Last Nizam (9781742626109) (23 page)

In the end a special school was set up in Bolarum, the cantonment area to the north of Hyderabad's twin city of Secunderabad. Known as Asafiya Kothi, it consisted of 16 pupils, once again handpicked from among the nobility. Joan Reddy, an Australian who taught Mukarram to play the piano and community singing, remembers him as being ‘a bit of a madcap'. ‘He was not interested in royalty. He preferred playing with bulldozers and farm implements.'
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His favourite toy was a two-horsepower, army surplus Cushman Parachute Scooter, given to him by Reddy's husband.

While Jah was attending school at Ooty, India achieved its independence. India's ‘tryst with destiny' had almost passed unnoticed at the hill station with just a few tricoloured flags hoisted on 15 August 1947. In the Nizam's Dominions, however,
anyone seen flying the Indian tricolour was arrested. Osman Ali Khan took Hyderabad's independence for granted. After all, the British had recognised him as the leader of the Muslim world and rewarded him with titles such as ‘High Exalted Highness' and ‘Faithful Ally of the British Empire', which no other ruler enjoyed. Britain never claimed at any time the right to make laws for Hyderabad, and its territory was never regarded as part of the Crown's Dominions. The State of Hyderabad had its own machinery of government – legislative, executive and judicial. If India could be granted Dominion status within the British Commonwealth, so too, the Nizam believed, could Hyderabad.

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'.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.'
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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'.
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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 ‘Standstill 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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.