The story of the princely state of Hyderabad’s annexation into the Indian Union in 1948 remains largely inaccessible to public memory due to the Indian state’s deliberate efforts to keep it under wraps. It was also incidentally eclipsed by the scale and tragedy of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Hyderabad, just like the other 561 princely states in India, was legally an independent entity after August 15, 1947 when the British left the sovereignty of princely states to their own devices, with options of merging with India or Pakistan or remaining independent.
However, missing in the state narratives is the fact that the accession was a full-blown military invasion coded ‘Operation Polo’ (Hyderabad had the most number of polo fields) of an independent territory; also missing is the violence that it unleashed on the citizens of the state. The operation was carried out in the name of ‘police action’ to make it seem like a domestic issue, thus keeping it away from international scrutiny.
While the state narratives paint a polarised account rife with communal tension, the reality on the ground was much more nuanced, which we know thanks to the many essays and writings by the prominent socio-political activists of the time. These were mined out of obscurity and made accessible in 2013 after the declassification of the Indian government’s own committee report on the matter – the Sunderlal Report. These essays have been compiled into a book titled 1948 Hyderabad Readings, edited by Mohammed Ayub Khan, Anant Maringanti, and Gita Ramaswamy, and published in December 2024.
In making this collection accessible, SouthSide Books has ensured it no longer remains a topic of political taboo and has shone a long overdue spotlight on the scholarship on the prevalent socio-political atmosphere of Hyderabad state in the 1940s, pre and post ‘Police Action’, giving voice to all the political stakeholders of the time – a) the State of Hyderabad headed by the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, and his feudal monarchy, b) the Congress Party led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, c) the Razakars, a ragtag private militia working with the ambition to form a sovereign Islamic state, and d) the peasant uprising against feudalism and the Nizam that led to the Telangana Armed Struggle (1946-1951) supported by communist ideology.
Starting off on the wrong foot, the series of negotiations on accession between the Indian Union and the State of Hyderabad resulted in a “standstill agreement” being reached on November 29, 1947. This would give both sides a chance to breathe, take stock of their situation, and re-approach the negotiating table within a year.
A representation was heard in the United Nations from Hyderabad on September 12, 1948 notifying it of India’s official proclamation to invade and requesting an earliest possible hearing. The Indian army, however, marched in on the very next day and Hyderabad surrendered on September 17, within five days of the invasion.
Responsibility of the state or the lack thereof
One of the most shocking aspects of the operation was that the head of nation, Jawaharlal Nehru, had not been apprised of the tragedy until after it happened. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s obsession with Hyderabad, which he referred to as a nasoor (an infected wound) in the belly of India, was no ordinary one. He was even willing to trade Kashmir for Hyderabad in negotiations with Pakistan. While Patel took matters into his own hands, VP Menon assisted him in providing the fine print.
A series of de-stabilisation tactics were employed by the Congress Party during the standstill period. Border raids included attacks on police outposts, theft of weaponry, disruption of railway communications, destruction of customs outposts, etc. Another arm-twisting mechanism adopted was economic blockade of essential goods to Hyderabad such as rice, salt, medicines, medical supplies, petroleum and diesel for transport and industry, chlorine for water treatment, etc.
Lucien D Benichou’s essay, ‘The Beginnings of Popular Political Agitation: The 1938-39 Satyagraha’, highlights how the State Congress conflated the mainland Indian independence movement with the movement to achieve civil liberties and independence in Hyderabad from the Nizam administration.
The Sunderlal Report
The Sunderlal Report – headed by Pandit Sunderlal, Qazi Abdul Ghaffar, and Maulana Abdullah Misri – also included in the book, provides a conservative estimate of about 40,000 human casualties in the violence during and after the ‘Police Action’ that was unleashed against Hyderabad’s citizens. Ordinary Muslims were openly targeted after unfairly accusing them of being a Razakar or a sympathiser. Historian Margrit Pernau writes: “Razakars had sown wind and reaped not only a storm but a hurricane which in a few days cost the lives of 1/10th to 1/5th of the male Muslim population of the state.”
The report elaborates that “the communal frenzy did not exhaust itself in murder alone but also in rapes, abduction of women and children, forceful conversion, loot, arson, desecration of Mosques, seizure of houses and lands”. While the primary accused were mobs from the Marathwada and Karnataka borders of the state, incited by communal organisations, i.e., Arya Samaj, Hindu Mahasabha, and the Razakars, the report makes an unusually honest confession that they had also gathered “absolutely unimpeachable evidence of the participation of Indian army and local Police in the loot and other crimes”.
Telangana Armed Struggle (1946-51)
The members of the state Communist Party on the other hand had since maintained that the real reason for the invasion by the Indian army was to crush their peoples’ movement, an “upheaval of Asian peasants under the leadership of the Communist Party in the immediate postwar years after the Chinese revolution” as described by Margrit Pernau. This peasant uprising leading to the Telangana Armed Struggle (1946-51) is well documented by academia and historians like Barry Pavier, Caroline Elliot, DN Dhanagare, Puchalapalli Sundarayya, and others.
After all, the movement had already taken control of up to 4,000 villages, driving out the landlords and the feudal administration, and replacing it with people’s governance. It was a matter of a few more months until the Nizam was overthrown and the movement would infiltrate the interiors of mainland India, had the Indian army delayed the invasion. Perhaps this was the nasoor Patel was referring to, and the Razakar movement provided a perfect communal excuse to justify the invasion. Sundarayya writes that if the violence by the Razakars and the Communist party had caused about 400 casualties, the state crackdown on communists resulted in 4,000 immediate casualties and its impact lasted for an entire decade after the invasion.
The question of Muslim representation
The editors of the book include a bold and provocative essay by Moid MA and A Suneetha, titled ‘Rethinking Majlis’ Politics: Pre-1948 Muslim Concerns in Hyderabad State’. Bold because very rarely has there been an academic stand taken on the vision of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (Majlis hereafter), and provocative because of the claim to represent and thereby monopolise the Muslim identity.
The essay makes a case for the transformation of Majlis from a socio-cultural Muslim organisation into a political think-tank representing Muslim interest to combat the “dangers of majoritarian democracy” and thus was “in response to the complex transition of a princely state into a democratic regime, rendering the state’s Muslim population into political minority”.
It is interesting to note that the Majlis’s original manifesto was to unite the Muslim masses of the state, dispersed on the lines of sectarianism and emerging political ideologies of the world, by re-igniting the flame of Islam and focusing on its core teachings, under the able leadership of Bahadur Yar Jung, a charismatic orator of the time who renounced his feudal background for the cause.
The Majlis met with some success in uniting Muslims across the sectarian barrier but the same cannot be said in generating a single uniform political voice. The Muslims of Hyderabad were in a unique position in history, where by virtue of being the majority among the ruling class while being a minority demographically they were exposed to high quality education and the emerging notions of democracy and secularism that caught the world by storm, post-WWII, far and wide.
Thereby the then young Muslim generation from both the ruling class and lower/middle-classes rebelled in various ways against the state and the politics of Majlis that would change the course of history. This dynamic is made clear by the majority of opposing political visions covered in the rest of the essays in the book, which also happen to be from Muslim thinkers and leaders themselves, such as Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Mohammed Hyder, Maulana Maududi, Ali Yavar Jung, etc, presenting with no ambiguity the condemnation of the means the Majlis employed towards their goal.
The most notable rebellion was the contemporary peasant uprising of the 1940s and the following communist armed struggle against the Nizam’s feudal government and the Razakars that was led and participated in by Muslim masses, in positively disproportional numbers compared to their demographic – 11% Muslim as compared to 85% Hindu.
It is up to the reader to meditate on whether the Majlis truly represented the ‘Muslim’ voice of the state when there is towering evidence that every other political movement was also co-led and joined by Muslim citizens of the state. This included participation in the Hyderabad State Congress and the Mulki League, which envisioned a semi-democratic sovereign state, still under the monarchy of the Nizam, but free of Gair-Mulki influence (both British and Hindustani) with a constitution that would ensure the responsibility of the executive to the legislative branch.
The ‘Edward Snowden’ of Hyderabad
Amidst the explosive socio-political chaos engulfing Hyderabad state emerged a whistleblower from the Nizam’s administration, Ali Yavar Jung. Jung anonymously authored a collection of articles for the Times of India newspaper, published from Madras Presidency, on the disturbing state of affairs within the Nizam’s regime. These articles, compiled as the essay ‘Hyderabad in Retrospect’, perhaps serve as the holy grail of the book, providing deep insights, sometimes a day-by-day account of the mismanagement within the Nizam’s administration during its most crucial time in history.
The Majlis turned into a political organisation in 1938 and was ferociously active by the late 1940s (stronger than Muslim League at an all-India level) and occupied 51% legislative vote in an experimental form of part-elected, part-nominated ‘responsible government’ formed under pressure from the Indian Union as a prerequisite to resume talks on the accession. The essay effectively deconstructs the monopoly of this Muslim-majoritarian representation in legislative, won on the basis of parity of Muslim interests rather than on the proportion of Muslim population (11%).
The time period also exposes the double standards of Muslim leaders and influencers like Bahadur Yar Jung and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (an unofficial political advisor sought by the Majlis) when it came to Hyderabad versus Kashmir. BYJ had urged a responsible government in Kashmir but opposed it in Hyderabad. Jinnah demanded partition of India on communal majoritarian politics whereas he wanted Hyderabad to remain a Muslim state based on the religion of the ruler.
Another valuable resource in this regard is Mohammed Hyder’s book October Coup: A Memoir of the Struggle for Hyderabad. He was serving as the Collector of Osmanabad during the ‘coup’ and had a front row seat to the horrors that unfolded from both sides.
As Karen Leonard, an eminent scholar on Hyderabad, suggested, while one can find racks of books on the Mughals at libraries, not even a single rack has writings on Hyderabad. The editors of this book have done their part in filling the Hyderabad rack at libraries.
Another recommended book on the same topic that came out recently is Remaking History – 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad by Afsar Muhammad.
Moses Tulasi is a filmmaker and freelance journalist who writes on Hyderabad and on Telangana history and culture. Views expressed are the author’s own.