fracture, some segments fall away and other sections emerge to occupy the spaces vacated. By the same process, myths change with the times and those that outlive their utility have to be discarded before they cause enduring harm. And there are ample signs today that persisting with the received mythology could deepen the alarming fissures that have appeared on the civic body of Hyderabad city and its environs.
Early in the year 2013, Akbaruddin Owaisi (hereafter Akbaruddin), a member of the Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly representing the Chandrayangutta constituency in the heart of the old city of Hyderabad, was arrested under rarely invoked clauses of "hate speech" in Indian criminal law. The immediate provocation was an angry speech he delivered in Adilabad district, some three hundred 3
kilometres north of Hyderabad, on 24 December 2012. It was a speech that spoke to a sense of siege among those of the Muslim faith in Hyderabad and its adjoining districts. Akbaruddin spoke of an asymmetric battle that people of his faith had been waging for years together. And almost like a juvenile challenge to resolve a schoolyard brawl with a round of head-butting, he dared the adversary to enter the arena on its own strength, rather than seek to wage war from behind the protective armour of the police and other agencies of the State. Interspersed with this muscular call to battle, were numerous derogatory references to the belief system of the adversary community, with its faith in multiple, magically endowed gods, its mystical faith in icon worship, and its lack of a serious doctrinal foundation.
Akbaruddin’s speech did not occur in a vacuum. It was firmly situated in a cycle of escalating chauvinist rhetoric in which as always, there is great difficulty identifying precisely when and by whom, the first stone was cast. The city of Hyderabad has for long been identified by its magnificent arched gateway, the Charminar -- built in the late sixteenth century -- and the nearby Makka (Mecca) Masjid, which the ruler of the time ordered built from soil consecrated in the birthplace of Islam. Since about the 1960s, there has been an intrusive presence of another faith in the near vicinity of the Charminar. A temple dedicated to the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, sprang up by some miracle of human subterfuge just metres away from the ancient structure at some stage in the 1960s. Over time, it acquired several embellishments – including an association with good fortune, which made it a "Bhagya Lakshmi" temple -- and established itself firmly within the ritual practice of communities seen under the caste-cultural inheritance, as custodians of wealth. In time, this ritual practice merged with the political 4
interest of aggressively projecting a religious identity as a claim for electoral support.
Several days before Owaisi’s incendiary speech in Adilabad, Hyderabad had played host to Praveen Togadia, the Gujarati surgeon who has fashioned a second career for himself as a rabble-rouser for Hindutva, identified -- as all such sectarian agendas are -- only by the strident hatred of other faiths. With a number of critical stories appearing then in both the local and national press, over the encroachment of modern-day kitsch into the near vicinity of a protected archaeological monument, the potential threat to the "Bhagya Lakshmi" temple was squarely in his line of sight. For Togadia, the temple was not an act of trespass, as common sense tended to see it, but a miraculous manifestation of the Hindu claim to the entire sacred topography of the Indian nation. The consequence of denying access to the Bhagya Lakshmi temple on any ground – aesthetic or political – for him, was brutally clear: Hyderabad would become another Ayodhya.2
2 Togadia’s speech passed without much mention in the mainstream press, perhaps because they have decided that to give him coverage would be to dignify his rants more than they deserve. There is something to be said for this editorial strategy though perhaps more to recommend that he be held to account for all he says. In the event, the speech was reported by
Siasat, a newspaper in the Urdu language published from Hyderabad, and also featured on the English language website run by it. The link, which remains good as of 1 January 2014 is here:
The Siasat Daily: Hyderabad, Bollywood, World, Islamic News
Ayodhya has been the archetype of the Hindutva agenda of the territorial conquest of symbolic sites, based on what its proponents claim are primeval titles to ownership. Territoriality is a surrogate here for cultural subjugation, with the larger political objective of marginalising and then perhaps effacing the Muslim cultural identity from the Hindu nation. Ayodhya had a long period of gestation, from the first act of trespass in December 1949, orchestrated by a cabal of 5
religious cultists who found in it a pathway out of irrelevance and indigence in the fraught aftermath of partition, to the final act of effacement in December 1992.3 At various stages in the journey, including in the final destruction, the cause was helped along by official connivance.4 This effacement from the face of the earth may be the destiny that fanatics have in mind for the Charminar, but residual decency within Hindutva ranks may not permit that grand catharsis. Meanwhile, there are embellishments being added every year to the Bhagya Lakshmi temple which perhaps ensure a continuing undertow of animosity and an aesthetic blight on a site of archaeological importance, which could be a flashpoint for future communal violence.
3 Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K. Jha,
Ayodhya, The Dark Night: The Secret History of Rama’s Appearance in Babri Masjid, Harper Collins, Delhi, 2012.
4 For certain hints and suggestions of official connivance in the final act of destruction, see the account by Madhav Godbole, the Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs at the time: "Ayodhya and India’s
Mahabharat",
Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006, pp 2072-6.
5 See for instance, the commentary written by a civil rights advocate and campaigner, Mahtab Alam on the website of critical media commentary Kafila: "Now that Owaisi is in jail, how about Togadia?", extracted 1 January 2014 from:
Now that Owaisi is in jail, how about Praveen Togadia?: Mahtab Alam | Kafila
What followed this suite of inflammatory speeches from opposing poles of Hyderabad’s growing communal estrangement was not atypical. Akbaruddin’s speech was blazoned across the national media with aggressive news anchors demanding a response of unequivocal condemnation, not merely from other community leaders but also from civil rights advocates whose work has been largely community neutral.5 Conditional responses or efforts to draw attention to the broader context of communal estrangement were dismissed out of hand. In the process, Togadia’s vituperations largely escaped comment and in fact, a number of his confederates within 6
the Hindutva ranks were quick to step up with statements of support and endorsement.
Confected and selective outrage from primetime TV news anchors was all very well as far as it went. But the message that came out from the civil rights community was that the malaise at the heart of Akbaruddin’s speech was unlikely to be cured by aggressive posturing or by the temporary expedient of arresting him and granting him bail shortly afterwards. The party that Akbaruddin represents in the Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly was once tarred with the stigma of launching a reign of terror and lawlessness in the city of Hyderabad and neighbouring districts, then under the sovereignty of the Nizam of the Asaf Jah dynasty, largest of the legatees to the Mughal empire. The All India Majlis Ittihad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM, or just MIM) is the political formation that spawned the infamous "razakars" or volunteer force of the 1940s that added a dangerous extra dimension of complexity to the already violent processes of Independence and Partition. In the received historiography of Indian nationalism, the MIM is the force of disruption and disintegration, which stood in the way of the seamless and sensible absorption of the Nizam’s Hyderabad province into the union, fomented widespread unrest in a vast swathe of territory at the heart of India, and got its just desserts with the Indian Army’s swift surgical strike of September 1948, codenamed "Operation Polo". According to a recently written history of the years since India’s Independence, the Indian Army took less than four days to establish "full control" of the state. "Those killed in the fighting included forty-two Indian soldiers and two thousand-odd Razakars".6
6 Ramachandra Guha,
India after Gandhi, The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, Picador India, Delhi, 2007, p 55. This rather anodyne account, as we shall see in due course, 7
is inattentive to certain inconvenient facts that make the icons of early Indian nationalism look rather feeble in their commitment to principle.
7 It is important to note here that Munshi himself was a man of strongly held Hindu revivalist beliefs and that his political persona and writings were influenced by these in ways that official histories of India have chosen to ignore. On this, see Manu Bhagavan, "The Hindutva Underground, Hindu Nationalism and the Indian National Congress in Late Colonial and Early Post-colonial India",
Economic and Political Weekly, September 13, 2009, pp 39-48.
8 Guha,
India after Gandhi, p 56.
As the Hyderabad state army formally signed an instrument of surrender with the commander of Operation Polo, General J.N. Chaudhuri, the Nizam went on the air and read out a speech that was in all likelihood, written for him by K.M. Munshi, who had succeeded to the imperial title of "agent" in the state of Hyderabad.7 The razakars he announced, had been banned and the union with India consummated. Subjects should "live in peace and harmony with the rest of the people in India". His message of conciliation was underlined in a broadcast six days later, when he reserved a still more explicit denunciation for the razakars and the MIM leader Qazim Razvi. These were the baleful forces that had prevented an "honourable settlement with India" and had indeed, taken "possession of the state" by "Hitlerite methods" which "spread terror".8
Razvi was arrested following the army operation and tried for sedition. He spent the next nine years in prison before being released and exiled to Pakistan. Prior to his departure from Indian shores, he formally handed over the leadership of the MIM to the Owaisi family. Abdul Wahed Owaisi, Razvi’s chosen legatee was succeeded by his son Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi. The third generation in this dynastic succession – Akbaruddin and his elder brother Asaduddin Owaisi – are now at the helm of this body of rather dubious provenance within the Indian nationalist imaginary. 8
Yet for all the scepticism about its antecedents, the MIM after a phase when its fortunes seemed continually on the wane, rebounded by some magic to regain a position of influence. The Owaisi dynasty initiated a far-reaching process of rewriting the party constitution to make the MIM a credible player within the Indian political framework. But that in itself was not of much consequence. The real breakthroughs came in 1969, when it won back the Hyderabad city real estate assets lost during its years in the wilderness.9 Though it had long since allowed its political identity to lapse and switched emphasis to the provision of welfare amenities to Hyderabad’s Muslim community, the lack of an asset base had till then, prevented a serious initiative even in this domain.
9 A comprehensive account of the MIM’s changing fortunes is available in G. Narendranath (Ed.) (1984)
Communal Riots in Hyderabad: What the People Say (Ahmedabad, Centre for Social Knowledge and Action); accessed on 1 January 2014 at:
http://www.unipune.ac.in/snc/cssh/H... ANTI-MUSLIM RIOTS/01-ANDHRA PRADESH/01A.pdf. This report was based on a series of interviews with residents of the city in the wake of several years of rapidly escalating communal tensions. It points out that people of the Muslim faith in Hyderabad, all through the 1960s and early-1970s, tended to be loyal voters of the Peoples’ Democratic Front, a coalition of left forces marshalled by the Communist Party of India (CPI). This may have been possibly because this front was a consistently anti-government force which could be trusted on to take up their specific grievances and aspirations. The restoration of the MIM’s legitimacy by the Congress-led governments of Andhra Pradesh may in this regard, have been motivated by the intent to cut down the electoral influence of the left-oriented forces in the city.
Also see the piece on the Opinion page of The Hindu, 27 April 2003, titled "Holding them captive?"; extracted 1 January 2014 from:
The Hindu : Holding them captive?
The MIM’s political fortunes began an upturn in 1979, when communal riots erupted in Hyderabad city – part of a general recrudescence of violence in various parts of the country between 1978 and 1980. The annual report of the Ministry of Home Affairs in the Union Government put down the violence to a general strike call given by the MIM following the capture of the Grand Mosque in 9
faraway Mecca by Arab militants seeking to overthrow the Saudi ruling dynasty.10 In its annual report the following year, the MHA, while recording with some remorse and regret that the "overall communal situation" after some seeming improvement, remained disturbed through much of 1980, suggested a socio-economic approach towards the study of violence: "Communal disturbances are the flashpoints of some deep-rooted factors linked with socio-economic, educational and other aspects. It has recently been suggested to the state governments of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh, to set up working groups for Moradabad, Aligarh, Jamshedpur, Kalyan-Bhiwandi and Hyderabad city, to carry out an in-depth study from socio-economic, educational and historical angles and formulate time-bound programmes for implementation".11
10 Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs,
Annual Report, 1979-80, pp 7-8. Narendranath,
op cit, suggests that the polarisation between communities was never healed following the integration of Hyderabad into the union. Rather, it may have only been temporarily submerged, to show itself in especially virulent form at every provocation. Though the siege of the holiest of holies for the Muslim faith in Mecca was the most serious of the provocations through the 1970s, there were several others that had aggravated matters in the city: such as the sub-continent wide turmoil that originated in Kashmir in 1963, following the disappearance of a holy relic from the Hazratbal mosque and the unrest following the occupation of the Islamic sites of Jerusalem by Israel in 1967. But these were relatively minor outbreaks, easily contained. In comparison, the 1970s, with the MIM’s resurgence, brought much more troublesome episodes of communal antagonism, as with the alleged gang-rape of a Muslim woman by the police in Hyderabad in 1978.
11 Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs,
Annual Report 1980-81, p 6.
While soundly based, these intentions remained unimplemented. Communal violence continued to flare in various parts of the country, becoming a widespread contagion from the mid-1980s, when the Hindutva campaign for Ayodhya acquired full-blown virulence. In general elections to the Indian Parliament in 1980, the MIM polled over one hundred thousand votes from the Hyderabad 10
seat, but fell short of victory.12 In the 1984 contest, in a pattern that would hold till the next elections in 1989, the MIM won the Hyderabad seat with a large share of the vote, while the Congress won the neighbouring Secunderabad constituency. The 1991 election turned up an ominous result: while the MIM comfortably retained Hyderabad, in an atmosphere suffused with the rhetoric of competitive communalism, Secunderabad was won by the flag-bearer of Hindutva in the political arena, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
12 This figure and all the following ones on the electoral performance of the MIM, are taken from reports of the Election Commission of India (various years).
Turning to the Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly, in 1989, the MIM contested thirty-five seats, winning four and forfeiting its deposit in twenty-eight. In seats won, its share of total votes cast was well in excess of forty percent, but what is more arresting, is that in all the thirty-five seats contested – even including those in which it lost its deposit – its average share of total votes cast was fifteen percent, substantial as a bargaining counter within a parliamentary system based on the single-member, simple-plurality seat.
In the parliamentary arena, the BJP’s gain in votes proved ephemeral. But the communal estrangement it created as part of the Ayodhya agitation was a lasting legacy. The MIM’s electoral record since then in the few seats that it contests, which have a high concentration of people of the Muslim faith, has been a rapidly ascending graph, except for 1994, when the party was riven by a split over its alleged quiescence over the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. A breakaway faction that year took away much of the committed vote: of twenty seats contested, the MIM had just one solitary win and its average vote share in seats contested fell below 10 per cent. By the next election to the state legislature, the schisms 11
had been healed and there also was a greater awareness of the strengths of strategic voting among the MIM flock. Of the five seats the MIM chose to contest, it won all but one and its share of the total votes cast in the seats contested was over forty-five percent. The winning streak has continued ever since. It currently (i.e., in January 2014) has seven seats in the legislative assembly, won in the 2009 general election, with an average share of close to forty per cent of the vote in the eight seats contested.
By all accounts, this is a remarkable turnaround in political fortunes for a party that was stigmatised as a divisive force with inclinations to spread terror and disorder. It tells a tale of a successful ring-fencing of those of the Muslim faith in Hyderabad within the system of representative democracy, a defensive reflex against the ghettoisation of the Muslim identity within the mythology of India’s nationhood. At the national level, this ghettoisation is reflected in the hegemonic narrative of Partition that paints Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League unequivocally in the colours of villainy, while absolving Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the Congress of any part of the responsibility for a cataclysmic partition and a population transfer that led to still uncounted deaths. Within the localised ambience of Hyderabad, the very same process of ghettoisation is reflected in the good versus bad polarity involving the Indian army on one side and the razakars on the other, the Congress on one side and the Nizam on the other.
Significant scholarly works have emerged in recent years which challenge this orthodoxy and pose an alternative construction, more complex and more faithful to recorded facts.13 From the local milieu
13 The standard reference here is of course Ayesha Jalal’s
The Sole Spokesman:
Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge, 1985. Soon afterwards, an entire chapter that the respected Muslim leader of the Indian freedom struggle, Maulana Abul 12
Kalam Azad, had withheld from publication in the first edition of his memoirs,
India Wins Freedom, came to light under the terms of his will and testament. Here again, the dogmatic insistence of Jawaharlal Nehru on a centralised polity where the "union" would hold all the powers is held to be the more significant contribution to the trauma of partition, rather than Jinnah’s demand for a fair power sharing that involved India’s large Muslim population. Since these pages emerged to the light around the same time as the nation-wide celebrations of the Nehru centenary, with the grandson of India’s first Prime Minister having inherited the office, they were never actively discussed or debated. In subsequent years, as unlikely a person as Jaswant Singh, a politician who has served the Hindutva party loyally and done duty as a senior cabinet minister, has felt compelled to recognize that Jinnah was far from being the demon of divisiveness that he is portrayed as in official Indian history. See his
Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence, OUP India, Delhi, 2010.
of Hyderabad, we learn from Hyder’s sketchy recollections of the death throes of the Nizam’s dominion, how this complexity played out in terms of the life and death choices forced upon the many who were caught unprepared for the precipitate haste of Partition. Hyder’s narration of events is also a reminder of how a deliberately fostered disdain for the subtleties of history prevents a larger reconciliation process, nationally and internationally.
Soon after Hyder’s book came to public attention, the constitutional scholar and prolific media commentator A.G. Noorani published
The Destruction of Hyderabad, a volume title with seeming irony for a time when the public is accustomed to viewing the city as a focal point of India’s new musculature as a global player in the information technology industry. Noorani’s focus is not on the embellishments of technological sophistication the city may recently have acquired, but on a time gone by, when Hyderabad represented a rare synthesis of cultures. Indeed, through the last years of the British
raj, Hyderabad presented an alternative to the virulent antagonisms that tended to be unleashed when newly minted cultural differences were transported into the domain of competitive politics. Following the trauma of the partition of the sub-continent, the prolonged stalemate over the status of Hyderabad was a part of the story of how wounds were aggravated by the continuing 13
"bankruptcy of statesmanship". This deficit of wisdom was "compounded with a spirit of vengeance and, what goes with it, the attractiveness of violence". With even the "tallest leaders" proving susceptible to these deviations from principle, the consequences of those baneful years, Noorani concludes, "are still with us".14
14 A.G. Noorani,
The Destruction of Hyderabad, Tulika Books, Delhi, 2013, p xiv.
In Noorani’s narration, the knotty problems of integration that Hyderabad posed were part of a broader dilemma. When the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946 was consigned to the dustbin – primarily on account of Jawaharlal Nehru’s late realisation that it did not quite deliver him the strongly centralised polity he longed for -- the British plan for a transfer of power shifted focus from bringing into existence a widely dispersed set of sovereign entities, which delegated a limited set of powers, typically defence, foreign affairs and currency, to a central authority. The solution was now to create two sovereign entities embodying respectively, the political aspirations of the sub-continent’s two principal political parties – the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League – while obliging the vast number of quasi-autonomous principalities subsisting under the doctrine of British paramountcy, to join one or the other among these two. In theory, the choice of independence was also proffered to these princely states, but in practice, actively discouraged.
Religious demography and geographical contiguity were thought to be the main considerations in determining the disposition of each princely state. But Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Qaid-e-Azam who had by then emerged as "sole spokesman" for Muslim interests, did not think of the homeland of the South Asian Muslim as necessarily constrained by geography. Regions where they had strength in numbers, such as Punjab, Bengal and Sindh were for him, potentially 14
united in a spiritual community with places of a distinct Muslim cultural ambience, such as Hyderabad, Lucknow and other parts of the Deccan and the United Provinces. Yet in the rush of events that followed the British decision to scuttle and run, Jinnah was often led into making inconsistent and imprudent choices: as when he advised the Nawab of Bhopal, a ruler of the Muslim faith, to acknowledge the faith of the majority of his subjects and accede to India, while concurrently advising the Nizam of Hyderabad to hold out against the pressures for accession.
There was always the possibility that the princes – disoriented by the chance of a sudden accretion to their power – would act in a manner that undermined their subjects’ sovereign power of choice, in a manner that indeed violated the basic truth that their subjects were now citizens of a sovereign nation committed to republican ideals. Indeed, some among the princely states did choose unwisely. The Nawab of Junagadh, Muslim by faith, held sovereign power over a predominantly Hindu population, but chose accession to Pakistan on the rather ludicrous grounds that his principality enjoyed a contiguous sealink with the newly emergent homeland of the South Asian Muslim. He was quickly disabused of his ambitions when his principality suffered the privation of an Indian blockade, contributing to a drop in availability of the essentials of life and a rapid crumbling of his authority. A relatively painless integration into India followed.
The Raja of Travancore, egged on by his politically ambitious Dewan C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer, flirted briefly with the independence option, but gave in to the moral power of the newly emerging Indian nation and the undeniable aspirations of his people. That left only Hyderabad and Kashmir as the thorny moral dilemmas, both for their rulers and for two nation-states that succeeded the British
raj. 15
Noorani introduces these complexities into the narrative and also provides significant insights into the role that a world historical personality seen in the official historiography of the Indian nation as an unequivocal villain, though for the wrong reasons, may have seriously miscued his strategy on Hyderabad. Following a long period of self-exile, Mohammad Ali Jinnah entered the political arena afresh in the 1930s, partially to win back ground that the Muslim cause had lost following the 1936 elections and the institution of provincial governments under the Congress in various parts of British India. He quickly gained moral ascendancy as the spokesman for Muslim political aspirations, winning in Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung, the founder of the MIM in Hyderabad, a loyal adherent.
The forces of communal polarisation were by now beginning to pierce Hyderabad’s carefully cultivated veneer of amity. Elements of the revivalist movement, the Arya Samaj, had infiltrated from nearby districts of British India and begun an agitation for greater access to power for the province’s majority community. Violence broke out in 1938, following which the Nizam’s administration clamped down on the group’s activities and banned its foundational scripture, the
Satyarth Prakash. This in turn engendered a movement for religious freedom in which the Congress party joined forces with the Arya Samaj. The Nizam found himself in a cleft stick, wavering haplessly between the MIM’s insistence on an administration founded on Islamic principles and the rising volubility of the Hindu revivalist element within.15
15 Noorani,
op cit, pp 52-6. Also, see Narendranath,
op cit, p 14.
With all that, Noorani regards the MIM under Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung as a relatively benign presence, with explicit commitments to safeguarding the rights of the religious and linguistic minorities in the province. The scenario changed with the Nawab’s death in 1944 at 16
the young age of thirty-nine in 1944 and the ascent of Qasim Razvi to leadership after an election carried out among the MIM cadre.
As the British raj entered its period of terminal crisis following the end of the Second World War, the sense of disorientation mounted among all those who were positioning themselves to occupy the pivotal positions of power it would vacate. The Nizam himself believed that as the oldest and most substantial among the principalities, Hyderabad was entitled to a special dispensation. This was a forlorn and foolish expectation, Noorani argues, but one that the Nizam was encouraged in by Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah, who surely should have known better.
In a chapter titled "Hyderabad’s Kashmir Connection", Noorani argues that the two princely states were conjoined in Jinnah’s imagination as vital parts of the mission of safeguarding Muslim interests. A proposal was made after fighting broke out in Kashmir, that the status of that state should be determined alongside Junagadh and Hyderabad, in accordance with the communal composition of their respective populations. But Jinnah insisted on leaving Hyderabad out of this grand bargain, perhaps because he believed that yielding too quickly would jeopardise Pakistan’s chances of gaining its rightful claims over Kashmir. And thus, laments Noorani, was a "fine opportunity for a grand settlement .. missed". "An overall settlement," he argues, "would have spared the subcontinent the bitterness which the endless Kashmir dispute has spread for decades. Hyderabad would have been spared the invasion and the massacre that followed. In the deal, safeguards for the Muslim minority and the composite culture of Hyderabad would have been stipulated. Kashmiris would have lived in peace and with dignity... History would have taken a far saner course in a land which 17
has known nothing but strife and bloodshed. That was not to be. Jinnah willed it otherwise".16
16 Noorani, op cit., pp 160-170.
17 Ibid, pp 209 ff.
With all the aggravation caused by Jinnah’s obduracy and the Nizam’s ambitions, Noorani claims, the harsh final solution imposed on Hyderabad, with consequences that official Indian historiography is yet to acknowledge, was totally avoidable. It was a course of action that Nehru as Prime Minister, found least desirable. But he was almost obsessively preoccupied with Kashmir at the time and often enough deferred to his Home Minister, Sardar Patel. If Nehru was keen on safeguarding the secular fabric and the composite culture of Hyderabad, Patel was insistent on imposing on it his Hindu nationalist outlook. He secured a valuable accessory in the mission by fostering a person of like outlook, Munshi, as political agent in the province. Thinking in Delhi was coloured by the lurid and grossly exaggerated stories of razakar atrocities that Munshi filed, virtually forcing the hand of the Indian government. The military invasion, fancifully dressed up as a "police action" finally began on 13 September 1948, two days after Jinnah’s death.17
It was a complex and deeply traumatic history that culminated in the military invasion. And continuing disregard for the subtleties of history could accelerate the slide down the slippery slope of burgeoning communal estrangement. Received wisdom is that the razakars and the MIM were the sole force of disorder preventing a sensible settlement of the Hyderabad question at Indian independence. This is obviously incorrect, since there was an agrarian revolt, spearheaded by the Communist Party of India (CPI) that began roughly a year before independence and continued to rage till well afterwards. Operation Polo was in fact, carried out to 18
quell the dangerous intersection of two tendencies, bitterly opposed to each other, though equally threatening in the perception of the Nehru-Patel duumvirate that brought the Indian union into being. One was a political tendency that undermined the possibility of the Indian union coming into being, the other threatened its sustenance as a stable entity.
For CPI leader Putchalapalli Sundarayya, a strategist and participant in the agrarian revolt in what was known then as the Telangana region of the Hyderabad, the choice was very clear: "We had been demanding that the Indian government should intervene and put an end to Nizam’s rule even while continuing our armed struggle. To say that we were fighting the oppressive regime was one thing, but to really mop up a wide support base and defeat the Nizam was quite another". At some point, the agrarian revolutionary faced the possibility that the Indian government and the Nizam were in league against his movement. That moment of clarity came when some of the insurgents were arrested by the Nizam’s forces while being shifted between enclaves that belonged within the Indian union: "We demanded prompt action on the whole incident, but the Centre ignored our outcry since it was locked in discussions with the Nizam. We did not have any illusions that the Indian government would protect us or ensure peoples (
sic) liberty in Telangana by sending its own forces".18
18 Putchalapalli Sundarayya,
An Autobiography, National Book Trust, Delhi, p 204-5.
When the Indian army action finally did begin on 13 September 1948, Sundarayya recalls, "we issued a circular .. welcoming the armed intervention as far as putting an end to the Nizam regime was 19
concerned. At the same time, we expressed the apprehension that the Police Action could be turned towards us".19
19 Ibid p 214.
20 Hyder, p 2.
Interestingly, the agrarian rebellion is only an incidental mention in Hyder’s own narration of events during those tense days. He was by all accounts, a civil servant trapped in an impossible situation, where forces beyond his control or even comprehension, were working at cross purposes, with seemingly only the common objective of precipitating a state of social and political meltdown. Hyder had at the time of India’s independence, been just over a decade in the civil service of Hyderabad state. And contrary to the view from outside, which saw Hyderabad as a benighted province administered on behalf of a decadent court by a civil service drawn from a narrow Muslim stratum, he saw from the inside, that the state he was serving was one "blessed with a remarkably secular outlook, enjoying communal harmony, with a benign ruler concerned with the advancement of the poor and the protection of the oppressed; an excellent administration where recruitment was based on merit; and an eclectic ruling elite, which included, besides Muslims, Hindus, Parsees, and others who proudly assimilated into (its) distinctive culture".20
This possibly is a romanticised account, but it needs to be taken seriously as an alternate point of view to the dogmatism of the nationalist theology. So too must the narrative that Hyder renders of his encounter with Qazim Razvi in November 1947, shortly after a "standstill agreement" had come into force with the government of newly independent India. Both sides to the agreement were committed to honouring existing territorial jurisdictions and refraining from unilateral moves to change the disposition of political 20
and military power. Razvi had led a mass demonstration in Hyderabad just the previous month against precisely such an agreement, since it looked to him to be suspiciously like the first step towards accession to India. That is the "October Coup" that lends Hyder’s book its title, but it was to prove soon enough, to be a moment in politics without great significance. It added to the demonisation of Razvi as a recalcitrant element who wanted to punch a hole in the heart of India, but contributed nothing of value to the negotiating stance of either side. The "standstill agreement" of November was little different in substance, from the deal that Razvi had mobilised his forces to put down in October.
Hyder found Razvi absolutely sanguine and complacent at their first meeting, but attentive and anxious to address all reservations about the MIM’s political strategy. He was "uncomfortable" with the talk of a Muslim minority ruling over a Hindu majority in Hyderabad, simply because it suggested the inevitability of conflict between religious groupings. "Our experience in Hyderabad proves otherwise", Hyder recalls Razvi stating: "The incitement to violence is being introduced from outside; it does not answer the needs of the people".
Very early in their meeting, Hyder recognised the man he was speaking to as a skilful debater with an answer to every possible point. Beyond the binary choice then being spoken of – between independence and Hyderabad’s accession to India – Hyder sought Razvi’s views on political reforms that introduced "responsible government" based on the principle of "majority representation". Razvi’s response was a marvel of
realpolitik. "I see much to admire in Hindu social reform", he said: "I freely admit they are more advanced educationally and more sophisticated politically and better 21
off economically. We rule, they own! It’s a good arrangement, and they know it!"21
21 Ibid, pp 12-3.
Hyder came away with distinctly mixed feelings from his meeting with the principal patron of the razakars. He had no doubts that Razvi, a lawyer of fairly modest means from Latur in Osmanabad district in the Nizam’s province, was speaking for a large section of the Muslim community in Hyderabad. But he had serious reservations about the prudence of the course the MIM was embarked on and the weighty influence it had begun to exert on the political administration of Hyderabad.
Despite these misgivings, Hyder seemingly was up for a challenge. Having completed a decade in the civil service of the state, he was due for promotion as the head of administration in a district. And he made a special point of seeking a district where the potential for trouble was most acute. At a meeting with the revenue minister, he was told that a colleague from the civil service had already been put in charge of Nalgonda, which left Osmanabad as a possible posting.
Perhaps if Hyder had by a twist of fortune been posted to Nalgonda, his narrative would have taken a different turn, since that was – along with the eastern districts known collectively as Telangana – the epicentre of the communist-led agrarian revolt. Osmanabad however, as Hyder recounts, presented its own challenges, notably that the administration seemed possessed by a "general loss of nerve". Indeed, he observed, the structure had begun to "totter" and "corruption was rampant". A variety of armed militant groups claiming to be defending the Muslim faith – razakars and deendars – not to mention ethnic militias of Arabs and Pathans, had begun to 22
claim their own territory, destroying the fabric of civil order and terrorising in particular, the Hindu community.
On arriving in Osmanabad and closely assessing the situation, Hyder found that local folk of the Hindu faith were equally resentful of several among their leadership that had slipped away across the border into Sholapur district in what was then independent India, and were organising militant camps from which raids were persistently being directed into the Nizam’s territory. This multiplied the vengeful urge among Muslim vigilante groups, putting the Hindus in Osmanabad at further risk.22
22 Ibid, pp 26-7.
Hyder soon evolved an elaborate strategy, which first required neutralising the deendars and razakars, and then the arming of local communities to ensure that they could resist the marauders from across the border. Where officials of the Nizam’s administration were found to be in default on basic responsibilities, they were to be strictly disciplined. Yet with all this in place, Hyder found himself unable to cope with the Arab and Pathan irregulars who stalked the district, dispensing summary justice. Most serious from his point of view was the continuing threat of armed raiders from across the border in Sholapur, who continued a campaign of provocation.
These raiders, Hyder notes, were controlled by the Congress leadership. After a desultory effort at gaining integration into India through non-violent political action, the Congress in Hyderabad, or so Hyder narrates, had decamped to friendlier territory to organise a systematic campaign of violence and armed intrusions. The Hyderabad unit of the Congress had a history of ineptitude, grossly miscued political calculations, and opportunistic alliances with extremist elements in the Hindutva fold. In his first few weeks in 23
Osmanabad, Hyder claims, he managed to precisely identify at least eleven camps across the border, all under Congress patronage, where extremist elements were lodged and generously afforded the means to carry out provocative actions within the territory of Hyderabad. There were another six camps he identified, organised by political forces other than the Congress.
Many of these findings were corroborated after the army action that swept aside the Nizam’s regime, when the Congress leadership, anxious at the entire credit being bestowed on military commander General Chaudhuri, stepped up to claim their due in terms of public recognition. The campaign of "sabotage and violence", Hyder affirms, was directed from the highest level of the Indian political leadership. It was "carried out with impunity from across the border in India, at a time when Hyderabad and India were ostensibly at peace with each other, having solemnly undertaken a Standstill Agreement".23
23 Ibid, p 37.
24 Ibid, p 32.
Hyder called for consultations with his counterpart, the District Collector of Sholapur, but encountered an attitude of unreasoning obduracy. While he sought to build the morale of his police force, the raids continued with impunity. Hyder records the names of several of the perpetrators of the raids and identifies three camps in particular as being the havens of the "most ruthless killers", who had been "responsible for the merciless slaying of hundreds of innocent people".24 And yet, with all these details set down, Hyder found, there was much else that he could not bring himself to document, since his mind willed that these be banished from memory: "I have forgotten many by actually willing myself to do so and am waiting to 24
forget what I remember now once I unburden my mind here. Until then, I remain a walking library of the unspeakable".25
25 Ibid, p 34.
26 Ibid, p 60.
By June 1948, mistrust was running high on both sides and the Standstill Agreement was void in all but name. The Indian outpost of Nanaj – an enclave within Hyder’s jurisdiction -- was an especially vulnerable point. Indian troops often used it as a transit point to access the important rail link in the town of Barsi. But the Pathans who had been put on guard duty on behalf of Hyderabad state, were disinclined to respect ordinary military protocols. Hyder saw trouble coming and made a case for replacing the Pathan irregulars with troops of the Hyderabad state army. But the Hyderabad army hierarchy under General El Edroos was paralysed with indecision, fearful that a forward deployment of its men could provoke retaliation from the Indian army. Soon, the Pathans had their way: a fight broke out in which they were routed and Nanaj taken over entirely by the Indian army.
Hyder consulted with the army high command on the options available to regain lost ground. But nothing seemed quite feasible. The security situation meanwhile had taken a rapid turn for the worse. "After the occupation of Nanaj, the strip of land between Sendri and Nanaj came under the sway of the freedom fighters", he records: "A reign of terror was now unleashed in the area: Scores of villagers lost their lives in violent encounters... I began to feel helpless. It looked as if the order for which we had worked so hard was beginning to break up. I had no one to look up to for help – we could no longer expect anything from our armed forces".26 25
In frustration, Hyder resigned his post and returned to Hyderabad. His action was put down by his superiors as possibly due to intolerable mental strain and physical ill-health. But he continued to be consulted by the Nizam’s administration on matters related to border security. He was in agreement with the general opinion that the razakars had to be reined in, though doubtful if this alone would succeed in restoring the peace: "The Razakars had been given undue prominence. They were nothing more than a nuisance. But a certain gangsterish aura surrounded them, which was being used to great effect by the Government of India. It seemed to me, therefore, that we should begin thinking of ways to minimise the importance of the Razakar movement".27
27 Ibid, p 68 ("Razakars" spelt in capitals in original).
The bureaucracy was unsure if Razvi would agree to the plan. But at a strategy meeting, Hyder found Razvi to be receptive. Finally though, he vetoed the option of disarming the razakars since with the Hyderabad state army virtually neutralised, there was no other means of self-defence available.
By the end of August 1948, the border raids began to diminish in frequency and intensity, followed soon afterwards, at the beginning of September, by reports of increasing troop concentrations in Barsi. These were ominous in themselves and Hyder was already convinced that a full blown offensive from across the border was imminent.
When Operation Polo began on 13 September, Hyder set off for Latur to check the state of civil defences there, evacuated the state treasury and returned
via Bidar and Nanded to Hyderabad, cautioning those among the irregulars preparing to defend the Nizam’s regime that they were hopelessly outgunned. As he woke up in Hyderabad on the morning of 16 September, he was astounded at 26
the air of unreality all around. The Prime Minister seemed in a state of denial, insisting that the flight of Hyderabad’s army from the border districts was a tactical retreat. Once the Indian army approached the capital city, it would be surrounded by units that had been pulled back from the borders. Hyderabad and Secunderabad, he said, were fully protected and in no imminent danger.
Razvi was in a more resigned and contemplative mood, conceding that arming the razakars and letting them loose may have been a serious mistake, before turning with a business-like air towards the urgency of procuring fresh consignments of arms to defend the city. Early on the morning of 17 September, he called Hyder and warned him to stay indoors all day since the "inevitable" was about to happen. Hyder thought he was being given a friendly warning to stay out of range of the Indian army’s firepower, since General Chaudhuri was widely expected to bring his forces into Hyderabad city that day. What Razvi told him next plunged him deep into horror: the remnants of the razakars in Hyderabad city had been fully armed and were prepared soon after prayers were concluded that Friday, to unleash a massacre in the city.
Hyder rushed to meet the chief of Hyderabad’s police force – a close kinsman – and urged him to get on the telephone with Razvi at once. Though he was privy to only one side of the conversation which went on more than half-an-hour, Hyder figured that Razvi’s principal worry was over securing his men from possible retribution by the Indian army. All possible assurances were conveyed through the conversation, at the end of which Razvi delivered the commitment expected from him: that his men would stand down and surrender their arms. That evening, Razvi went on the air over Radio Deccan, admitting his failure to fulfil his followers’ expectations, but asking 27
for calm and religious amity in accordance with the greatest traditions of Hyderabad.
The government of the Nizam resigned on 17 September. The following day, General Chaudhuri led his men into the city and on 19 September, General El Edroos signed an instrument of surrender on behalf of Hyderabad’s state army.
Hyderabad was now a fully integrated part of the Indian union. The war had been won but had the peace been secured? The Indian army, Hyder recounts, had been "preoccupied with fears of an anti-Hindu uprising in Hyderabad". In the bargain it had failed to prepare for a possible explosion in other parts of the state. "I have no desire to exaggerate the horrors that followed Police Action but these tragic occurrences were largely preventable", he records:
In most places, there was chaos in the wake of the swift Indian advance. Instead of just smashing through, the victorious army could have taken greater care to either restore local administration, or set up its own military administration. It did neither. Thugs quickly filled the vacuum.. Among (them) were several thousand young men from the border camps that had just been broken up: they were trained in violence, familiar with the terrain and vengeful in spirit. .. The anarchy lasted weeks. Mobs broke into prisons and set convicts free. There was murder, loot and arson... Thousands of families were broken up, children separated from their parents and wives, from their husbands. Women and girls were hunted down and raped. There were many other shameful deeds perpetrated in those days. I cannot bring myself to write about them even now.28
28 Ibid, p 79.
It has taken the Indian nation a long time reckoning with this hugely problematic and unsavoury legacy. In 1998, the British travel writer 28
and historian William Dalrymple set down his impressions from a visit to Hyderabad when he met with several of the descendants of the old aristocracy. He found vivid memories of the old days, as too a growing sense of disquiet at the conspicuous disregard that the modern city manifested towards its historical grandeur. Particularly hurtful Dalrymple found, were the persistent traumas of the 1948 massacre and the denial that had set in subsequently as official narratives of Indian nationhood airbrushed it out of history entirely.29
29 William Dalrymple,
The Age of Kali, Penguin India, 1998, chapter 4, "Under the Char Minar".
30 A.G. Noorani, "Of a massacre untold",
Frontline, March 16, 2001, extracted on 1 January 2014 from:
Of a massacre untold
31 Cited Ibid.
A.G. Noorani took up the theme in 2001, referring pointedly to the report on the 1948 carnage that had been commissioned by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, which was suppressed soon after it was submitted and subsequently perhaps destroyed in most part. "Suppression of records is not only unethical but futile", he commented: "More often than not, the foreign scholar will unearth it from archives in London or Washington, or in India itself".30
In her book on Hyderabad between 1911 and 1948, published in English translation in 2000, the German scholar Margrit Pernau did just that: "while the occupation by the Indian army had been quick and had caused only relatively few casualties", she wrote, "the following communal carnage was all the more terrible". "The Razakars had sown wind and reaped not only a storm but a hurricane which in a few days cost the lives of one-tenth to one-fifth of the male Muslim population primarily in the countryside and provincial towns".31 29
Noorani assembles a wealth of similar references from the scholarly literature on the untold events of the aftermath of Operation Polo. He draws pointed attention to the report of two senior Congress men, Pandit Sundarlal and Kazi Mohammad Abdul Ghaffar, which a shocked and shaken Jawaharlal Nehru had commissioned. When apprised of their findings, Sardar Patel chose not to worry about factual veracity and value, but to angrily question the credentials of the inquiry team and attack their exclusive focus on the aftermath of Operation Polo, while allegedly glossing over the atrocities of the razakars.
Patel was being disingenuous here since the report on Hyderabad was carried out at the explicit request of Nehru, who had written to him in November 1948, mentioning information from "reliable observers". The Prime Minister’s information was that even if the army had generally "functioned well", there were a "very large number of outbreaks .. in the small towns and villages resulting in the massacre of possibly some thousands of Muslims by Hindus, as well as a great deal of looting, etc". Being contrary to what he had been led to believe, Nehru was anxious to have facts "verified through our military and civil authorities in Hyderabad". It was imperative to ascertain the truth, he said, "or else we shall be caught saying things which are proved false later".32
32 Ibid.
Nehru presumably, was never informed of the truth, which continued to fester under the make-believe that became the official Indian practice of secularism. In her study on the integration of Hyderabad state published in 2007, Taylor C. Sherman concluded on the basis of all available evidence: "Conservative estimates suggest that 50,000 Muslims were killed. Others claim several hundred 30
thousand died. Indian troops in some places remained aloof from these activities, in others, they were implicated in them".33
33 Taylor C. Sherman, "The Integration of the princely state of Hyderabad and the making of the postcolonial state in India",
Indian Economic and Social History Review, December 2007, pp 489-516.
34 Perry Anderson,
The Indian Ideology.
Clearly, the policy of scholarly inattention to buttress the official policy of denial was proving unsustainable. In 2012, the renowned Marxist scholar Perry Anderson intervened rather brusquely in the historiography of modern India, posing with little attention to the genteel conventions of scholarly life, a number of questions about the inconvenient truths that the official historians dare not utter. The Hyderabad massacre, he said, was precisely such an area of deliberate silence, enforced by historians of otherwise very liberal persuasion. This silence, Anderson proposed, was about a deep-seated anxiety in the Indian nationalist psyche, whose other manifestation is a ready tendency to celebrate the survival of democracy and secularism as governing principles of Indian statehood.34
With his most recent work, Noorani has placed the Sundarlal report and much of the intrigues that preceded the forced integration of Hyderabad, in the public domain. The time for denial has now clearly passed. Now the reckoning has to take place followed by the reconciliation, no matter how inconvenient and uncomfortable the facts of history may be.
The other half of the famous sibling duo, Benedict Anderson has elsewhere made a point about the nation as an imagined community, where as the French political ideologue Ernest Renan put it: "all individuals have many things in common and also that they have forgotten many things". Such as for instance, every French 31
citizen was obliged to have forgotten the "massacres of St Bartholomew and the mid-13th century". This as Anderson says, is a curious formulation by the ideologue of the French nation, who feels obliged to remind his constituency of events from the distant past that they as loyal citizens of the French nation, are obliged to have forgotten.35
35 Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities, pp 199-200.
36 Ibid: where Anderson asks if the Paris Commune of 1871 for Renan who wrote in 1882, was something that could be forgotten only for the French nation to be reminded of it.
37 Shail Mayaram
, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity deals with the issues in Alwar and Bharatpur on the basis of Meo oral history. On Kashmir, the matter of the Rajauri-Poonch massacres has of course been part of the contention between India and Pakistan in the U.N. Security Council. It was brought into the serious scholarly domain by Alasdair Lamb with
Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1846-1990 and
That act of remembering only to forget obviously does not work as a cement for nationhood, when the events concerned are recent and fresh in the memory.36 When remembered with a sense of grief on one side and exultation on the other, the events become active agents of national disintegration. Hyderabad 1948 was just one among several stories of strife in the integration into the Indian Union of erstwhile princely states operating under the principle of paramountcy. Several of these involved major atrocities by ruling dynasties against subjects of the Muslim faith. Alwar and Bharatpur carried out a massacre of the Meo Muslims on their territory, offering them the alternative recourses of conversion – which had to be demonstrated by the conspicuous consumption of pork – or expulsion to what would soon become Pakistan. The Kashmir dynasty carried out a similar programme of ethnic cleansing in its Jammu districts of Rajauri and Poonch, only to be brought up short by a rebellion which was probably the immediate trigger for the armed Pathan raid into Kashmir to avenge the atrocities against those of the Islamic faith.37 32
rebutted from an Indian nationalist point of view by Prem Shankar Jha in
Kashmir: Rival Views of History. Andrew Whitehead, a long-time BBC correspondent, gave a new life to the story of unspeakable atrocities against the Rajauri-Poonch Muslims by the Dogra dynasty in
A Mission in Kashmir. And Christopher Snedden in
Kashmir: The Unwritten History has cited a large variety of sources, including Nehru and Patel, to show that the Rajauri-Poonch incidents were very much in the foreground of attention of the Indian political leadership at the time of independence, and that retaliatory action from the other side was expected and something to prepare for.
Amnesia is the best antidote for the wounds of history. And modernisation and economic growth, which invites everybody (putatively) into its benign embrace, could make an ill-remembered past totally irrelevant to the manner in which nations construct their future. When a nation is unable, six-and-a-half decades and more into its modernisation project, to still the voices of primordialism which call for vengeance against the supposed injustices of history, even when the consequence could be a severe fracture in the social consensus and unending political discord, there is clear evidence that the promise has failed. To address the wounds of history candidly and transparently, may then seem the only way forward for a nation serious about sustaining its internal unity and solidarity.
