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September 17, 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the accession of Hyderabad to independent India. This day in 1948 brought to a close a year-long story of tall claims, dithering, and violence that threatened to make the rich Deccan province a “cancer in the belly of India”, in the words of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
Why did Hyderabad’s Nizam not join India in August 1947, like most other princely states? What made Hyderabad so significant that Patel dealt with it cautiously? What was the role of razakars, and why were peasant movements active against the Nizam? Here’s a brief history.
August 1947: the season of independence
As the British prepared to leave India, liberating — and dividing — the land they had ruled for close to 200 years, the question of the 500-odd princely states so far under British control arose. The provinces were given the option of joining either India or Pakistan, or remaining independent. While most provinces on the Indian side of the border acceded, some harboured dreams of independence. Most significant among these were Jammu and Kashmir in the North, and Hyderabad in the south.
Founded in 1713, Hyderabad in 1947 was a large province, comprising present-day Telangana and parts of Karnataka and Maharashtra. Its ruler, the seventh Nizam Mir Usman Ali, was then the richest man on the planet. He was also the Muslim ruler of a Hindu-majority state, but not just any Muslim ruler. His personal wealth and the prestige of his province made him an important figure in the Muslim world. The Nizam’s sons were married to the daughter and niece of the deposed Caliph of Ottoman, Abdulmejid II, who even wanted his daughter’s heir to succeed him as the Caliph.
Mir Usman Ali had also contributed generously to the British coffers during the World Wars, and he believed he could persuade the English crown to recognise and support his state as an independent entity.
To plead his case, he employed a prominent English lawyer, Sir Walter Monckton, who also happened to be a friend of the last viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Monckton told Mountbatten that if India pushed Hyderabad too much, the Nizam would join Pakistan. Historian Rmchandra Guha writes in his book India After Gandhi that from Pakistan’s side, Muhammad Ali Jinnah “had gone so far as to tell Lord Mountbatten — erroneously — that if the Congress ‘attempted to exert any pressure on Hyderabad, every Muslim throughout the whole of India, yes, all the hundred million Muslims, would rise as one man to defend the oldest Muslim dynasty in India’.”
Sardar Patel moved patiently with Hyderabad. In November 1947, India and Hyderabad signed a stand-still agreement, which meant ties between India and the state would continue as they had under the British. Meanwhile, negotiations continued.
While the state actors — KM Munshi from India’s side and dewan Mir Laik Ali from Hyderabad — were negotiating, a revolt against the Nizam’s rule had been brewing within the province. As early as on August 7, 1947, as Bipan Chandra and others write in India Since Independence, the Hyderabad State Congress had launched a satyagraha for democracy in the province. In the rural areas, a Communist-led peasant movement, against large landholdings, forced labour and excessive tax collection, was gaining strength.
In the midst of this, an outfit meant to cement the Nizam’s position was getting more violent.
The Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen had started off as a political outfit to demand greater say for Muslims, but after Qasim Razvi, a close aide of the Nizam, took over, it gained a communal and extremist tinge. Razvi also set up, with state support, a paramilitary called ‘razakars’, who began brutally attacking opponents of the Nizam.
Sardar Patel was fast losing patience. In June 1948, he wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru: “I feel very strongly that a stage has come when we should tell them quite frankly that nothing short of unqualified acceptance of accession and of introduction of undiluted responsible government would be acceptable to us.”
But the government still tried to make the accession happen peacefully through talks. Meanwhile, more and more arms were being brought into Hyderabad.
Eventually, on September 13, 1948, the Indian Army was sent to Hyderabad under Operation Polo. In three days, the Nizam’s forces surrendered. On the night of September 17, the Nizam made a public address on the radio, banning the razakars. Six days later, he made another address, in which Guha quotes him as saying that Razvi and his men had taken “possession of the state through Hitlerite methods while he had been “anxious to come to an honourable settlement with India”.
For India, the accession of Hyderabad was not just a huge problem solved, but also a triumph of the secularism the Indian state stood for.
Bipan Chandra and others quote Patel as writing, “On the question of Hyderabad, the Indian Union Muslims have come out in the open on our side and that has certainly created a good impression in the country.”
