Last Nizam (9781742626109) (24 page)

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.

On 15 June 1948, just six days before Mountbatten was to leave India for good, the Nehru Government presented the Nizam with its final offer. The question of accession would be determined by a plebiscite and a responsible government would be introduced following the establishment of a Constituent Assembly elected on a 60 per cent non-Muslim basis with cabinet in the same ratio. India would have the power to override legislation passed by Assembly and Indian troops could be stationed within the state if India constitutionally declared a state of emergency.

The Nizam rejected the deal. He wanted to determine the composition of the Constituent Assembly himself to give Muslims a greater role, and would not agree to India unilaterally sending in its own troops or overriding legislation. Realising there was now no turning back, Monckton sent a telegram to Mountbatten with the single word ‘Lost'. Referring to Monckton's role in trying
against all odds to save Hyderabad from the inevitable, Mountbatten would write later, ‘I often wonder whether that silly old Nizam had any idea what a superlative genius was conducting his business.'
³⁸

By now it was clear that the Standstill Agreement would not last its full 12 months. Both sides were reporting increasing numbers of atrocities. Delhi claimed that Muslims were repressing Hindus while Hyderabad complained that India was fomenting trouble and waging an economic war. Churchill likened Nehru's tone to ‘the sort of language which might have been used by Hitler before the devouring of Austria'.
³⁹
As for the Nizam, he was becoming putty in the hands of Razvi and his storm troops. Razakars were roaming through the cities terrorising Hindus and bringing Muslim refugees dislocated by Partition into the state in the hope of altering the demographics sufficiently to make Muslims a majority. Rumours spread that millions of Indian Muslims would rise up and Pakistan would declare war if India invaded Hyderabad. Mir Laik Ali made similar wild-sounding claims. ‘If the Union government takes any action against Hyderabad, 100,000 men are ready to join our army. We also have 100,000 bombers in South Arabia ready to bomb Bombay.'
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Events moved quickly. By the end of August the Indian Army had almost surrounded Hyderabad and was ready to move once the order was given. Patel was demanding that the Nizam ‘accede or die'. Even the peace-loving Nehru warned: ‘If and when it is considered necessary we shall have military operations against Hyderabad.'
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The trigger for the invasion, dubbed the Police Action to make it sound like a law and order operation, was the appeal to the United Nations on 21 August by Hyderabad's external affairs representative, Zahir Ahmed, for the Security Council to mediate in the dispute. Ahmed's letter referred in detail to
India's campaign of intimidation, threats of invasion and other breaches of the Standstill Agreement. The matter was included in the Security Council's agenda for 16 September, but by then it was too late.

After a final warning to Hyderabad that the government would take ‘whatever action they consider necessary' to put down disorder in the state,
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Indian troops poured across the border at 4 a.m. on 13 September. India's new governor, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, declared a state of emergency, saying that the country's security was threatened by internal disturbance. Although the three-pronged attack by troops under the command of Lieutenant General Maharaj Rajendrasinghji had been expected for weeks, Hyderabad's 25,000-strong army appeared to be totally unprepared. Its maps were outdated, and little if any of the arms and ammunition Cotton had transported were ever deployed. Thousands of Razakars using spears and stones tried to attack Indian Army tanks. In Karachi the invasion touched off demonstrations demanding that Pakistan declare war on India, but the death two days earlier of Jinnah rendered any kind of intervention impossible.

A highly critical editorial in
The Times
denounced India's ‘use of force against a weaker neighbour which resists its claims'.
⁴³
The New York Times
said it was understandable that India viewed the existence of an ‘ancient hereditary monarchy within the limits of a new nation that is struggling hard for democracy' as an anachronism, but it also believed that Hyderabad's leaders had a good case for believing that ‘they can promote the welfare of their people more successfully outside the Dominion than within it'.
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There would be little time to hammer out such arguments in editorials or world forums. On 17 September at 4.18 p.m., Laik Ali announced the Nizam's capitulation in a radio address: ‘Early this morning the Cabinet felt that there was no point in sacrificing
human blood against heavy odds.' He urged that the change in the situation be accepted by Hyderabad's 16 million inhabitants ‘with courage and tolerance'.
⁴⁵

One of Cotton's biographers, R. V. Jones, maintains that the Nizam was planning to flee to Egypt where arrangements had been made to accommodate him in one of King Farouk's palaces in return for a 25 per cent cut of the £100 million he was bringing out of Hyderabad. According to Jones, the Nizam was saying a last prayer when the Indian Army took over his palace, preventing him from reaching the airport where one of Cotton's planes, loaded with boxes crammed full of 100-rupee notes, was waiting to take off.
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Few Hyderabadis believe the Nizam would have fled, but several witnesses have vouched for the existence of the money boxes. What happened to the cash remains a mystery. As for Cotton, he would be charged with breaching air navigation regulations, fined £200 in London's Bow Street Court and have his pilot's licence cancelled for two years. The light sentence was said to have been a result of Churchill's intervention.

Though the Indian Government would later claim the Police Action had been almost bloodless, independent reports put the number of Muslims killed at anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000. Many died in the settling of old scores at the hands of Hindus, but the Indian Army was also accused of committing atrocities such as firing on unarmed civilians, rape, looting, and looking the other way while civilian reprisals took place. Months after the invasion, train travellers going from Hyderabad to Aurangabad reported seeing vultures feeding on corpses scattered in the fields.
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Even if the number killed was at the lower end of the scale, the Police Action still ranks as the single largest bloodbath in India since Partition. At first Nehru denied any disorder, stating on All India Radio that ‘not a single communal incident occurred in the whole length and breadth of this country'. Privately he was
alarmed by reports of the killing of Muslims so large in number ‘as to stagger the imagination', and looting of property belonging to Muslims ‘on a tremendous scale'.
⁴⁸

In the days following the formal surrender of Hyderabad's forces, Razvi was imprisoned and Laik Ali put under house arrest. A reshuffle of the entire administration of the state was undertaken, resulting in Muslims losing their near monopoly of government jobs. Many members of Hyderabad's intelligentsia moved to Pakistan. There were reports of forced conversion of Muslims and of mosques being turned into Hindu temples.

But the Nizam and his family were left alone. His dreams of an independent Hyderabad shattered, his kingdom now occupied by Indian troops, his once proud army dissolved, Osman Ali Khan retired to his palace to contemplate his next move. Although he remained the nominal Head of State, real power now rested in the hands of the military governor, Major General J. N. Chaudhuri. On 6 December 1948 the Nizam issued a
farman
ordering the dissolution of the Hyderabad Legislative Assembly and called upon all officers and subjects of the state to assist in the preparation of electoral rolls for a new Constituent Assembly. Just under a year later he issued another
farman
declaring and directing that the Constitution of India should be the Constitution of the State of Hyderabad. For all intents and purposes Hyderabad became the 562nd princely state to accede to India. The Nizam's Dominions were now a part of democratic India.