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ALTERNATE HISTORIES
Hyderabad 1948 compels a fresh evaluation of the theology of Indias
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
Hyderscion of an influential family of civil servants in the court of
the Nizamwrote up his recollections of the months of tumult that
ended in the forced integration of the province into the IndianUnion. 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
Masoods personal and professional preoccupations.
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Perhaps that long lapse of time has contributed inadvertently to the
topicality and relevance of Hyders 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. Hyderhas 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.
India of course is not exceptional in having a foundational mythologyundergirding 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), amember 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
1Mohammed Hyder, October Coup, A Memoir of the Struggle for Hyderabad, Roli Books,
Delhi, 2012.
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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 yearstogether. 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.
Akbaruddins 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
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interest of aggressively projecting a religious identity as a claim for
electoral support.
Several days before Owaisis 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 theBhagya 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
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, fromthe first act of trespass in December 1949, orchestrated by a cabal of
2Togadias 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:http://www.siasat.com/english/news/bhagyalaxmi-mandir-near-charminar-will-
turn-ayodhyatogadia.
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/bhagyalaxmi-mandir-near-charminar-will-turn-ayodhyatogadiahttp://www.siasat.com/english/news/bhagyalaxmi-mandir-near-charminar-will-turn-ayodhyatogadiahttp://www.siasat.com/english/news/bhagyalaxmi-mandir-near-charminar-will-turn-ayodhyatogadiahttp://www.siasat.com/english/news/bhagyalaxmi-mandir-near-charminar-will-turn-ayodhyatogadiahttp://www.siasat.com/english/news/bhagyalaxmi-mandir-near-charminar-will-turn-ayodhyatogadiahttp://www.siasat.com/english/news/bhagyalaxmi-mandir-near-charminar-will-turn-ayodhyatogadia7/29/2019 Alternate Histories: Why Hyderabad 1948 Compels a Fresh Examination of India's National Theologies
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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 byofficial connivance.
4This 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.
What followed this suite of inflammatory speeches from opposing
poles of Hyderabads growing communal estrangement was not
atypical. Akbaruddins 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.5Conditional responses or efforts to draw
attention to the broader context of communal estrangement were
dismissed out of hand. In the process, Togadias vituperations largely
escaped comment and in fact, a number of his confederates within
3Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K. Jha,Ayodhya, The Dark Night: The Secret History of Ramas
Appearance in Babri Masjid, Harper Collins, Delhi, 2012.4For 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 Indias Mahabharat, Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006, pp 2072-
6.5See 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 1January 2014 from:http://kafila.org/2013/01/09/now-
that-owaisi-is-in-jail-how-about-praveen-togadia-mahtab-alam/.
http://kafila.org/2013/01/09/now-that-owaisi-is-in-jail-how-about-praveen-togadia-mahtab-alam/http://kafila.org/2013/01/09/now-that-owaisi-is-in-jail-how-about-praveen-togadia-mahtab-alam/http://kafila.org/2013/01/09/now-that-owaisi-is-in-jail-how-about-praveen-togadia-mahtab-alam/http://kafila.org/2013/01/09/now-that-owaisi-is-in-jail-how-about-praveen-togadia-mahtab-alam/http://kafila.org/2013/01/09/now-that-owaisi-is-in-jail-how-about-praveen-togadia-mahtab-alam/http://kafila.org/2013/01/09/now-that-owaisi-is-in-jail-how-about-praveen-togadia-mahtab-alam/7/29/2019 Alternate Histories: Why Hyderabad 1948 Compels a Fresh Examination of India's National Theologies
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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
Akbaruddins 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 lawlessnessin 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 Nizams 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 Armys
swift surgical strike of September 1948, codenamed Operation
Polo. According to a recently written history of the years since
Indias 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
6Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi, The History of the Worlds Largest Democracy,
Picador India, Delhi, 2007, p 55. This rather anodyne account, as we shall see in due course,
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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 hadsucceeded 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, Razvis 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.
is inattentive to certain inconvenient facts that make the icons of early Indian nationalism
look rather feeble in their commitment to principle.7It 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-
48.8Guha, India after Gandhi, p 56.
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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 tomake 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.9Though it
had long since allowed its political identity to lapse and switched
emphasis to the provision of welfare amenities to Hyderabads
Muslim community, the lack of an asset base had till then, prevented
a serious initiative even in this domain.
The MIMs 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
9A comprehensive account of the MIMs 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/HumanRights/04%20COMMUNAL%20RIOTS/A%20-
%20%20ANTI-MUSLIM%20RIOTS/01-ANDHRA%20PRADESH/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
MIMs 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:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040328051529/http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/04/2
7/stories/2003042700081500.htm.
http://www.unipune.ac.in/snc/cssh/HumanRights/04%20COMMUNAL%20RIOTS/A%20-%20%20ANTI-MUSLIM%20RIOTS/01-ANDHRA%20PRADESH/01A.pdfhttp://www.unipune.ac.in/snc/cssh/HumanRights/04%20COMMUNAL%20RIOTS/A%20-%20%20ANTI-MUSLIM%20RIOTS/01-ANDHRA%20PRADESH/01A.pdfhttp://www.unipune.ac.in/snc/cssh/HumanRights/04%20COMMUNAL%20RIOTS/A%20-%20%20ANTI-MUSLIM%20RIOTS/01-ANDHRA%20PRADESH/01A.pdfhttp://web.archive.org/web/20040328051529/http:/www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/04/27/stories/2003042700081500.htmhttp://web.archive.org/web/20040328051529/http:/www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/04/27/stories/2003042700081500.htmhttp://web.archive.org/web/20040328051529/http:/www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/04/27/stories/2003042700081500.htmhttp://web.archive.org/web/20040328051529/http:/www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/04/27/stories/2003042700081500.htmhttp://web.archive.org/web/20040328051529/http:/www.hindu.com/thehindu/2003/04/27/stories/2003042700081500.htmhttp://www.unipune.ac.in/snc/cssh/HumanRights/04%20COMMUNAL%20RIOTS/A%20-%20%20ANTI-MUSLIM%20RIOTS/01-ANDHRA%20PRADESH/01A.pdfhttp://www.unipune.ac.in/snc/cssh/HumanRights/04%20COMMUNAL%20RIOTS/A%20-%20%20ANTI-MUSLIM%20RIOTS/01-ANDHRA%20PRADESH/01A.pdf7/29/2019 Alternate Histories: Why Hyderabad 1948 Compels a Fresh Examination of India's National Theologies
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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, remaineddisturbed 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
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
10Government 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 MIMs
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.
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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 electionturned 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).
Turning to the Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly, in 1989, theMIM 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 contestedeven 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 BJPs gain in votes proved
ephemeral. But the communal estrangement it created as part of the
Ayodhya agitation was a lasting legacy. The MIMs 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 splitover 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
12This 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).
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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 inclinationsto 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 Indias
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
13The standard reference here is of course Ayesha Jalals 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
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of Hyderabad, we learn from Hyders sketchy recollections of the
death throes of the Nizams 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.Hyders 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 Hyders bookcame 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 atime when the public is accustomed to viewing the city as a focal
point of Indias new musculature as a global player in the
information technology industry. Nooranis 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
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 Jinnahs demand for a fair power sharing that involved Indias 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 Indias 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 hisJinnah: India, Partition, Independence, OUP India, Delhi, 2010.
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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 ofthose baneful years, Noorani concludes, are still with us.
14
In Nooranis 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 Nehrus late realisationthat 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-continents 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 tobe 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 forMuslim 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
14A.G. Noorani, The Destruction of Hyderabad, Tulika Books, Delhi, 2013, p xiv.
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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 ledinto 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 thechance of a sudden accretion to their powerwould 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.
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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 haveseriously 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 Hyderabads 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 provinces majority community. Violence broke out in
1938, following which the Nizams administration clamped down on
the groups 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 MIMs insistence on an administration founded on
Islamic principles and the rising volubility of the Hindu revivalist
element within.15
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 Nawabs death in 1944 at
15Noorani, op cit, pp 52-6. Also, see Narendranath, op cit, p 14.
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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 surelyshould have known better.
In a chapter titled Hyderabads Kashmir Connection, Noorani
argues that the two princely states were conjoined in Jinnahs
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 alongsideJunagadh 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 Pakistans
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
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17
has known nothing but strife and bloodshed. That was not to be.
Jinnah willed it otherwise.16
With all the aggravation caused by Jinnahs obduracy and the
Nizams 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 ofHyderabad, 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 Jinnahs 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
razakarsand the MIM were the sole force of disorder preventing asensible 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
16Noorani, op cit., pp 160-170.17
Ibid, pp 209 ff.
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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 theIndian 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 anend to Nizams 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 Nizams 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
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
18Putchalapalli Sundarayya,An Autobiography, National Book Trust, Delhi, p 204-5.
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concerned. At the same time, we expressed the apprehension that
the Police Action could be turned towards us.19
Interestingly, the agrarian rebellion is only an incidental mention in
Hyders own narration of eventsduring 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 Indias 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 ofhis 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
19Ibid p 214.20
Hyder, p 2.
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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 lendsHyders 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 MIMs 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 Hyderabads accession to India Hyder soughtRazvis views on political reforms that introduced responsible
government based on the principle of majority representation.
Razvis 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
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off economically. We rule, they own! Its a good arrangement, and
they know it!21
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 Nizams 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 putin 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 Telanganathe
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
21Ibid, pp 12-3.
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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 Nizams territory. This multiplied
the vengeful urge among Muslim vigilante groups, putting the Hindus
in Osmanabad at further risk.22
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 Nizams administration
were found to be in default on basic responsibilities, they were to be
strictly disciplined. Yet with all this in place, Hyder found himselfunable 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
22Ibid, pp 26-7.
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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 ofHyderabad. 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 Nizams 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 publicrecognition. 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
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
23Ibid, p 37.24
Ibid, p 32.
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forget what I remember now once I unburden my mind here. Until
then, I remain a walking library of the unspeakable.25
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 Hyders 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 withtroops 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 feelhelpless. 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
25Ibid, p 34.26
Ibid, p 60.
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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 Nizams administration on matters related toborder 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
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
Nizams regime that they were hopelessly outgunned. As he woke up
in Hyderabad on the morning of 16 September, he was astounded at
27Ibid, p 68 (Razakars spelt in capitals in original).
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the air of unreality all around. The Prime Minister seemed in a state
of denial, insisting that the flight of Hyderabads army from the
border districts was a tactical retreat. Once the Indian army
approached the capital city, it would be surrounded by units that hadbeen 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 armys 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 Hyderabads police forcea close
kinsmanand 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 Razvis 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
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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 Hyderabads 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 localadministration, 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
It has taken the Indian nation a long time reckoning with this hugely
problematic and unsavoury legacy. In 1998, the British travel writer
28Ibid, p 79.
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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 themodern 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
A.G. Noorani took up the theme in 2001, referring pointedly to thereport 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 themale Muslim population primarily in the countryside and provincial
towns".31
29William 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:http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1805/18051130.htm.31
Cited Ibid.
http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1805/18051130.htmhttp://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1805/18051130.htmhttp://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1805/18051130.htmhttp://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1805/18051130.htm7/29/2019 Alternate Histories: Why Hyderabad 1948 Compels a Fresh Examination of India's National Theologies
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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 ashocked 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 Ministers 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
Nehru presumably, was never informed of the truth, whichcontinued 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
32Ibid.
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thousand died. Indian troops in some places remained aloof from
these activities, in others, they were implicated in them.33
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 liberalpersuasion. 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 reportand 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
33Taylor 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.
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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 pastthat they as loyal citizens of the French nation, are obliged to have
forgotten.35
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 activeagents 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
35Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp 199-200.
36Ibid: 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
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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 theirfuture. 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.
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
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