On Independence Day, Hyderabad Remained a Vast Hole at the Centre of New India’s Map

As the country waves flags and celebrates the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, it is also time to take stock. What did India’s founders and citizens dream of, how has India fared, what have been our challenges and successes?

The Wire’s reporters and contributors bring stories of the period, of the traumas but also the hopes of Indians, as seen in personal accounts, in culture, in the economy and in the sciences. How did the modern state of India come about, what does the flag represent? How did literature and cinema tackle the trauma of Partition?

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If you were to look at the maps of India published in newspapers on August 15, 1947, it would become immediately obvious that the India we know today did not simply “become” independent on that day, but was, rather, still a work in progress. The Partition was ongoing and unsettled: violence and mass migration were not yet at their peak, and the exact boundaries of the two new nation-states of India and Pakistan had yet to be determined.  Yet there were also blank spots on the maps representing Indian princely states that had yet to accede to either India or Pakistan, and whose ultimate fate remained unclear.

Britain’s Indian Empire consisted, broadly, of “two Indias”: the provinces of British India on the one hand, and, on the other, the more than 500 Indian states, each exercising various degrees of sovereignty. The princely states had long been essential pillars of the Raj’s un-codified imperial constitution and loyal allies and servants of the British Crown. Their sovereignty had been repeatedly recognised by the British and every single constitutional proposal put forth by the British (and, indeed, the Muslim League and the Congress) in the highly consequential decades prior to 1947.

The Indian Independence Act was clear that the new dominions would be formed out of British India alone. At the same time, however, the Act unilaterally revoked all treaties and other relations between the British Crown and the princely states. The princes were informed that the only way they could continue their relationship with the Crown was to accede to either of the new dominions. Seeing the writing on the wall, nearly all of the princes signed on the dotted line in exchange for keeping their private properties. Their states were annexed and subsequently dissolved into the new states of the Indian Union. The Partition, then, inaugurated a process of division as well as one of integration and centralisation.

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In the popular historical imagination, the process of integrating the variegated landscape of the Raj into a coherent national formation is most closely associated with the figure of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. In recent decades, Patel, the “Iron Man” of the Indian National Congress, has been re-cast as a Hindu nationalist icon representing the primacy of national unity above all else. There remains a paradox: Patel is lauded for his role in integrating the princely states into the Indian Union, yet the princely states themselves are rarely attributed with any significant explanatory power (that is, they are generally not seen to have shaped historical developments in any consequential way leading up to and following 1947). In this respect, Patel is credited with solving a problem that many assume would have resolved itself anyway.

In a recent book, I argue that the princely states and ideas of sovereign kingship were central to the context in which the political ideas and institutions that have shaped modern India were forged. In 1947, the princely states became the third front of Partition. In his unapologetic defence of the Partition, the Sardar was unique among the senior leadership of the Congress, even if others like Nehru had, by mid-1947, acquiesced to his logic. “I would make no efforts to explain away the responsibility of the Congress for dividing the country,” Patel declared in a speech on August 11, “I felt convinced that in order to keep India united it must be divided now.”

While the Partition was, and is, seen as a settlement between Hindus and Muslims, Patel’s paradoxical statement reminds us that this settlement was premised on cutting the Indian princely states out of the deal. “A Raja-sthan would have been something worse than Pakistan…if we had not accepted partition, India would have broken into bits.” What made Mountbatten’s partition plan innovative – and acceptable to both the Congress and the League – was Britain’s complete repudiation of the rights of the Indian princes. It is fitting, perhaps, that Britain’s Indian empire, born out of avarice, ended with the betrayal of their most loyal collaborators.

The example of Jammu and Kashmir has provided a lasting reminder of the trajectories that emerged out of this history. But if you were to look at the maps printed in newspapers on August 15, 1947, you would be struck by massive blank spot in the heart of the Deccan: Hyderabad. In response to the announcement of the Partition in June 1947, the Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, issued a royal firman declaring that Hyderabad would not accede to either India or Pakistan: with “the departure of the Paramount Power…I shall be entitled to resume the status of an independent sovereign”.

Also read: Scenes from Hyderabad: The City as a Defiant Space Against Hindutva Politics

Hyderabad was large enough to reasonably claim to be able to stand on its own: it covered 82,698 square miles and had a population of around 17 million (more than any dominion of the British Commonwealth as well as a good number of United Nation member states). The Nizam had dynastic claims dating back more than two centuries, and had long been considered the “premier prince” of Britain’s Indian Empire. He was, in short, considered a sovereign ruler in his own right.

Over the course of the 1930s, Hyderabad, as a Hindu-majority state ruled by a Muslim monarch, featured prominently in nearly every consideration of India’s constitutional dilemma, and especially so among Muslim thinkers and politicians. The Nizam, confident in the historical and legal merits of his claim, was determined enough to take his case all the way to the United Nations Security Council, which conducted hearings on the matter beginning in September 1948. In this respect, Hyderabad’s bid for independence was an event of global significance with significant implications for the newly-established postwar international order. It was covered as such in newspapers around the world.

If the Hyderabad affair was of interest to international audiences, for Indian nationalists it held existential stakes. Hyderabad, Patel noted, was “situated in India’s belly. How can the belly breathe if it is cut off from the main body?” Nehru, ever concerned about India’s “fissiparous tendencies”, saw in Hyderabad the potential for the further partitioning of India, which he had agreed to pay the heavy price of Partition to prevent. Ambedkar, then the law minister in the Union Cabinet, remarked that Hyderabad was a “problem which may turn out to be worse than the Hindu-Muslim problem as it is sure to result in the further Balkanisation of India”.

Internationally, the Indian government led by Nehru was able to convince all the other major players – including the US and USSR – to follow Britain and the Commonwealth in refusing to recognise the Nizam. Domestically, the Indian government took a number of steps to pressure the Nizam to acquiesce and accede.

Hyderabad, completely landlocked, shared a border more than 2,600 miles long with the Indian Union. The Indian Army stationed forces around the state. The governments of the bordering provinces dispatched armed police to the frontier and began raising tens of thousands of home guards to be stationed along the border. The Government of India imposed a near-total blockade on Hyderabad, although it publicly denied doing so.

The national and provincial governments – controlled by the Congress – secretly supported militant cadres from the Congress, Hyderabad State Congress, the Socialist Party, the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha as they waged a violent campaign of sabotage within Hyderabad from base camps on the Indian side of the border. Their aim was to manufacture a “law and order” crisis, which would, in turn, give the Indian government a pretext for a military intervention.

Meanwhile, the Indian press issued a constant stream of reports accusing the Nizam’s government and the paramilitary group known as the Razakars of raids into Indian territory, of atrocities against Hindus within Hyderabad, and of conspiring to create communal unrest elsewhere in India. When the Indian Army annexed Hyderabad in September 1948, the Government of India referred to it as a “Police Action” to emphasise the domestic nature of the conflict but also to frame the intervention as necessary to maintain security in peninsular India.

Also read: The Mulki and the Mulk: How Belonging Is Layered in the Deccan

There is now enough available evidence to reasonably conclude that the Police Action precipitated a wider event of violence targeting Muslims in Hyderabad state, although the exact scale of the violence remains unclear. This violence was both covered up and explained away as the natural “retaliation” of Hyderabad’s Hindus. While such an explanation cannot be completely dismissed as entirely irrelevant, it also ignores much of the wider context. The Government of India’s White Paper on Hyderabad, for example, referred to Hyderabad as a “communal” state “founded by the agents of foreign invaders” and ruled by a “fascist minority” in which “the majority has no civil liberties and lives in a State of utter serfdom”. The Police Action, as an event of majoritarian violence, was integral to the making of Indian Muslims as a political minority after 1947. While Nehru was concerned that the violence and subsequent Hinduisation of the government in Hyderabad would undermine India’s secular ideals and set a dangerous precedent, Patel was insistent that whatever violence did occur was an expression of “popular reaction and revulsion against the older order”. “Everything considered,” the Sardar wrote to Nehru, “it was nothing short of a revolution.”

Here we can begin to grasp one of the congenital dialectics of Indian democracy that emerged from this founding moment: the adoption of a “cosmopolitan constitution” that enunciated universal principles of liberty, equality and fraternity was linked to certain majoritarian conceptions of popular sovereignty and the entrenchment of an illiberal state apparatus inherited from the British. Indeed, Patel and Nehru were representative of the two co-existing strands of majoritarianism within the Congress. Patel thought that the concerns of minorities should not trump those of the majority, and that the onus was on Indian Muslims in particular to demonstrate their loyalty to India. Nehru thought that majorities should, in keeping with the Gandhian notion of trusteeship, wield power in a manner that recognised the vulnerability of minorities.

Moreover, Nehru conceived of “the people” as “the masses”, defined largely in terms of class, broadly conceived. In the 1930s, it was Nehru – backed by the Socialists, Communists and Kisan Sabhas – who initially pushed the Congress into confrontation with the princes on the basis that the Indian states were feudal anachronisms and imperial stooges, and thus the primary obstacles to the sovereignty, unity and progress of the Indian people. The example of Hyderabad reminds us, then, that Indian republicanism was fundamentally shaped by this conflict between Indian nationalists and the princely states. It also asks us to revisit August 15, 1947 as both an end and a beginning, and to consider the multifaceted historical processes by which the Indian nation-state was constructed before and after independence.

Sunil Purushotham is an Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University. He is the author of From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence, and Democracy in India and his work has also appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Modern Asian Studies and Comparative Studies in Society and History, among other places.