Film producer Gudur Narayana Reddy, who is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate for the Bhongir assembly constituency in Telangana, has approached the state’s Chief Election Officer against the purported banning of his film Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad. The film is expected to release on November 17, less than two weeks before the Telangana Assembly elections on November 30. While Narayana Reddy has stated that he only wants to “enlighten” the youth about the state’s history, many fear that the BJP will use the movie to polarise voters, and target Muslims.
The upcoming movie is set around the years 1947-48 before the erstwhile Hyderabad state’s annexation on September 17, 1948. Days ahead of the annexation, the Muslim paramilitary force Razakars, led by former Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen leader Qasim Razvi, were wreaking havoc in the state while the last Nizam of Hyderabad attempted to stay as an independent ruler. Narayana Reddy on Monday, October 30, met Chief Election Officer Vikas Raj, stating that there were “rumours” that his movie would be banned.
“This is to bring to your kind notice that the above movie has been produced only to depict the history, especially what happened during the period between August 15, 1947 and September 17, 1948, till the then Hyderabad state was liberated from the then Razakars who were working under Qasim Razvi, the close confidant of Mir Osman Ali Khan, the 7th Nizam. Through the media we have been hearing and seeing many news (reports) that this movie is being produced to incite communal disturbances as alleged by a few people and groups. As we said above, the movie is just to enlighten the present-day youth of the country with the history. Kindly do not take any hasty decision either to recommend the banning or to stop it from being screened in theaters of Telangana and the rest of India,” he stated in his letter.
However, the narratives and incidents preceding the erstwhile Hyderabad state’s annexation are more complex than the BJP leader’s singular narrative, as Telangana also witnessed a Communist Party of India (CPI)-led peasant armed rebellion against the Jagirdars, or state-appointed revenue collectors. Though right-wing narratives often paint Hyderabad’s last Nizam Osman Ali Khan as an anti-Hindu figure who supported the Razakars, the story is more complicated than that.
The peasant struggle, which liberated thousands of peasant farmers and bonded slave labourers under the Jagirdars, ended only on October 21, 1951, when the CPI called-off the movement and formally joined the India polity.
A more catastrophic event in the aftermath of Operation Polo – the military operation through which Hyderabad was annexed – was the massacre of Muslims in the state. About 26,000 to 40,000 Muslims, as estimated by the Pandit Sunderlal Commission, were reported to have lost their lives in communal violence. It is to be seen if Narayana Reddy’s movie even takes this into account.
The erstwhile Hyderabad state under Osman Ali Khan (1911-48) was one of the largest princely states under the British. It occupied 2,14,158.35 square kilometres of land and comprised 16 districts: eight from all of Telangana, five from present day Maharashtra, and three from present day Karnataka. The state had a population of about 1.6 crore, of whom around 85% were Hindus and about 12% Muslims.
“That was a class struggle in Telangana against the Razakar harassment. Whether it is going to take shape as a Hindu-Muslim contradiction or a class struggle is not fully clear, so I can only decide after watching the film,” said professor E Venkatesu, a faculty member from the University of Hyderabad’s Political Science department.
After the movie’s poster was released, which showed a Brahmin boy being impaled on a spear, Telangana IT minister and working president of the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) said that he would take up the issue (of communal conflagration) with the Central Board of Film Certification. “Some intellectually bankrupt jokers of the BJP are doing their best to instigate communal violence and polarisation for their political propaganda in Telangana. We will take up the matter with the censor board and also the Telangana police to ensure that the law & order situation of Telangana is not affected (sic),” he posted on X (formerly Twitter).