alternate histories: why hyderabad 1948 compels a fresh examination of india's national theologies

7/29/2019 Alternate Histories: Why Hyderabad 1948 Compels a Fresh Examination of India's National Theologies

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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-ayodhyatogadia


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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/


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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.pdf


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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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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 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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19

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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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 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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21

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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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 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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24

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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26

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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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 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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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 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.htm


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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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30

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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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 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

thi t f

alternate histories: why hyderabad 1948 compels a fresh examination of india's national theologies

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