Indian Troops Took Hyderabad, a State of 16,338,534 People, in Five Days in September 1948, and a Report Withheld for Decades Estimated 27,000 to 40,000 Deaths

On 13 September 1948 Indian troops crossed into Hyderabad, the most populous of the princely states, and by the evening of 17 September its army had surrendered. V. P. Menon, secretary of India’s States Ministry, wrote that the operation lasted barely 108 hours and that the number of dead on the Hyderabad side was “a little over 800”. The government called it a police action. The army’s code name was Operation Polo.

A second number comes from three men the Government of India sent to the state in late 1948, who estimated that “at least 27 thousand to 40 thousand people lost their lives during and after the police action.” The two figures measure different things. Menon counted men killed in the fighting. The delegation estimated killings across the state, including the reprisals that followed the collapse of the Razakars, the Nizam’s volunteer militia.

A state larger than England and Scotland put together

The 1941 census report for Hyderabad gives an area of 82,698 square miles, which it says is more than England and Scotland combined, and a population of 16,338,534. It counts 12.8 per cent of the people as Muslims. Menon writes that Muslims nonetheless filled almost all the important posts, including those in the army and police.

The state had its own coins, currency notes and stamps, and a revenue of Rs 26 crore (260 million rupees), according to Menon. Its ruler, Mir Osman Ali Khan, was the seventh Nizam and had held the gaddi, the throne, since 29 August 1911.

The Nizam wanted a treaty, India wanted a signature

Sardar Patel’s States Department asked each princely ruler to sign an Instrument of Accession handing over defence, external affairs and communications, a method covered in our account of Patel and Menon’s work with the princes. The government’s White Paper says every state inside India’s borders had acceded by 15 August except Hyderabad, Kashmir and Junagadh.

After the 3 June 1947 plan the Nizam issued a firman saying he would send representatives to neither Constituent Assembly and would resume the status of an independent sovereign on 15 August, Menon writes. A delegation led by the Nawab of Chhatari, with the British lawyer Sir Walter Monckton as adviser, came to Delhi in July. Mountbatten and Menon urged accession on the three subjects. The delegates answered that the Nizam would find that very hard and that pressing him might push him towards Pakistan.

The Nizam wanted a treaty instead. Patel refused any variation, arguing, in Menon’s account, that India would otherwise be charged with breach of faith by the states that had already signed. On 27 August Mountbatten offered a referendum under British officers. The Nizam replied the next day that “the question of referendum does not arise.”

Razvi’s crowd and a truce signed anyway

By October a compromise was ready, and it broke India’s own rule. Menon had told the Hyderabad delegation in July that India would not sign a standstill agreement, which keeps existing arrangements running, with any state that did not accede. Now it was prepared to. On 25 October the Nizam’s Executive Council voted six to three to advise him to accept it.

At about 3 am on 27 October a crowd Menon estimates at 25,000 to 30,000 surrounded the houses of the delegates who were due to leave for Delhi. No Hyderabad police were present, Menon writes, and he says the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen, a Muslim communal organisation, was behind it. Its leader, Qasim Razvi, had organised a force called the Razakars, and Menon, who negotiated for India, described the movement as aiming at a theocratic and totalitarian state.

The next morning the Nizam called Razvi into a meeting with his delegates. Razvi, Menon reports, told him India would be in no position to act because its hands were “fully occupied with their troubles elsewhere”. Indian troops were being flown into Kashmir that same week, an episode told in our piece on the first Kashmir war. The delegates resigned, and the Nizam sent a new one. He also asked Jinnah for advice. According to Menon, Jinnah would not commit himself on the Delhi talks and advised against naming Mir Laik Ali, a former Pakistani delegate to the UN, head of the Executive Council. The Nizam appointed Laik Ali anyway, at Razvi’s urging.

The Standstill Agreement was signed on 29 November 1947 with no material change. It had five articles and ran for one year. It kept existing arrangements on defence, external affairs and communications in force, and gave India no right or duty to send troops to help the Nizam keep order, or to station troops in the state except in time of war. In a secret letter the Nizam undertook not to accede to Pakistan. Nehru told Menon that day, “This means we shall have peace for one year.”

A year of breaches and a one-word telegram

Within weeks the Nizam’s government issued an ordinance ending the legal-tender status of Indian currency, and Menon learned that it had lent Rs 20 crore (200 million rupees) to Pakistan in Government of India securities. Hyderabad’s delegation told him the loan was a purely economic investment and that the ordinance was meant to popularise the state’s own money. On 23 March 1948 Menon sent a formal letter listing what India counted as breaches, among them the loan, a larger state army and support for the Razakars, and asking for the Ittehad to be banned. Laik Ali, now the Nizam’s prime minister, replied on 5 April that the two sides read their obligations differently and proposed arbitration.

India’s information then, Menon wrote, was of 200,000 Razakars with small arms and 42,000 regular and irregular state troops. Laik Ali told Mountbatten that the Razakars had formed because Muslims feared for their lives. On 22 May a party armed with daggers, hockey sticks and lathis attacked the Madras to Bombay mail train at Gangapur station inside Hyderabad, and Menon gives two killed, eleven seriously injured and thirteen missing. After the June talks failed, J. V. Joshi, a member of the Nizam’s Executive Council, resigned with a letter saying “a complete reign of terror prevails in Parbhani and Nanded districts.”

Mountbatten tried once more before he left India. The draft Heads of Agreement of June 1948 capped the Hyderabad army at 20,000 and called for irregular forces to be disbanded. On 17 June Monckton telephoned Mountbatten with a single word, “Lost”, after the Nizam, on his Council’s advice, had asked for four more changes. Mountbatten left India on 21 June.

Five days in September

On 9 September the Government of India decided to send troops in, Menon writes, and Southern Command ordered the advance for the early hours of Monday 13 September. Major General J. N. Chaudhuri commanded under Lieutenant General Maharaj Shri Rajendrasinhji, the army’s southern commander. Menon describes two prongs: the main force along the 186 miles of road from Sholapur, and a smaller one along 160 miles from Bezwada, today’s Vijayawada. A US chargé’s cable of 13 September, relaying what Laik Ali had told Hyderabad’s agent in Delhi by telephone, said troops had entered from Sholapur, Bezwada and Chanda and that Hyderabad’s forces had clashed with them at Naldrug.

Resistance was stiff for two days and then collapsed, in Menon’s account. On the first day Indian troops caught a former British commando in Hyderabad’s service driving a jeep full of explosives to blow up the Naldrug bridges.

On 17 September Laik Ali’s cabinet resigned. The Nizam sent for K. M. Munshi, India’s Agent-General, who had been under house arrest since the action began, and said he had ordered his army to surrender, would ban the Razakars and would let Indian troops return to Secunderabad and Bolarum. Dawn’s Hyderabad report, reprinted from its 1948 pages, says the Nizam “in a message broadcast to his troops, ordered them to cease fire.” Menon puts the army’s surrender on the evening of 17 September and Dawn puts it at 4 pm. Chaudhuri’s troops entered the city on 18 September and he became Military Governor that day. A cable from the Nizam to the United Nations on 22 September said he had ordered Hyderabad’s complaint withdrawn on 18 September.

The fighting toll is itself disputed. On the Hyderabad side, in his count, a little over 800 died, while India’s casualties were slight and the irregulars and Razakars suffered comparatively more. He calls the number small beside the killing, rape and looting he attributes to the Razakars. A footnote in Sunil Purushotham’s 2015 article, citing an earlier study by Benichou, gives the official statistics as 1,373 Razakars and 807 Hyderabad Army soldiers killed, 43 other Hyderabadi combatants killed, and ten dead on the Indian side. None of the sources reconciles the two sets. Chaudhuri’s own account, 1 Armoured Division in Operation Polo, calls the action a police action rather than a military campaign, according to its publisher’s listing.

What the Sundarlal mission wrote down

At the Government of India’s request, Pandit Sundarlal, Qazi Abdul Ghaffar and Maulana Abdulla Misri went to Hyderabad on what their report calls a goodwill mission. The three reached the city on the afternoon of 29 November 1948 and left for Delhi in December. Over those weeks they toured nine of the state’s 16 districts and met more than 500 people from 109 villages they did not visit. Theirs, they wrote, was a goodwill mission and not an inquiry.

The typescript says that “at least 27 thousand to 40 thousand people lost their lives during and after the police action”, which it calls a very conservative estimate. It puts the four worst districts, Osmanabad, Gulbarga, Bidar and Nanded, at no fewer than 18,000 dead and four others at no fewer than 5,000. The scan at the Internet Archive holds more than one typescript, and the totals differ between them. One calls 25 to 30 thousand a safe figure for the whole state. Another gives between 30,000 and 40,000 and says not fewer than 25,000.

The report records killing, looting, arson, rape, abduction of women, forced conversion and the desecration of mosques, and says the sufferers were Muslims, a minority of roughly one in ten in the affected areas. The four worst districts, it notes, had been Razakar strongholds. Armed and trained men from a Hindu communal organisation based in Sholapur and other border towns took part in the violence, the report says, along with local and outside Communists, and in some cases led the rioters. Independent informants had told the mission of instances, “happily isolated ones”, in which men of the Indian Army and the local police were seen “taking part and sharing the loot”. Chaudhuri is “a man without the slightest tinge of communal prejudice” in its words, though a section of the army was not free of communal hostility. Hindu weavers, it records, protected Muslim weavers, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.

Who disputes what

The report was not published at the time. The Quint says it was declassified in 2013 after the Cambridge historian Sunil Purushotham petitioned for a copy, while Scroll’s Sajjad Hassan says it surfaced in 1988 and was made public by scholars in 2013. According to Scroll, Qazi Abdul Ghaffar sent the report to Patel on 3 January 1949, and Patel replied that the delegation was “lacking balance and proportion”.

The estimates around it differ widely. Scroll quotes Chaudhuri as saying “It is estimated that about 2,000 Muslims may have been massacred”, and gives no date or document for the remark. It cites the historian Margrit Pernau for an estimate that one-tenth to one-fifth of Hyderabad’s male Muslim population died, mostly in the countryside and provincial towns. Khaitan’s post quotes William Dalrymple as saying the Sundarlal report put the toll at up to 200,000, a figure the archived typescript does not contain.

The reasons for the action are disputed as well. India told the UN General Assembly on 25 September 1948 that the action followed looting, arson and a reign of terror in parts of Hyderabad, while Pakistan’s representative called it aggression. A. G. Noorani’s 2014 book The Destruction of Hyderabad, in its publisher’s words, challenges the official narrative to show Hyderabad was forcibly annexed. Srinath Raghavan wrote in ThePrint that with both Junagadh and Hyderabad, Nehru was fully prepared to use force when diplomacy failed.

A military governor, a Nizam who stayed, and the 1956 map

Chaudhuri governed as Military Governor until December 1949, when M. K. Vellodi, a civil servant, became chief minister. The Razakars were disbanded, and Razvi was tried, found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment, Menon writes. Menon also writes that he urged Patel to keep the Nizam on the throne, and that Patel and Nehru agreed.

On 23 November 1949 the Nizam issued a firman making the Constitution of India the constitution of Hyderabad, subject to confirmation by the state’s own constituent assembly. An agreement dated 25 January 1950 gave him a privy purse of Rs 50 lakh (5 million rupees) a year, free of tax and payable to him alone for his lifetime. The White Paper says that under the new Constitution the head of Hyderabad, the Rajpramukh, was whoever the President recognised as Nizam, and The News Minute says he held that office until 1956.

The States Reorganisation Act, No. 37 of 1956, took effect on 1 November 1956 and ended the state. Eight districts (Hyderabad, Medak, Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Warangal, Khammam, Nalgonda and Mahbubnagar), most of Adilabad and several taluks from other districts joined Andhra, which became Andhra Pradesh. Aurangabad, Parbhani, Bhir and Osmanabad districts and most of Nanded went to Bombay State. Gulbarga, Raichur and Bidar, less a few taluks, went to Mysore State.

Mir Osman Ali Khan died on 24 February 1967, aged 81, and is buried at the Masjid-e-Judi, opposite King Kothi Palace.