After all, the movement had already taken control of up to 4,000 villages, driving out the landlords and the feudal administration, and replacing it with people’s governance. It was a matter of a few more months until the Nizam was overthrown and the movement would infiltrate the interiors of mainland India, had the Indian army delayed the invasion. Perhaps this was the nasoor Patel was referring to, and the Razakar movement provided a perfect communal excuse to justify the invasion. Sundarayya writes that if the violence by the Razakars and the Communist party had caused about 400 casualties, the state crackdown on communists resulted in 4,000 immediate casualties and its impact lasted for an entire decade after the invasion.
The question of Muslim representation
The editors of the book include a bold and provocative essay by Moid MA and A Suneetha, titled ‘Rethinking Majlis’ Politics: Pre-1948 Muslim Concerns in Hyderabad State’. Bold because very rarely has there been an academic stand taken on the vision of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (Majlis hereafter), and provocative because of the claim to represent and thereby monopolise the Muslim identity.
The essay makes a case for the transformation of Majlis from a socio-cultural Muslim organisation into a political think-tank representing Muslim interest to combat the “dangers of majoritarian democracy” and thus was “in response to the complex transition of a princely state into a democratic regime, rendering the state’s Muslim population into political minority”.
It is interesting to note that the Majlis’s original manifesto was to unite the Muslim masses of the state, dispersed on the lines of sectarianism and emerging political ideologies of the world, by re-igniting the flame of Islam and focusing on its core teachings, under the able leadership of Bahadur Yar Jung, a charismatic orator of the time who renounced his feudal background for the cause.
The Majlis met with some success in uniting Muslims across the sectarian barrier but the same cannot be said in generating a single uniform political voice. The Muslims of Hyderabad were in a unique position in history, where by virtue of being the majority among the ruling class while being a minority demographically they were exposed to high quality education and the emerging notions of democracy and secularism that caught the world by storm, post-WWII, far and wide.
Thereby the then young Muslim generation from both the ruling class and lower/middle-classes rebelled in various ways against the state and the politics of Majlis that would change the course of history. This dynamic is made clear by the majority of opposing political visions covered in the rest of the essays in the book, which also happen to be from Muslim thinkers and leaders themselves, such as Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Mohammed Hyder, Maulana Maududi, Ali Yavar Jung, etc, presenting with no ambiguity the condemnation of the means the Majlis employed towards their goal.
The most notable rebellion was the contemporary peasant uprising of the 1940s and the following communist armed struggle against the Nizam’s feudal government and the Razakars that was led and participated in by Muslim masses, in positively disproportional numbers compared to their demographic – 11% Muslim as compared to 85% Hindu.
It is up to the reader to meditate on whether the Majlis truly represented the ‘Muslim’ voice of the state when there is towering evidence that every other political movement was also co-led and joined by Muslim citizens of the state. This included participation in the Hyderabad State Congress and the Mulki League, which envisioned a semi-democratic sovereign state, still under the monarchy of the Nizam, but free of Gair-Mulki influence (both British and Hindustani) with a constitution that would ensure the responsibility of the executive to the legislative branch.
The ‘Edward Snowden’ of Hyderabad
Amidst the explosive socio-political chaos engulfing Hyderabad state emerged a whistleblower from the Nizam’s administration, Ali Yavar Jung. Jung anonymously authored a collection of articles for the Times of India newspaper, published from Madras Presidency, on the disturbing state of affairs within the Nizam’s regime. These articles, compiled as the essay ‘Hyderabad in Retrospect’, perhaps serve as the holy grail of the book, providing deep insights, sometimes a day-by-day account of the mismanagement within the Nizam’s administration during its most crucial time in history.
