by K. VENKATESHWARLU
IMAGE/Dawn
The Destruction of Hyderabad by A.G. Noorani, Tulika Books, 2013, pages, 388
on the turbulent history of the erstwhile Hyderabad state are dime a dozen. But The Destruction of Hyderabad, authored by the eminent lawyer and columnist A.G. Noorani, encapsulating the transition of Hyderabad from the reign of the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, to its troublesome merger into the Indian Union, is of a different genre by all accounts.
Rummaging through the largely unexplored archival records, Noorani dissects, with surgical precision, this transition period as no writer has done before. He ferrets out hitherto unknown and suppressed facts—the most significant being the Sunderlal Committee report on the massacre of Muslims which kicked off a debate on whether or not to declassify such “sensitive” reports. Unlike the “court historians of Indian nationalism”, Noorani has had the courage to publish, perhaps for the first time, the entire committee report in the book.
For the author, the appointment of the committee, its submission and the way it was suppressed reflected the varying mindset of the two political giants of that era: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He writes: “Patel hated the Nizam personally and was ideologically opposed to Hyderabad’s composite culture. Nehru’s concern was to… [defeat] Hyderabad’s secessionist venture. Patel wanted to go further. He wanted to destroy Hyderabad and its culture completely. In Hyderabad as in Kashmir, Nehru was an ardent Indian nationalist. On both states, Vallabhbhai Patel was a strident Hindu nationalist.”
In fact, this thoroughly researched book is described as a trilogy by the author, the other two being Jinnah and Tilak: Comrades in the Freedom Struggle and The Kashmir Dispute 1947-2012. “The Hyderabad question was linked inextricably to the causes of the partition of India and to the roots of the Kashmir dispute,” he observes.
Patel’s contempt
Patel did not conceal his contempt for Hyderabad and often described it as an “ulcer in the heart of India”, Noorani writes. He was the villain of the piece in the destruction of Hyderabad, he argues and, using a plethora of Patel’s letters, biography and public speeches, portrays him as a hard-core Hindu communalist within the Congress. He narrates the way Patel opposed Maulana Azad’s inclusion in Nehru’s first Cabinet and managed to get the Congress Working Committee nod for opening the party’s membership to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). When Nehru, who could not attend the meeting, came to know, he simply withdrew the approval. It only shows the ingrained Hindu bias of Patel, the author contends, providing, in a way, the answer to why the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is now deifying Patel and installing a mammoth 183-metre-high statue of him in Gujarat.
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