India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  Ten days later Sir Shah Nawaz informed the Indian government that he would like to hand over the administration of Junagadh. The formal transfer took place on 9 November. Back in Delhi, however, Mount-batten was cross that he had not been consulted before the territory was taken over. Partly to placate him, but also to establish its own legitimacy, the Indians then organized a plebiscite. A referendum held on 20 February 1948 resulted in 91 per cent of the electorate voting for accession to India.43

  VI

  The state of Hyderabad also had a Muslim ruler and a mostly Hindu population; but it was a prize greater by far than Bhopal or Junagadh. The state ran right across the Deccan plateau, in the centre of the subcontinent. Its area was in excess of 80,000 square miles, and its population more than 16 million, these distributed among three linguistic zones: Telugu, Kannada and Marathi. Hyderabad was surrounded by Central Provinces in the north, by Bombay in the west, and by Madras in the south and east. Although landlocked, it was self-sufficient in food, cotton, oilseed, coal and cement. Petrol and salt, however, had to be imported from British India.

  Hyderabad began life as a Mughal vassal state in 1713. Its ruler was conventionally known as the Nizam. Eighty-five per cent of its population was Hindu, but Muslims dominated the army, police and civil service. The Nizam himself owned about 10 per cent of the land of the state; much of the rest was controlled by large landowners. From his holdings the ruler earned Rs25 million a year in rent, while another Rs5 million were granted him from the state treasury. There were some very rich nobles, but the bulk of the Muslims, like the bulk of the Hindus, worked as factory hands, artisans, labourers and peasants.44

  In power in 1946–7 was the seventh Nizam, Mir Usman Ali, who had ascended to the throne as far back as 1911. He was one of the richest men in the world, but also one of the most miserly. He rarely wore new clothes, his preferred mode of dress being an un-ironed pyjama and shirt and a faded fez. He ‘generally drove in an old, rattling, tin-pot of a car, a 1918 model; he never offered any kind of hospitality to a visitor’.45

  This Nizam was determined to hang on to more than his personal wealth. What he wanted for his state, when the British left, was independence, with relations forged directly between him and the Crown. To help him with his case he had employed Sir Walter Monckton, a King’s Counsel and one of the most highly regarded lawyers in England. (Among Monckton’s previous clients was King Edward VIII, whom he had advised during his abdication.) For the Englishman’s services the Nizam was prepared to pay a packet: as much as 90,000 guineas a year, it was rumoured. In a meeting with the viceroy, Monckton ‘emphasized that His Exalted Highness would have great difficulty in taking any course likely to compromise his independent sovereignty’. When Mountbatten suggested that Hyderabad should join the Constituent Assembly, the Nizam’s lawyer answered that if India pressed too hard his client might ‘seriously consider the alternative of joining Pakistan’.46

  The Nizam’s ambitions, if realized, would virtually cut off the north of India from the south. And, as the constitutional expert Reginald Coupland pointed out, ‘India could live if its Moslem limbs in the northwest and north-east were amputated, but could it live without its midriff?’ Sardar Patel put it more directly, saying that an independent Hyderabad constituted a ‘cancer in the belly of India’.47

  In this face-off between the Nizam and the government of India, each side had a proxy of its own. The Indians had the Hyderabad State Congress, formed in 1938, which pressed hard for representative government with in the state. The Nizam had the Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen, which wished to safeguard the position of Muslims in administration and politics. Another important actor was the Communist Party of India, which had a strong presence in the Telengana region of the state.

  In 1946–7 all three voices grew more strident. The State Congress demanded that Hyderabad fall into line with the rest of India. Its leaders organized street protests, and courted arrest. Simultaneously, the Ittihad was being radicalized by its new leader, Kasim Razvi, an Aligarh-trained lawyer and a passionate believer in the idea of ‘Muslim pride’. Under Razvi the Ittihad had promoted a paramilitary body called the ‘Razakars’, whose members marched up and down the roads of Hyderabad, carrying swords and guns.48

  In the countryside, meanwhile, there was a rural uprising led and directed by the communists. Across Telengana large estates were confiscated and redistributed to land-hungry peasants. The insurrectionists first seized all holdings in excess of 500 acres, bringing the limit down successively to 200 and then 100 acres. They also abolished the institution of forced labour. In the districts of Nalgonda, Warangal and Karimnagar the communists ran what amounted to aparallel government. More than 1,000 villages were ‘practically freed from the Nizam’s rule’.49

  On 15 August the national flag was hoisted by Congress workers in different parts of Hyderabad state. The offenders were arrested and taken off to jail.50 On the other side the Razakars grew more truculent. They affirmed their support for the Nizam’s declaration of independence, and printed and distributed handbills which proclaimed: ‘Free Hyderabad for Hyderabadis’ and ‘No pact with the Indian Union’.51

  The Nizam’s ambitions were encouraged by the Conservative Party in Britain. Sir Walter Monckton was himself a prominent Tory and he had written to his party leaders to support his client’s case. Monckton claimed the Congress practised a kind of ‘power politics’ that was an ‘exact replica of those in which Hitler and Mussolini indulged’. Since Mountbatten was hand-in-glove with Nehru and Patel, it was up to the Tories to ‘see to it that if this shameful betrayal of our old friends and allies cannot be prevented, at least it does not go uncastigated before the conscience of the world’.52

  To see the Nizam’s Hyderabad as Poland and the Congress as the equivalent to Hitler’s Nazis boggles the imagination. Even Winston Churchill allowed himself to be persuaded of the analogy, perhaps because he had along standing dislike for Mahatma Gandhi. Speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill argued that the British had a ‘personal obligation . . . not to allow a state, which they had declared a sovereign state, to be strangled, starved out or actually overborne by violence’. The party’s rising star, R. A. Butler, weighed in on Churchill’s side, saying that Britain should press for the ‘just claims of Hyderabad to remain independent’.53

  The Nizam, and more so the Razakars, also drew sustenance from the support to their cause from Pakistan. Jinnah had gone so far as to tell Lord Mountbatten 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’.54

  The Nizam now said he would sign a treaty with India, but not an Instrument of Accession. In late November 1947 he agreed to sign a ‘Stand still Agreement’, under which the arrangements forged between Hyderabad and the British Raj would be continued with its successor government. This bought both parties time; the Nizam to reconsider his bid for independence, the Indians to find better ways of persuading him to accede.

  Under this agreement, the Nizam and the Indian government deputed agents to each other’s territory. The Indian agent was K. M. Munshi, a trusted ally of Vallabhbhai Patel. In November the Nizam had appointed a new dewan, Mir Laik Ali, who was a wealthy businessman and a known Pakistan sympathizer. Laik Ali offered some Hindu representation in his government, but it was seen by the State Congress as a case of too little, too late. In any case, by now the real power had passed on to the Razakars and its leader, Kasim Razvi. By March 1948 the membership of the Ittihad had reached a million, with a tenth of these being trained in arms. Every Razakar had taken avow in the name of Allah to ‘fight to the last to maintain the supremacy of Muslim power in the Deccan’.55

  In April 1948 a correspondent of The Times of London visited Hyderabad. He interviewed Kasim Razvi, and found him to be a ‘fanatical demagogue with great gifts of organization. As a “rabble-rouser” he is formidable, and eve
n in a tête-à-tête he is compelling.’56 Razvi saw himself as a prospective leader of a Muslim state, a sort of Jinnah for the Hyderabadis, albeit amore militant one. He had a portrait of the Pakistan leader prominently displayed in his room. Razvi told an Indian journalist that he greatly admired Jinnah, adding that ‘whenever I am in doubt I go to him for counsel which he never grudges giving me’.

  Pictures of Razvi show him with a luxuriant beard. He looked ‘rather like an oriental Mephistopheles’.57 His most striking feature was his flashing eyes, ‘from which the fire of fanaticism exudes’. He had contempt for the Congress, saying ‘we do not want Brahmin or Bania rule here’. Asked which side they would take if Pakistan and India clashed, Razvi answered that Pakistan could take care of itself, but added: ‘Wherever Muslim interests are affected, our interest and sympathy will go out. This applies of course to Palestine as well. Even if Muslim interests are affected in hell, our heart will go out in sympathy.’58

  The Razakars saw the Delhi-Hyderabad battle in Hindu–Muslim terms. The Congress, on the other hand, saw it as a clash between democracy and autocracy. In truth, it was a bit of both. Caught in the cross-fire were the citizens of Hyderabad, for whom the months after August 1947 were a time of deep insecurity.59 Some Hindus began fleeing to the adjoining districts of Madras. Meanwhile, Muslims from the Central Provinces were flocking to Hyderabad. Mostly illiterate, these Muslims had heard fearful reports of attacks on their co-religionists in Bengal and Punjab. But they did not seem to realize that in Hyderabad too they would be a minority. Perhaps, as an independent observer put it, ‘these emigrating Muslims have more trust in the Nizam’s troops and Arabs to protect them than in the Union provincial administration’. In turn, these CP Muslims were said to have thrown out Hindus from their houses in Hyderabad, aided by the Nizam’s men. It was even claimed that there was a plan to make Muslims a majority in the state: apparently, Hindu localities of cities such as Aurangabad, Bidar and Hyderabad had come to ‘present a deserted appearance’.60

  Through the spring and summer of 1948 the tension grew. There were allegations of gun-running from Pakistan to Hyderabad – in planes flown by British mercenaries – and of the import of arms from eastern Europe. The prime minister of Madras wrote to Patel saying he found it difficult to cope with the flood of refugees from Hyderabad. K. M. Munshi sent lurid reports of the Nizam’s perfidy, of his ‘fixed idea’ of independence, of his referring to the government of India as ‘the scoundrels of Delhi’, of ‘the venomous propaganda being carried out day and night through speeches, Nizam’s radio, newspapers, dramas etc., against the Indian Union’.61

  For the moment, the Indians temporized. In June 1948 V. P. Menon and Laik Ali held a series of meetings in Delhi. Menon asked that the state introduce representative government, and promise a plebiscite on accession. Various exceptions were proposed to protect the Nizam’s dignity; these included the retention of troops. None was found acceptable. Meanwhile, the respected former dewan of Hyderabad, Sir Mirza Ismail, attempted to mediate. He advised the Nizam not to take the Hyderabad case to the United Nations (which Laik Ali had threatened to do), to get himself out of the clutches of the Razakars and to accede to India. Hyderabad, he told His Exalted Highness, ‘must realize the weakness of its own position’.62

  On 21 June 1948 Lord Mountbatten resigned from office of governor general. Three days previously he had written to the Nizam urging him to compromise, and go down in history ‘as the peace-maker of South India and as the Saviour of your State, your dynasty, and your people’. If he stuck to his stand, however, he would ‘incur the universal condemnation of thinking people’.63 The Nizam chose not to listen. But, with Mountbatten gone, it became easier for Patel to take decisive action. On 13 September a contingent of Indian troops was sent into Hyderabad. In less than four days they had full control of the state. Those killed in the fighting included forty-two Indian soldiers and two thousand-odd Razakars.

  On the night of the 17th, the Nizam spoke on the radio, his speech very likely written for him by K. M. Munshi. He announced a ban on the Razakars and advised his subjects to ‘live in peace and harmony with the rest of the people in India’. Six days later he made another broadcast, where he said that Razvi and his men had taken ‘possession of the state’ by ‘Hitlerite’ methods and ‘spread terror’. He was, he claimed, ‘anxious to come to an honourable settlement with India but this group . . . got me to reject the offers made by the government of India from time to time . . . ’64

  Whether by accident or design, the Indian action against Hyderabad took place two days after the death of Pakistan’s governor general. Jinnah had predicted that a hundred million Muslims would rise if the Nizam’s state was threatened. That didn’t happen, but in parts of Pakistan feelings ran high. In Karachi a crowd of 5,000 marched in protest to the Indian High Commission. The high commissioner, an old Gandhi an, came out on the street to try to pacify them. ‘You cowards,’ they shouted back, ‘you have attacked us just when our Father has died.’65

  Back in June, a senior Congress leader had told the Nizam that if he made peace with the Union, His Exalted Highness of Hyderabad might even become ‘His Excellency the Ambassador of the whole of India at Moscow or Washington’.66 In the event that offer was not made, perhaps because his dress, or his style of entertainment, or both, did not be hove a diplomatic mission. But he was rewarded for his final submission by being made rajpramukh, or governor, of the new Indian state of Hyderabad.

  Two years after the end of the ancien régime, the Bombay journalist K. A. Abbas visited Hyderabad. He found that in the window of the hundred-year-old photo studio of Raja Deendayal, pictures of the city’s ‘liberator’, Colonel J. N. Chaudhuri of the Indian Army, had eclipsed portraits of the Nizam. Now, in Hyderabad, the white Congress cap was ‘the head-gear of the new ruling class, and inspire[d]the same awe as the conical Asafjahi dastaar (ready-to-wear turban) did before the police action’.67

  VII

  In August 1947 an experienced British official who had served in the subcontinent published an article with the portentous title ‘India and the Future’. British India had just been divided into two new nations, but, the writer asked, ‘will the division stop there?’ Or would the subcontinent break up ‘into innumerable, small, warring States’? Pakistan seemed inherently unstable; there was every chance of its north-western parts becoming an independent ‘Pathanistan'’.Nor was India necessarily more stable. Thus ‘many competent observers believe that [the province of] Madras will ultimately secede into virtual independence'. As for the princely states, the smaller and more vulnerable ones would have no option but to join India. But ‘the big States of the South, however, notably Hyderabad, Mysore and Travancore – are in an altogether different position. They could, if necessary, preserve an independent existence, and the recent threats of the Congress Party are not likely to deter them from deciding this matter solely on consideration of their own advantage.’

  The ‘ultimate pattern of India’, concluded this prophet, ‘is likely to consist of three or four countries in place of British India, together with a Federation of South Indian States. This will be, approximately speaking, are turn to the pattern of sixteenth century India . . .’68

  Given the odds, and the opposition, the integration of these numerous and disparate states was indeed a staggering achievement. The job was so smoothly and comprehensively done that Indians quite quickly forgot that this was once not one country but 500. In 1947 and 1948 the threat of disintegration was very real, what with ‘honey-combs of intrigue’ such as Bhopal and Travancore and ‘strategic points of assault’ such as Hyderabad. But a mere five years after the last maharaja had signed away his land, Indians had ‘come to take integrated India so much for granted that it requires amental effort today even to imagine that it could be different’.69

  The position of the Indian princes in the Indian polity ‘afforded no parallel to or analogy with any institution known in history’. Yet, through ‘peace
ful and cordial negotiations’ the chiefdoms had dissolved themselves, and become ‘hardly distinguishable from the other democratic units comprising the [Indian] Union’.

  The words are from a booklet issued by the government of India in 1950. The self-congratulation was merited. Whereas the British-directed partition of India had exacted such a heavy toll, these 500 ‘centres of feudal autocracy’ had, with little loss of life, been ‘converted into free and democratic units of the Indian Union’. The ‘yellow dots on the map’ that marked these chiefdoms had now ‘disappeared. Sovereignty and power have been transferred to the people’.‘For the first time’, the booklet went on, ‘millions of people, accustomed to living in narrow, secluded groups in the States, became part of the larger life of India. They could now breathe the air of freedom and democracy pervading the whole nation.’

  This being an official booklet, the credit for the job was naturally given to the man in charge. ‘What the British pro-consuls failed to achieve after two centuries of ceaseless efforts’, wrote the publicists, ‘Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel accomplished through his persuasive appeal to the nobler feelings of the Princely Order.’70

  Patel’s guiding hand was indeed wise and sure; another Congress politician, even (or especially) Nehru, might not have supervised the princes’ extinction with such patience and foresight. But he could scarcely have done the job without V. P. Menon, who made hundreds of trips to the chiefdoms, chipping away at their rulers. In turn, Menon could have done little without the officials who effected the actual transition, creating the conditions for financial and social integration with the rest of India.

  In truth, both politicians and bureaucrats had as their indispensable allies the most faceless of all humans: the people. For some decades, the people of the princely states had been clamouring in numbers for the rights granted to the citizens of British India. Many states had vigorous and active praja mandak. The princes were deeply sensible of this; indeed, without the threat of popular protest from below, they would not have ceded power so easily to the Indian government.