The land of Hyderabad
The exercise of forcible conversion was accompanied by a process of “shuddhi” (purification) under which not only Hindu idols were placed in hundreds of mosques but captive Muslims were taken to temples and “sacrificed”
Among the many challenges faced by the post-partition nascent Indian state was the challenge to establish its authority over those who refused to accept it. The princely state of Hyderabad had refused to join the Indian Union and this refusal was taken as an affront to Indian authority and an impediment in its mission to integrate what was left of the subcontinent after partition in 1947. Hyderabad was the richest, largest and most populousof the hundreds of princely states with a viable government that could sustain without India, once the British paramountcy lapsed on 15 August and all power surrendered by Hyderabad to the British, returned to it under the 3 June Partition Plan. To gratify greed, showcase military power and fulfil its ambition of a sovereign greater India, the Indian government resorted to devious means including the shameful inciting of violence and naked military aggression against the state of Hyderabad under the garb of “Police Action” to give an impression to the world as if the issue of the forcible annexation of Hyderabad was an “internal” territorial dispute of the sovereign Indian state especially after theNizam had approached the United Nations to seek global support for “Azad” (independent) Hyderabad.
To justify its military intervention, Premier Nehru and Interior Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel “manufactured” border incidents and engineered destabilisation through the Congress party’s militants in Hyderabad and the adjoining provinces and the Indian press was complicit as a report in the Indian Expresswarned of a “well-laid scheme to massacre, on a vast scale, the Hindus of Hyderabad is almost complete.” There were just twelve percent Muslims in Hyderabad, who were no threat to the large Hindu majority but to “sell” the military action to the Hindu public, the press was used to disseminate factually incorrect and propagandist statements of Congress leaders such as that of Patel, who alleged that the “campaign of murder, arson and loot going on in Hyderabad rouses communal passion in India and jeopardises the peace of the Dominion” whereas the chief minister of the Central Provinces asserted that the “tales of atrocity and woe” of the Hindu refugees from Hyderabad were inflaming the emotions of the fellow Hindus in the neighbouring provinces.
The role of the secular Congress party was quite heinous. With the explicit approval of Patel, the Congress set a “Committee of Action” and “Volunteer” squads to commit acts of sabotage, destroy means of communications, demolish police posts, etc in Hyderabad. On the orders of Nehru, “the Great”, tens of thousands of “Home Guards” were recruited to wage guerrilla warfare inside Hyderabad.
The stage was set for the military action, so, on 13 September 1948, under the command ofMajor-General JN Chaudhuri two infantry brigades and one armored brigade fully backed by the Indian Air Force and augmented by over nine thousand policemen attacked Hyderabad and within a few days overpowered the Hyderabad army and forced the Nizam to surrender and agree to an unconditional accession of his state to the Indian Union.
The subsequent violence in Hyderabad primarily targeted the Muslims in which houses were burned, mosques destroyed, women molested and abducted and men killed. The Muslim community was coerced into submission through a process of intimidation, degradation and humiliation. This was done by compelling them to adopt Hindu faith. The women were either tattooed on the forehead in the orthodox Hindu style or their new Hindu names were tattooed on fore-arms. The men were made to shave off beards, wear sacred threads around their necks and keep “choties.”Even children were not spared as their ears were pierced in the Hindu style.
The exercise of forcible conversion was accompanied by a process of “shuddhi” (purification) under which not only Hindu idols were placed in hundreds of mosques but captive Muslims were taken to temples and “sacrificed” in the sacred precincts whereas according to an intelligence report about fifteen Congress volunteers cut throats of three Muslims and their leader Raghava Reddi drank their blood. In this butchery, the Congress was fully abetted by the rabid Hindu Mahasabha, the radical Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), the reformist Arya Samaj and the liberal Socialist Party. So ferocious was the frenzy that in the Muslim town of Latur, out of a total population of ten thousand, only three thousand survived. This cleansing of the Muslims was a precondition for the fulfilment of the project of Indian nationhood because the “villainous” leaders at the helm of affairs such as Patel considered the Muslims as a source of “veritable poison” and the land of Hyderabad “a cancer in the belly of India” that had to be removed by a “surgical operation” to purify India of the Muslim pollutants.
The horror let loose by Patel “disturbed” the duplicitous Nehru, who realised that the “horrible deeds” and “inhuman atrocities” perpetrated in Hyderabad were akin to the bloodbath in the Punjab and so wrote to Patel that the Hindus had indulged in large-scale killings and the scale of looting was so high that a great number of Muslims had become completely destitute and thus proposed an official enquiry of the carnage. The “Goodwill Mission” set to find facts was headed by Pandit Sunderlal, who had served as Vice President of the Congress in the United Provinces and Qazi Abdul Ghaffar, who was a former editor of a nationalist paper and therefore “more loyal than the king” to the nationalist Congress government. The report of this Mission, known as the Sunderlal Report stated that about 27,000 to 40,000 people lost their lives in this “Police Action” which was a very conservative number as compared to other estimates that put the Muslim death toll to a staggering 200,000. Even such an “eyewash” report was rejected by Patel calling it imbalanced whereas General Chaudhuri dismissed it as the report “full of the grossest inaccuracies as well as dangerous statements” and warned “the danger of such a document getting into the hands of any interested Pakistani;” that is why this report remained hidden for decades till it was unearthed by a researcher Omar Khalidi in 1988. Both Patel and Chaudhuri criticised the report because it put the police department and the army in a bad light by admitting that that there was “absolutely unimpeachable evidence [that] men belonging to the Indian army and also the local police took part in looting and even other crimes.” While in the Punjab, the Muslims were butchered mainly by the Sikhs; in Hyderabad they were massacred by the Hindus and those Hindus who were caught red-handed in the bloodletting were granted full amnesty on the orders of Patel and the tragic aspect is that some of these accused were subsequently rewarded by the Congress by being elevated to high positions such as Phoolchand Gandhi, who was made a minister in the Hyderabad government and P V Narasimha Rao, who ended up becoming the prime minister of India from 1991 to ’96.
The unfortunate memories of partition continue to haunt as the incumbent Indian Premier Narendra Modi has undertaken the construction of the world’s tallest statue to honour the “black memories” of the very Sardar Patel. This statue will be twice as high as the Statue of Liberty in New York and almost 100 feet taller than China’s Spring Temple Buddha which is the tallest statue in the world, today.