Continuing our Deccan Series in collaboration with the Khidki Collective, this set of six articles presents alternative perspectives on the 1948 Police Action in Hyderabad. These perspectives challenge, modify, add nuance to the mainstream narrative of Hyderabad’s integration as ‘liberation’, a narrative currently used to further divisive politics.
The 75th anniversary of the Police Action in Hyderabad calls for a sombre reflection on what happens when emotions take over communities and reason is thrown to the wind. This exercise becomes even more important as politicians and other opportunists try to convert a tragedy into a source of electoral polarisation. Hyderabad in 1948 was much more complex than what is understood popularly. A closer look at the events of the period reveals that the experience of Police Action was determined by caste, social class, and other identities.
One of the recent films, Razakar, might surpass other films in terms of demonising Muslims but this propagandistic representation has historical antecedents in the period of 1947-48 when the state was demonised as a cancer and a ‘diseased limb’. To get an accurate picture of the events, we need to turn to sources like the once-suppressed Pandit Sundarlal Committee Report. Led by the freedom fighter and Gandhian Pandit Sundarlal, the report is remarkable for its attention to detail and dispassionate commentary. Despite its overly cautious tone, the report was long suppressed, and its mere mention in an obscure journal by Yunus Saleem, a lawyer turned politician who was a part of Pandit Sunderlal’s team, was enough to create ripples in the Parliament more than three decades after the Police Action. The final report only came to light ten years ago when researchers discovered a copy at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. The report provides much-needed context and nuance.
In the first phase, coinciding with the 1947 partition, the Hindus of the state were at the receiving end of Razakar violence and this needs to be acknowledged without exaggeration. The Sundarlal Report states, “Razakar atrocities chiefly consisted in levying monthly amounts on every town and village. Wherever these amounts were willingly paid there was generally no further trouble. But at places they were resisted, loot followed. If there was further resistance, then murder and in some instances, rape followed.”
It needs to be mentioned that ‘Razakars’ became a catch-all phrase for any violent activity conducted in the area. Robbers, neighbourhood toughs, debt collectors and other actors conducted violent raids in the garb of Razakar. Without undermining the severity of the Razakar atrocities, the actions of these other groups and individuals should also be scrutinised.
Read: How Telugu cinema has been distorting the history of Telangana rebellion
The implication that all of Hyderabad’s Muslims were involved in the Razakar violence is also erroneous on multiple counts. Most did not engage or assist in the violence against Hindus even while they wanted Hyderabad to remain independent. Even the premier Muslim organisation, the Majlis Ittehad ul Muslimeen, was divided on the course of action despite the vice-like grip of Qasim Razvi. It was divided into at least three different factions and two of them advocated peaceful but conditional integration into the Indian Union.
The claims of Razvi-led Ittehad as the leader of all Muslims of Hyderabad was challenged even during the heady days of 1947-48. The Communist leader and poet, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, in a banned (and recently re-discovered) book Hyderabad, claimed that the party only represented two thousand land-owning families, high-ranking officials and capitalists and cannot be considered as representative of all the Muslim communities. Maqdoom cited statistics to show that the economic plight of Hyderabad’s 20 lakh common Muslims was no different than that of their Hindu compatriots. There are many more examples demonstrating that Razvi’s influence on the Muslim community was by no means a done deal. Spiritual leaders, intellectuals, and civil society members disapproved of his actions and it sometimes led to violence. In 1947 and 1948, Razakars clashed frequently with Arabs in the districts, and the violence even spilled over into the capital city.
On the other hand, some of Razvi’s closest friends and confidants were middle-class Hindus— many of them from his hometown Latur and surrounding areas. His family physician was a Hindu lady who stood behind his family like a rock when everyone else abandoned them. Narendra Chapalgaonkar, retired judge and biographer of Swami Ramananda Theertha, throws further light on Razvi’s personal relations with Hindus in his The Last Nizam and His People (Routledge, 2022). He writes: “In the public mind, Razvi’s image is that of a villain. Doubtless, he instigated thousands to violence by his inflammatory rhetoric, but he personally does not appear to have wielded any weapon to do violence. This, of course, is the usual pattern of behaviour of such people. But otherwise, ironically, Razvi was not a cruel or violent man in his behaviour. He was just like any ordinary person, interacting with others normally. Vasudevrao Phatak, the editor of the only long-lasting Marathi weekly in the State, Nizam Vijay, has written that during the peak of the Razakar movement, Razvi used to come to his office and jovially ask for tea.”
A careful study of the Pandit Sundarlal Committee Report, contemporary Urdu newspaper accounts, and eyewitness accounts reveals that the impact of the Police Action differed significantly. Geographic and social space location mattered. The only constant was that all Muslims were impacted in some way. The violent retribution during and after Police Action that Muslims faced was greatly disproportionate and the victims often had no role to play in the violence. They were held guilty for mere religious affiliation. To quote Pandit Sundarlal’s report again, “At least a hundred Muslims were made to suffer for the sins of each guilty individual…In many places, we were shown wells still full of corpses that were rotting. In one such, we counted 11 bodies which included that of a woman with a small child sticking to her breasts.”
All Muslims in the border districts and areas of Razakar activities met with severe violence. In Latur, the hometown of Qasim Razvi and a major business centre, for instance, the killing continued for over twenty days. The main targets were Kutchi Memon Muslim merchant families. This even though they remained apolitical before and after the Police Action. In almost all districts of the state, Muslims were ruined financially. They were summarily dismissed from their jobs, their businesses destroyed, and a concerted effort was made to force them out of India.
Also read: Razakars came in the day, ‘they’ at night: Telangana women recall the police action
Those migrating to Pakistan did not exactly find a welcome mat either. Pakistan’s Interior Ministry patted itself on the back for the success of its permit system which “was introduced just in time to save Pakistan from what would have been a deluge from the Hyderabad state.” It warned that if the permit was removed the country may be faced “with a delicate security problem and a more delicate refugee problem entailing far more serious expenditure than any permit system could invoice.” (Cited in Vazira Zamindar’s The Long Partition and the Making of the Modern South Asia. Columbia University Press, 2007).
The impact of the violent Police Action on the creative classes was devastating irrespective of their faith. Ghazal singers Rauf and Vithal Rao felt a similar loss of patronage under the new regime. Poets, writers, translators, and others experienced a sudden loss of income. Many spent months and years getting them reinstated. One of the luckier ones was the Lucknow-based scholar and journalist Abdul Majid Daryabadi. His Hyderabad state pension was stopped in October 1950 without any explanation. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad tried to get it reinstated by writing several letters to concerned officials to no avail. It was only reinstated after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru personally intervened in 1951. Having political connections helped but only to a certain degree. The pension amount for Abdul Majid was reduced to Rs 125 per month from the original Rs 200.
Despite the hopeless situation that the Hyderabadi Muslims were caught in, many instances of fraternity have been documented. At the height of the Razakar movement, Muslims stood up for their Hindu neighbours and ensured that no harm came to them. The mashaikh, Sufi spiritual leaders, were instrumental in this regard. During and after the Police Action, Hindus defended their Muslim neighbours sometimes at the cost of their own lives. Pandit Sunderlal Report cites the instances of Hindu weavers defending Muslim weavers. Similarly, Hyderabad’s Hindus in many places helped in the recovery of Muslim women from their abductors. It is these stories of communal amity and necessary nuance which need to be highlighted as we approach the election year.
Mohammed Ayub Khan is a researcher of South Asian Muslim politics and history. His special areas of interest are public administration, affirmative action, social cohesion, and constitutional provisions for religious minorities. Views expressed here are the author’s own.
The Khidki Collective is a network of scholars committed to building public dialogue on history, politics, and culture. This series has been curated by Yamini Krishna, Swathi Shivanand, and Pramod Mandade of the collective.