These lines are from a letter of November 1946, written to the political adviser to Lord Wavell. Four months later Wavell was replaced as viceroy by Mountbatten, who, as it happens, was an old polo-playing buddy of the Nawab of Bhopal. Their friendship went back twenty-five years; Mountbatten once claimed that the Nawab was his ‘second-best friend in India’.35 But it was soon clear that they now stood in different camps. In mid-July 1947 Mountbatten wrote to Bhopal, as he had to all other princes, advising him to accede to India. He got a long and self-confessedly ‘sentimental’ letter in reply. This began by professing ‘unbroken and loyal friendship’ with the Crown of England; a link now being broken by the unilateral action of HMG. And to whom had they delivered Bhopal and his colleagues? The hated party of Gandhi and Nehru. ‘Are we’, asked Bhopal angrily, ‘to write out a blank cheque and leave it to the leaders of the Congress Party to fill in the amount?’
From accusations of betrayal the letter then issued a warning. In India, said the Nawab, the main bulwarks against the ‘rising tide of Communism’ were men of property. The Congress had already stated their intention to liquidate landlords. To that party’s left stood the Communist Party of India, which controlled the unions of transport workers; if they so chose, the communists could paralyse and starve the subcontinent. ‘I tell you straight’, said Bhopal to his friend, ‘that unless you and His Majesty’s Government support the States and prevent them from disappearing from the Indian political map, you will very shortly have an India dominated by Communists . . . If the United Nations one day find themselves with 450 million extra people under the heel of Communist domination they will be quite justified in blaming Great Britain for this disaster, and I naturally would not like your name associated with it.’
Bhopal hinted that he, like Travancore, would declare his independence; in any case he would not attend the meeting of the Chamber of Princes scheduled for 25 July. On the 31st Mountbatten wrote back to Bhopal inviting him once more to sign the Instrument of Accession. He reminded him of what he had said in the speech: that no ruler could ‘run away’ from the dominion closest to him. And he shrewdly turned the argument about communism on its head. Yes, he told Bhopal, there was indeed a Red threat, but it would be best met if the Congress and the princes joined hands. For men like Patel were ‘as frightened of communism as you yourself are. If only they had support from all other stable influences such as that of the Princely Order, it might be possible for them to ward off the communist danger.’36
By this time Bhopal had received reports of the meeting of 25 July. He had heard of the terrific impression his old friend had made, and also of the increasing tide of accessions by his fellow princes. And so he capitulated, asking only for a small sop to his pride. Would the viceroy press Patel to extend the deadline by ten days, so that his accession would be announced after 15 August instead of before? That, said Bhopal, ‘would enable me to sign our death warrant with a clear conscience’. (In the event, Patel said he could not make any exceptions; instead Mountbatten offered to Bhopal that if he would sign the Instrument of Accession on 14 August, he would keep it under lock and key and hand it over to Patel only after the 25th.)37
A case more curious still was that of Jodhpur, an old and large state with a Hindu king as well as a largely Hindu population. At a lunch hosted by Mountbatten in mid-July, the young Maharaja of Jodhpur had joined the other Rajput princes in indicating his willingness to accede to India. But soon afterwards someone – it is not clear who – planted the idea in his head that since his state bordered Pakistan, he might get better terms from that dominion. Possibly at Bhopal’s initiative, a meeting was arranged between him and Jinnah. At this meeting the Muslim League leader offered Jodhpur full port facilities in Karachi, unrestricted import of arms and supply of grain from Sindh to his own famine-stricken districts. In one version, Jinnah is said to have handed the maharaja a blank sheet and a fountain pen and said, ‘You can fill in all your conditions.’
If Jodhpur had defected to Pakistan, this would have opened up the possibility that states contiguous to it – such as Jaipur and Udaipur – would do likewise. However, K. M. Pannikar got wind of the plan and asked Vallabhbhai Patel to intervene. Patel contacted Jodhpur and promised him free import of arms too, as well as adequate grain. Meanwhile, his own nobles and village headmen had told the maharaja that he could not really expect them to be at ease in a Muslim state. The ruler of an adjoining state, Jaisalmer, also asked him what would happen if he joined Pakistan and a riot broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Whose side would he then take?
And so the Maharaja of Jodhpur also came round, but not before a last-minute theatrical show of defiance. When presented with the Instrument of Accession in the anteroom of the viceroy’s office, Jodhpur took out a revolver and held it to the secretary’s head, saying, ‘I will not accept your dictation.’ But in a few minutes he cooled down and signed on the line.38
V
Among the states that had not signed up by 15 August was Junagadh, which lay in the peninsula of Kathiawar in western India. This, like Bhopal, had a Muslim Nawab ruling over a chiefly Hindu population. On three sides Junagadh was surrounded by Hindu states or by India, but on the fourth – and this distinguished it from Bhopal – it had a long coastline. Its main port, Veraval, was 325 nautical miles from the Pakistani port city (and national capital) of Karachi. Junagadh’s ruler in 1947, Mohabat Khan, had one abiding passion: dogs. His menagerie included 2,000 pedigree canines, including sixteen hounds specially deputed to guard the palace. When two of his favourite hounds mated, the Nawab announced a public holiday. On their ‘marriage’ he expended three lakh (300,000) rupees, or roughly a thousand times the average annual income of one of his subjects.
Within the borders of Junagadh lay the Hindu holy shrine of Somnath, as well as Girnar, a hilltop with magnificent marble temples built by, and for, the Jains. Both Somnath and Girnar attracted thousands of pilgrims from other parts of India. The forests of Junagadh were also the last refuge of the Asiatic lion. These had been protected by Mohabat Khan and his forebears, who discouraged even high British officials from hunting them.39
In the summer of 1947 the Nawab of Junagadh was on holiday in Europe. While he was away, the existing dewan was replaced by Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a leading Muslim League politician from Sindh who had close ties to Jinnah.40 After the Nawab returned, Bhutto pressed him to stay out of the Indian Union. On 14 August, the day of the transfer of power, Junagadh announced that it would accede to Pakistan. This it was legally allowed to do, although geographically it made little sense. It also flew in the face of Jinnah’s ‘two-nation’ theory, since 82 per cent of Junagadh’s population was Hindu.
Pakistan sat on the Nawab’s request for a few weeks, but on 13 September it accepted the accession. It seems to have done this in the belief that it could then use Junagadh as a bargaining counter to secure Jammu and Kashmir. That state too had not acceded to either dominion by 15 August. It had a Hindu maharaja and a majority Muslim population: in structural terms, it was a Junagadh in reverse.
The acceptance by Pakistan of Junagadh’s accession enraged the Indian leaders. Touched in a particularly ‘tender spot’ was Vallabhbhai Patel, who came from the same region and spoke the same language (Gujarati) as the residents of Junagadh.41 His first response was to secure the accession of two of Junagadh’s tributary states, Mangrol and Babariawad. Their Hindu chiefs claimed that they had the right to join India; the Nawab of Junagadh denied this, claiming that as his vassals they had to seek his consent first. The Indian government went with the vassals, and sent in a small military force to support them.
In the middle of September V. P. Menon went to Junagadh to negotiate with the Nawab, but the ruler would not see him, feigning illness. Menon had to make do with meeting the dewan instead. He told Sir Shah Nawaz that from both cultural and geographical points of view Junagadh really should join India. Sir Shah Nawaz did not dispute this, but complained that local feelings had been
inflamed by the ‘virulent writings in the Gujarati Press’. He said that he personally would favour the issue being decided by a referendum.42
Meanwhile, a ‘provisional government of Junagadh’ was set up in Bombay. This was led by Samaldas Gandhi, a nephew of the Mahatma, and a native of the kingdom. This ‘government’ became the vehicle of popular agitation within Junagadh. In panic, the Nawab fled to Karachi, taking a dozen of his favourite dogs with him. The dewan was left holding the baby. On 27 October Sir Shah Nawaz wrote to Jinnah that, while ‘immediately after accession [to Pakistan], His Highness and myself received hundreds of messages chiefly from Muslims congratulating us on the decision, today our brethren are indifferent and cold. Muslims of Kathiawar seem to have lost all their enthusiasm for Pakistan.’
Ten days later Sir Shah Nawaz informed the Indian government that he would like to hand over the administration of Junagadh. The formal transfer took place on 9 November. Back in Delhi, however, Mountbatten was cross that he had not been consulted before the territory was taken over. Partly to placate him, but also to establish its own legitimacy, the Indians then organized a plebiscite. A referendum held on 20 February 1948 resulted in 91 per cent of the electorate voting for accession to India.43
VI
The state of Hyderabad also had a Muslim ruler and a mostly Hindu population; but it was a prize greater by far than Bhopal or Junagadh. The state ran right across the Deccan plateau, in the centre of the subcontinent. Its area was in excess of 80,000 square miles, and its population more than 16 million, these distributed among three linguistic zones: Telugu, Kannada and Marathi. Hyderabad was surrounded by Central Provinces in the north, by Bombay in the west, and by Madras in the south and east. Although landlocked, it was self-sufficient in food, cotton, oilseed, coal and cement. Petrol and salt, however, had to be imported from British India.
Hyderabad began life as a Mughal vassal state in 1713. Its ruler was conventionally known as the Nizam. Eighty-five per cent of its population was Hindu, but Muslims dominated the army, police and civil service. The Nizam himself owned about 10 per cent of the land of the state; much of the rest was controlled by large landowners. From his holdings the ruler earned Rs25 million a year in rent, while another Rs5 million were granted him from the state treasury. There were some very rich nobles, but the bulk of the Muslims, like the bulk of the Hindus, worked as factory hands, artisans, labourers and peasants.44
In power in 1946–7 was the seventh Nizam, Mir Usman Ali, who had ascended to the throne as far back as 1911. He was one of the richest men in the world, but also one of the most miserly. He rarely wore new clothes, his preferred mode of dress being an unironed pyjama and shirt and a faded fez. He ‘generally drove in an old, rattling, tin-pot of a car, a 1918 model; he never offered any kind of hospitality to a visitor’.45
This Nizam was determined to hang on to more than his personal wealth. What he wanted for his state, when the British left, was independence, with relations forged directly between him and the Crown. To help him with his case he had employed Sir Walter Monckton, a King’s Counsel and one of the most highly regarded lawyers in England. (Among Monckton’s previous clients was King Edward VIII, whom he had advised during his abdication.) For the Englishman’s services the Nizam was prepared to pay a packet: as much as 90,000 guineas a year, it was rumoured. In a meeting with the viceroy, Monckton ‘emphasized that His Exalted Highness would have great difficulty in taking any course likely to compromise his independent sovereignty’. When Mountbatten suggested that Hyderabad should join the Constituent Assembly, the Nizam’s lawyer answered that if India pressed too hard his client might ‘seriously consider the alternative of joining Pakistan’.46
The Nizam’s ambitions, if realized, would virtually cut off the north of India from the south. And, as the constitutional expert Reginald Coupland pointed out, ‘India could live if its Moslem limbs in the north-west and north-east were amputated, but could it live without its midriff?’ Sardar Patel put it more directly, saying that an independent Hyderabad constituted a ‘cancer in the belly of India’.47
In this face-off between the Nizam and the government of India, each side had a proxy of its own. The Indians had the Hyderabad State Congress, formed in 1938, which pressed hard for representative government within the state. The Nizam had the Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen, which wished to safeguard the position of Muslims in administration and politics. Another important actor was the Communist Party of India, which had a strong presence in the Telengana region of the state.
In 1946–7 all three voices grew more strident. The State Congress demanded that Hyderabad fall into line with the rest of India. Its leaders organized street protests, and courted arrest. Simultaneously, the Ittihad was being radicalized by its new leader, Kasim Razvi, an Aligarh-trained lawyer and a passionate believer in the idea of ‘Muslim pride’. Under Razvi the Ittihad had promoted a paramilitary body called the ‘Razakars’, whose members marched up and down the roads of Hyderabad, carrying swords and guns.48
In the countryside, meanwhile, there was a rural uprising led and directed by the communists. Across Telengana large estates were confiscated and redistributed to land-hungry peasants. The insurrectionists first seized all holdings in excess of 500 acres, bringing the limit down successively to 200 and then 100 acres. They also abolished the institution of forced labour. In the districts of Nalgonda, Warangal and Karimnagar the communists ran what amounted to a parallel government. More than 1,000 villages were ‘practically freed from the Nizam’s rule’.49
On 15 August the national flag was hoisted by Congress workers in different parts of Hyderabad state. The offenders were arrested and taken off to jail.50 On the other side the Razakars grew more truculent. They affirmed their support for the Nizam’s declaration of independence, and printed and distributed handbills which proclaimed: ‘Free Hyderabad for Hyderabadis’ and ‘No pact with the Indian Union’.51
The Nizam’s ambitions were encouraged by the Conservative Party in Britain. Sir Walter Monckton was himself a prominent Tory and he had written to his party leaders to support his client’s case. Monckton claimed the Congress practised a kind of ‘power politics’ that was an ‘exact replica of those in which Hitler and Mussolini indulged’. Since Mountbatten was hand-in-glove with Nehru and Patel, it was up to the Tories to ‘see to it that if this shameful betrayal of our old friends and allies cannot be prevented, at least it does not go uncastigated before the conscience of the world’.52
To see the Nizam’s Hyderabad as Poland and the Congress as the equivalent to Hitler’s Nazis boggles the imagination. Even Winston Churchill allowed himself to be persuaded of the analogy, perhaps because he had a longstanding dislike for Mahatma Gandhi. Speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill argued that the British had a ‘personal obligation . . . not to allow a state, which they had declared a sovereign state, to be strangled, starved out or actually overborne by violence’. The party’s rising star, R. A. Butler, weighed in on Churchill’s side, saying that Britain should press for the ‘just claims of Hyderabad to remain independent’.53
The Nizam, and more so the Razakars, also drew sustenance from the support to their cause from Pakistan. Jinnah had gone so far as to tell Lord Mountbatten that if the Congress ‘attempted to exert any pressure on Hyderabad, every Muslim throughout the whole of India, yes, all the hundred million Muslims, would rise as one man to defend the oldest Muslim dynasty in India’.54
The Nizam now said he would sign a treaty with India, but not an Instrument of Accession. In late November 1947 he agreed to sign a ‘Standstill Agreement’, under which the arrangements forged between Hyderabad and the British Raj would be continued with its successor government. This bought both parties time; the Nizam to reconsider his bid for independence, the Indians to find better ways of persuading him to accede.
Under this agreement, the Nizam and the Indian government deputed agents to each other’s territory. The Indian agent was K. M. Munshi, a trusted ally of Vallabhbhai
Patel. In November the Nizam had appointed a new dewan, Mir Laik Ali, who was a wealthy businessman and a known Pakistan sympathizer. Laik Ali offered some Hindu representation in his government, but it was seen by the State Congress as a case of too little, too late. In any case, by now the real power had passed on to the Razakars and its leader, Kasim Razvi. By March 1948 the membership of the Ittihad had reached a million, with a tenth of these being trained in arms. Every Razakar had taken a vow in the name of Allah to ‘fight to the last to maintain the supremacy of Muslim power in the Deccan’.55
In April 1948 a correspondent of The Times of London visited Hyderabad. He interviewed Kasim Razvi, and found him to be a ‘fanatical demagogue with great gifts of organization. As a “rabble-rouser” he is formidable, and even in a tête-à-tête he is compelling.’56 Razvi saw himself as a prospective leader of a Muslim state, a sort of Jinnah for the Hyderabadis, albeit a more militant one. He had a portrait of the Pakistan leader prominently displayed in his room. Razvi told an Indian journalist that he greatly admired Jinnah, adding that ‘whenever I am in doubt I go to him for counsel which he never grudges giving me’.
Pictures of Razvi show him with a luxuriant beard. He looked ‘rather like an oriental Mephistopheles’.57 His most striking feature was his flashing eyes, ‘from which the fire of fanaticism exudes’. He had contempt for the Congress, saying ‘we do not want Brahmin or Bania rule here’. Asked which side they would take if Pakistan and India clashed, Razvi answered that Pakistan could take care of itself, but added: ‘Wherever Muslim interests are affected, our interest and sympathy will go out. This applies of course to Palestine as well. Even if Muslim interests are affected in hell, our heart will go out in sympathy.’58
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