S.A. Aiyar: Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre

By Dilip - Saturday, November 24, 2012

NB: Letter to Editor, ToI, Sept 29, 2013:

Sir, in an article titled ‘Hyderabad 1948: India's hidden massacre’ (September 24, 2013), the BBC has represented the Pandit Sunderlal Committee’s report into the communal violence in 1948 as a matter deliberately kept hidden from the Indian public. A sentence starting ‘But now’ says that a Cambridge historian ‘has obtained a copy of the report as part of his research in this field.’ Further down, the BBC reporter says that the report is ‘now open for viewing’. These statements are misleading, as is your columnist S.A. Aiyar's suggestion in ‘Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre’ (TOI November 25, 2012), that the report is classified. The report has been available in the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library since 1968, when it was donated to the Library by Pandit Sunderlal’s heirs. In his 2001 article ‘Of a massacre untold’ in Frontline Vol. 18, # 05, March 2001, Mr A.G. Noorani states that the Director of Pandit Sundarlal Institute of Asian Studies at Ghaziabad obtained a copy of the full text for him from the NMML. The same issue also carried an extract entitled ‘From the Sunderlal Report’. Both these articles are available on the Net, and have been in the public domain for least 12 years. yours, etc., Dilip Simeon

NB: S.A. Aiyar's suggestion that the report is 'classified' is misleading. A BBC news report dated September 24, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24159594 is equally misleading. The BBC 'presenter states: The Sunderlal report, although unknown to many, is now open for viewing at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. There has been a call recently in the Indian press for it to be made more widely available, so the entire nation can learn what happened.." (This 'call' presumably refers to S. A. Aiyar's article below.)

According to the library administration the report has been available in Nehru Memorial Museum & Library since 1968, when it was donated to the Library. It was cited in 2001 by A.G. Noorani in this article: http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1805/18051130.htm - in which we are told the following: "Dr. Charan Sandhilya, Director of Pandit Sundarlal Institute of Asian Studies at Ghaziabad obtained for this writer a copy of the full text of the Sundarlal Report from the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi." Since Mr Noorani has the full text, it should be no problem for him to place it in the public domain

The committee's covering letter From the Sunderlal Report is also on the Net and may be seen here: https://frontline.thehindu.com/other/article30159647.ece

It contains the following sentences: "We can say at a very conservative estimate that in the whole State at least 27,000 to 40,000 people lost their lives during and after the Police Action."; and "It is a significant fact that out of these eight the four worst affected districts (Osmanabad, Gulburga, Bidar and Nanded) had been the main strongholds of Razakars and the people of these four districts had been the worst sufferers at the hands of the Razakars.”

It ends with the following remarks: "We were given by Muslims instances in which Hindus had defended and given protection to their Muslim neighbours, men and women even at the cost of their own lives. In some professions the fellow feeling was particularly marked. For instance at places Hin du weavers defended Muslim weavers against Hindu and protected them often at a very heavy cost (including loss of life) to themselves. Many Hindus helped in the recovery of abducted Muslim women... This communal trouble followed close upon the heels of the police action and the consequent collapse of the Razakar organisation, which had stood in the Muslim mind, as an effective barrier against the establishment of responsible government which was synonymous, to the average Hyderabadi Muslim, with Hindu Raj, because it would be based on the will of the Hindu majority. Muslim masses were generally slow to realise that their sufferings were the inevitable repercussions of the atrocities committed on the Hindus only, a few days before, by the Razakars. The Razakars movement had the sympathy of a good number of Musalmans in Hyderabad. Such of them as dared publicly to oppose that madness paid heavily for their temerity, so much so that one of them fell before the bullet of an assassin. Like the Razakars the perpetrators of crimes against the Muslims encouraged the belief that they had the backing of the authorities..."

Also see: https://frontline.thehindu.com/other/article30159646.ece

Sunderlal Report PDF

The Sundarlal Committee's figures for Muslim deaths are nowhere near 200,000.
A critical comment on this controversy may be read here:
http://missiontelangana.com/counting-the-bodies-numbers-game-or-lessons-for-the-future/

Aiyar says: 'Something is terribly wrong when Indian citizens are kept in dark about the biggest pogrom since Independence, even after foreign sources have lifted the lid.' What foreign sources? The document has been in a public archive for many years & it is wrong to suggest that the public is being kept 'in the dark' .

What is more curious is the secrecy about the Subhas Bose files:
Govt claims disclosure of Netaji Bose files will affect foreign relations, sovereignty & integrity of India; & cause serious law and order problems, especially W Bengal

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S.A. Aiyar: Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre
The Gujarat election will revive charges that Narendra Modi killed a thousand Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with the BJP accusing Rajiv Gandhi of killing 3000 Sikhs in the 1984 Delhi riots. To get a sense of perspective, i did some research on communal riots in past decades. I was astounded to find that the greatest communal slaughter occurred under neither Modi nor Rajiv but Nehru. His takeover of Hyderabad in 1948 caused maybe 50,000-200,000 deaths. The Sunderlal report on this massacre has been kept an official secret for over 60 years. While other princes acceded to either India or Pakistan in 1947, the Nizam of Hyderabad aimed to remain independent. This was complicated by a Marxist uprising. The Nizam's Islamic militia, the Razakars, killed and raped many Hindus. This incensed Sardar Patel and Nehru, who ordered the Army into Hyderabad. The Army's swift victory led to revenge killings and rapes by Hindus on an unprecedented scale.

Civil rights activist AG Noorani has cited Prof Cantwell Smith, a critic of Jinnah, in The Middle Eastern Journal, 1950. "The only careful report on what happened in this period was made a few months later by investigators - including a Congress Muslim and a sympathetic and admired Hindu (Professor Sunderlal)- commissioned by the Indian government. The report was submitted but has not been published; presumably it makes unpleasant reading. It is widely held that the figure mentioned therein for the number of Muslims massacred is 50,000. Other estimates by responsible observers run as high as 200,000." A lower but still horrific estimate comes from UCLA Professor Perry Anderson. "When the Indian Army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out, aided and abetted by its regulars. On learning something of them, the figurehead Muslim Congressman in Delhi, Maulana Azad, then minister of education, prevailed on Nehru to let a team investigate. It reported that at a conservative estimate between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover. This was the largest single massacre in the history of the Indian Union, dwarfing the killings by the Pathan raiders en route to Srinagar which India has ever since used as the casus belli for its annexation of Kashmir.

"Nehru, on proclaiming Indian victory in Hyderabad, had announced that 'not a single communal incident' marred the triumph. What action did he take on receiving the report? He suppressed it, and at Patel's urging cancelled the appointment of one of its authors as ambassador in the Middle East. No word about the pogroms, in which his own troops had taken eager part, could be allowed to leak out. Twenty years later, when news of the report finally surfaced, his daughter banned the publication of the document as injurious to national interests." Perry Andersen is accused by some of anti-Indian bias. This cannot be said of author William Dalrymple. In The Age of Kali, Dalrymple says the Sunderlal report has been leaked and published abroad, and "estimates that as many as 200,000 Hyderabadi Muslims were slaughtered." (emphases added - DS)

Our textbooks and TV programmes show Sardar Patel and Nehru as demi-gods who created a unified India. The truth is more sordid. You will not find any mention of the Hyderabad massacre in our standard history books (just as Pakistani textbooks have deleted reference to the East Pakistan massacre of 1971). The air-brushing of Patel and Nehru is complete. My friends ask, why rake up the 1948 horrors now? You sound like an apologist for Modi's killings of 2002. I can only say that the killings of 1948 cannot possibly justify the killings of 2002, or 1984, or any others. Modi has blood on his hands, whether or not he was directly culpable. But why pretend that others had spotlessly clean hands? There is a macabre logic in the praises Modi has recently heaped on Patel: the two were not entirely dissimilar. Nations need to acknowledge their past errors in order to avoid them in the future. Germany acknowledged the horrors of fascism and militarism, and this helped it build a new anti-war society focused on human rights.

Something is terribly wrong when Indian citizens are kept in dark about the biggest pogrom since Independence, even after foreign sources have lifted the lid. India's jihadi press is fully aware of the 1948 massacre, and projects its censorship as evidence of Hindu oppression. This is not how a liberal democracy should function. India cannot become a truly unified nation on the basis of suppressed reports and sanitized textbooks. The Sunderlal report must be made public.

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Swaminomics/entry/declassify-report-on-the-1948-hyderabad-massacre

See: From the Sundarlal Report:

Hyderabad State has 16 districts, comprising nearly 22,000 villages. Out of them only three districts remained practically, though not wholly, free of communal trouble which affected the state first during the activities of the Razakars and then during the reprisals that followed the collapse of that organisation. In another four districts the trouble had been more serious but nothing like the havoc that overtook the remaining eight. Out of these again the worst sufferers have been the districts of Osmanabad, Gulburga, Bidar and Nanded, in which four the number of people killed during and after the police action was not less, if not more than 18,000. In the other four districts viz. Aurangabad, Bir, Nalgunda and Medak those who lost their lives numbered at least 5 thousand...

We can say at a very conservative estimate that in the whole state at least 27 thousand to 40 thousand people lost their lives during and after the police action. We were informed by the authorities that those eight were the most affected districts and needed most the good offices of our delegation. We, therefore, concentrated on these and succeeded, we might say, to some extent at least, in dispelling the atmosphere of mutual hostility and distrust...It is a significant fact that out of these eight the four worst affected districts (Osmanabad, Gulburga, Bidar and Nanded) had been the main strongholds of Razakars and the people of these four districts had been the worst sufferers at the hands of the Razakars. In the town of Latur, the home of Kasim Razvi - which had been a big business centre, with rich Kuchhi Muslim merchants, the killing continued for over twenty days. Out of a population of about ten thousand Muslims there we found barely three thousand still in the town. Over a thousand had been killed and the rest had run away with little else besides their lives and completely ruined financially.. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1805/18051140.htm

Operation Polo: The Forgotten Massacre in Hyderabad?

http://lawandotherthings.blogspot.in/2012/04/operation-polo-forgotten-massacre-in.html