Last Nizam (9781742626109)

by Zubrzycki, John

  Of the 562 princely states in pre-Independence India, only Hyderabad, Kashmir and Junagadh held out from joining the Indian Union. Junagadh, in what is now Gujarat, was ruled by an eccentric nawab with a passion for dogs. He married his favourite bitch Roshana with a handsome golden retriever named Bobby in a state ceremony attended by 50,000 guests. Like Hyderabad, a Muslim minority ruled over a mainly Hindu population, but unlike Hyderabad it did not possess the resources to go it alone. Egged on by Pakistan’s new Governor-General, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Junagadh’s ruler acceded to Pakistan. But the switch was short-lived. Angered by their ruler’s unilateral declaration, the Hindu population rose in revolt. The canine-crazy nawab fled the state. When on 8 November 1947 the State Council asked India to intervene to prevent the situation from descending into chaos, New Delhi was only too happy to send in its troops.

  The situation in Hyderabad was far more complicated. As Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in July 1948, out of the 52 member states of the UN, 20 were smaller than Hyderabad and 16 had lesser incomes. Although it lacked a seaport, Hyderabad was rich in resources such as coal, iron ore and cotton. ‘The Nizam clung vainly, but not perhaps without some justification, to the belief that special treatment must be accorded to the premier state,’ the Nizam’s constitutional advisor Sir Walter Monckton would later recall. But it would have been better if he ‘had been prepared to enter the arena to assume the leadership his position demanded’.15

  Monckton, who represented the interests of King Edward VIII and his future American wife during the Abdication Crisis of 1936, would play a key role as a mediator between the Nizam and the British Government in the lead-up to India’s independence and its aftermath. Like Mason he was drawn to Hyderabad like a moth to a candle, fascinated by its Mughal culture, its eccentric ruler and its beautiful First Lady. Durrushehvar ‘was in many ways the most remarkable person in Hyderabad, a woman tranquil yet resolute, whose personality dominated any room she entered.’16 She looked as though ‘she might have stepped out of a picture by Edmund Dulac’, Monckton wrote in his private papers. ‘I learned from her what everyone must learn who has Muslim friends – how unnecessary it is to talk just for the sake of talking, and that there is no unfriendliness, and should be no awkwardness or embarrassment in silence.’17

  Monckton was taken in equal measure by the Nizam, whom he described as a ‘short, spare and bent man . . . with narrow shoulders [who] leaned on a crooked brown stick’. He had an ‘unkempt brown moustache over carious teeth, and a pale thin face from which the eyes stared inquisitively and aggressively at strangers’. The hands, although they shook, were ‘exquisite’. Slender and bony, they reminded him in their elegance ‘of those of an artist or sculptor’. As for the Nizam’s clothes they were:

  . . . indeed ancient and disreputable, their extreme shabbiness somehow shocking in so mighty a Prince, for he wore a soiled fez and sherwani . . . often left open at the neck, a scrawny necktie which, except in the hottest weather, was muffled in a moth-eaten khaki scarf. Beneath the sherwani protruded a pair of dirty off-white jodhpur trousers, under which yellow socks adorned with clocks sagged round the ankles. The Nizam’s feet were encased in bedroom slippers of the same colour and general antiquity.18

  Nevertheless, Monckton could see that the Nizam was by no means a negligible figure:

  The Nizam dominated the room, filling it with his vast authority, and barking out staccato interruptions, questions or comments in fluent but bizarre English. When the name of some despised Indian leader entered the conversation he described him contemptuously as a ‘half-penny, two-penny man’. There were moments when he seemed to be overcome by a rich amusement, and then a loud, metallic laugh would escape him, and he would give his right leg a hard slap. At moments of anger or excitement he would shout in a voice so tremendous that it could have been heard fifty yards away.19

  Monckton found him to be ‘a man of enlightenment and culture, a poet in Persian and Urdu, and one who deserved the gratitude of posterity for his work in preserving the monuments of Ajanta’. He was also touched by the Nizam’s ‘loyalty to his family, and to the swarm of dependants and ageing concubines who had become his pensioners and were never abandoned or allowed to go in want . . . Although himself living like an anchorite, he was compassionate and generous in his relations with others.’

  Monckton believed Hyderabad had a right to its independence, and after being hired by the Nizam in 1946 worked feverishly to extract the best possible deal for the state. At the same time he knew independence was impossible. He kept reminding the Nizam that his state was landlocked and that he was a Muslim prince ruling over a Hindu majority. Moreover, he had no control over its defence, foreign relations, or even its railways.

  ‘It was an embarrassing part of my task throughout to try to persuade the British to keep faith with their “Faithful Ally”,’ he would write later.

  But above all, in a country and a State peculiarly unwilling to face facts and escape from a world of fantasy, it was constantly in my mind that I must make them see reality even when it was unpleasant for me to assert and for them to hear. In particular, I had constantly to say that, in spite of the treaties, Great Britain would not come to preserve their independence – an independence to which in theory I have always thought they had a clear right – by force of arms, but would eventually, in spite of all the protestations, leave them to their fate.20

  When Monckton was rehired in 1946 he found the Nizam living in an ivory tower. ‘The inhabitant of an unreal world, he never left Hyderabad city, and saw none of his ministers except the President.’21 Despite the many palaces at the Nizam’s disposal, Monckton was given an office he described as:

  . . . an excessively mean and squalid little room with two decrepit swivel chairs, two or three kitchen chairs, and two old tables which serve as desks. There are two or three poor old wooden cupboards, an antique safe, and, apart from a few boxes, a pile of dusty letters and documents, no further furnishings. There are cobwebs which always catch my eye hanging down from the dirty ceiling to the still dirtier wall near the window.22

  The man who had been entrusted with the fate of India’s premier princely state had working for him ‘two or three even more dilapidated clerks’ who were able to overhear ‘all the secrets shouted by the Ruler’. ‘It is a preposterous set up and the President tells me that the Nizam’s private apartments, a bedroom (in which his daughter aged 40 also sleeps) and a thatched veranda outside, are more untidy and inadequate. The bottles, cigaretteends and odds and ends, he tells me, are only removed once a year on the Nizam’s birthday.’23

  The comical nature of the conditions under which Monckton worked were in stark contrast with the deadly serious game of bluff and counter-bluff the Nizam was engaged in. On 3 June 1947 the Nizam issued a farman declaring his intention to resume the status of an independent sovereign when India was granted its independence. He then wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, objecting to Clause Seven of the India Independence Bill, which the Nizam said contained ‘not only the unilateral repudiation of the treaties binding his State and dynasty to the Crown, but also seemed to him to contemplate that, unless he joined one or other of the new Dominions, his State would no longer be part of the British Commonwealth’.24

  On 11 July Monckton travelled to Delhi as part of a delegation comprising the Prime Minister, the Nawab of Chhatari, the Home Minister, Ali Yavar Jung, and one representative each from Hyderabad’s Hindu and Muslim communities. Monckton’s proposal, to which the Nizam agreed, was for Hyderabad to enter into a treaty with the Union of India under which the latter would be responsible for Hyderabad’s foreign relations, defence and communications. The delegates met with Mountbatten, Sir Conrad Corfield and V. P. Menon representing the State Department, but the talks bogged down over the question of accession, which India insisted on. The Nizam wanted a treaty governing relations between the two states. With negotiations at an impasse, Menon suggested the drafting of a ‘Standst
ill Agreement’ to allow time for further negotiations.

  On 25 October the Nizam gave his oral consent to the Standstill Agreement and promised to sign it the next day. But he procrastinated and in the early hours of 28 October thousands of Razvi’s supporters surrounded the houses of Monckton, the Nawab of Chhatari and another delegate, Sir Sultan Ahmed. As the police stood by, the mob threatened to burn down their houses unless the Nizam promised to jettison the agreement. When the Nizam conferred with the delegates later that day, Razvi burst into the meeting and called for the agreement to be torn up and for fresh negotiations with Delhi. Monckton and the other members of the delegation immediately submitted their resignations. The show of force, which some observers likened to a coup d’état, was a defining moment for Razvi and the Nizam. Razvi now realised the power he had over the masses. The Nizam recognised he could no longer have it all his own way. ‘He had to carry the people with him, which meant he had to take their popular leaders into confidence,’ Laik Ali later wrote.25

  Monckton was bitterly disappointed. ‘When the acid test of his rule came his statesmanship was to fail him and be replaced by a tendency to intrigue in the face of danger, by a fatal vacillation and an inability to accommodate himself to new and threatening conditions so different from the unchallenged supremacy he had exercised for more than 30 years.’26 But Razvi’s was a pyrrhic victory. When a new delegation, this time composed mainly of Razvi’s men, met with Mountbatten he refused to change a single word, and in the end the Standstill Agreement was signed unaltered on 27 November 1947. The agreement effectively froze the status quo that existed at the time, and denied India the right to send or keep troops in Hyderabad.

  Both sides knew that the Standstill Agreement was little more than an opportunity to buy time and build up their forces for the inevitable confrontation. Hyderabad’s greatest handicap was the lack of arms. When negotiations on the Agreement were reaching their final stage, the commander of Hyderabad’s army, General El Edroos, was asked by Monckton how long his forces could hold out against a full-blown Indian attack. He replied, ‘Not more than four days,’ at which point the Nizam interrupted and said: ‘Not more than two.’27 Landlocked and surrounded by hostile Indian territory, Hyderabad seemed a lost cause until a lanky, blue-eyed Australian became its unlikely hero.

  The son of an outback cattle king from Queensland, Sidney Cotton was a skilled pilot who had flown combat missions over Germany in World War I. Between the wars he became one of the pioneers of colour photography and was later recruited by MI6 to fly aerial reconnaissance missions over military sites in Germany and Italy. Posing as a businessman, he met Goering and other high-ranking Nazis and took them for joyrides while secretly filming German airfields, bridges and fortifications. After the war he participated in several failed business ventures, including buying mothballed DC-3s from Italy and surplus road-making equipment in Calcutta.

  Cotton had no idea when he arrived in Hyderabad in January 1948 to investigate importing groundnuts into the United States that he was about to make millions of pounds as a gunrunner for the richest man in the world. By now, India’s unofficial economic blockade was beginning to bite and Hyderabad was looking increasingly vulnerable. To Cotton, applying sanctions against a ‘friendly and defenceless state’ was ‘a brutal act of aggression’. ‘All around me I could see the evidence of a well run country, operating under difficulties because of Indian illegal blockade and looking to its old ally Britain apparently in vain. The more I thought about it the more indignant I became and I knew very well what I had to do.’28

  When Cotton was taken to meet Laik Ali, Hyderabad’s newly appointed Prime Minister seemed resolved to take all possible steps to save his country. ‘I asked him if his government was prepared to spend £20 million to remain free,’ Cotton later wrote. ‘You need not ask that question,’ Laik Ali replied. ‘The cost will not be counted.’29 Cotton agreed to supply 500 tonnes of machineguns, grenades, mortars and anti-aircraft guns. He bought five second-hand Lancaster bombers that had been converted into civilian aircraft for £5000 each and hired eight 3-man crews.

  El Edroos gave Cotton letters to Pakistani officials asking them to assist by giving landing facilities. The contract was finalised at the office of Hyderabad’s Agent General in Karachi on 27 May and the flights started on 4 June. Arms and ammunition were always described as fruit and vegetables and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns as cheese. Quoting secret intelligence, India’s Ministry for External Affairs reported in late July that ‘gun running had become an almost daily matter. The planes were said to be landing at Bidar, Warangal and Adilabad. They were said to be coming from Goa where arms and ammunition and other machinery were being removed from Karachi.’30

  The Goan connection turned out to be false. In 1947 the Nizam had toyed with the idea of buying Goa from Portugal in order to procure a seaport for landlocked Hyderabad. Cotton had been seen by Indian spies in Goa earlier in the same year inspecting sunken German ships in the harbour and negotiating a contract to salvage them. India’s intelligence network had linked the two events, but had come to the wrong conclusion.

  In reality, Cotton’s aircraft always took off at night and flew a circuitous route from Karachi across the Arabian Sea before entering Goan airspace and then crossing Indian territory. Guided by radio beacons, the pilots then made for one of three disused airfields, where a plane-spotter would illuminate the runway with kerosene flare paths on hearing aircraft approaching. The flights infuriated the Indians, who lacked aircraft that could fly high enough and fast enough to intercept the Lancasters. Cotton was deliberately provocative, on one occasion sending a radio message to Jawaharlal Nehru asking, ‘Where are your Tempests?’.31 In Karachi he told Sri Prakasha, the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan: ‘The Hyderabadis treat me very well, and so I like them.’32

  To his dismay, Mountbatten discovered in mid-March that plans had been drawn up by the Indian Government for a military invasion of Hyderabad codenamed ‘Operation Polo’. When he questioned Nehru, the Prime Minister insisted that it was no more than a contingency plan in case of a massacre of Hindus in Hyderabad, but Mountbatten was not convinced and told Nehru that if an invasion were to take place he would take ‘an extremely poor view of any such action’.33

  Mountbatten now applied the best of his negotiating skills to try to work out a settlement with the Nizam’s government. It was tough going. When Laik Ali remonstrated that the Nizam would rather be shot than accede to India, Mountbatten retorted: ‘If Hyderabad was occupied by an Armoured Division there would be very little shooting.’34

  With time for reaching a compromise agreement fast running out, Mountbatten invited the Nizam to New Delhi for consultations. The Nizam declined and proposed that Mountbatten visit Hyderabad. Mountbatten also declined and instead sent his Press Attaché, Alan Campbell-Johnson. The report of Campbell-Johnson’s three-day mission in May 1948 provides an extraordinary insight into the state of mind of the main players in Hyderabad.

  The interview with the Nizam ‘was not a particularly easy one to handle in view of the Nizam’s somewhat disconcerting appearance and manner, but as an opportunity to study his personality and mind it was revealing’, Campbell-Johnson wrote in his report. The Nizam was in a mood of ‘aggressive fatalism’ and was ‘ready to perform a “Samson Act” on the Government of India. In other words, if he goes under, full preparations have been made to ensure that the political and social structure of the State should go under with him. On the other hand, the Nizam is searching furtively and anxiously for an honourable settlement.’ The interview left Campbell-Johnson with the impression that he had been lectured to ‘by an eccentric elderly Professor on his special subject. He is a Prince of the old school – arrogant and narrow, but on his home ground formidable.’35

  Campbell-Johnson then went to the office of Razakar leader Kasim Razvi, whom he described as ‘a complete fanatic’. ‘He looks at you with eyes that bore holes into you, but one cannot help feeling that
there is about him a streak of absurdity and charlatanism which makes it difficult to take him completely seriously, even while he is talking, and one gets the firm impression that his megalomania has far outrun his real power. In appearance he is a mixture of Charlie Chaplin and a minor prophet.’ He was equally unimpressed with Mukarram’s father Azam Jah, who was unable to offer anything but small talk. ‘Perhaps the most amusing moment occurred when we were discussing the Governor-General’s capabilities; we all agreed that the Governor-General was a man of great determination and energy and the Private Secretary, almost doubling over His Highness, said: “In these respects he is extremely like Your Highness.”’36

  By now, patience was running out on both sides. The Indian Government was protesting about Cotton’s airlifts. In a desperate bid to broaden his support base the Nizam took the unprecedented step in early May of lifting the ban on the Communist Party, which was stoking the largest and most successful peasant uprising in Asia outside of China largely as a reaction to the feudal structure of Hyderabad state. Hundreds of villages refused to obey their landlords’ orders, supply forced labour or pay taxes and rent. The ruling class was almost entirely made up of nobles who owned about one-third of the land and did not pay any taxes. From among the nobles just over 10 families received an income of 100 million rupees, or about half the state budget. The Nizam’s estates comprised some five million acres and yielded an estimated daily income of 400,000 rupees. The one and a half million peasants working on these estates were ‘for all practical purposes slaves’, wrote Indian journalist Romesh Tharpar in 1948. He described the Nizam as ‘the cornerstone of this noble and awe-inspiring squeeze machine’.37

  The lifting of the ban on the Communist Party set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi. The Nizam had instructed its cadres to resist the Indian Army if Hyderabad was invaded. Nehru was afraid that Hyderabad would become ‘India’s Manchuria’ and a base for operations against its own regime, but he was still hesitant to unseat the Nizam, fearing that if India invaded Hyderabad, Razvi’s Razakars would start killing Hindus. This could lead to massacres by Hindus against Muslims such as those that had accompanied Partition.