Liberation, Police Action, Integration: One Day, Many Labels

Hyderabad:Indian troops crossed into Hyderabad State at 5 am on September 13, 1948, as an emergency was declared. Banks in Hyderabad and Secunderabad cut working hours to 10 am-1 pm, hospitals displayed Red Cross or Red Crescent flags, some telephones were disconnected, and suburban buses stopped from September 15, though routes 7 and 8 continued between Secunderabad and Afzalgunj. Cinema halls reduced evening shows to one 3.30 pm screening, while households were told to darken windows and stock essentials.

The military action was codenamed Operation Polo. Raunaq Yar Khan, the great-grandson of the sixth Nizam Mir Mahboob Ali Khan, links the name to Hyderabad’s polo grounds. “Hyderabad had around 17 polo grounds then. That was quite unusual, and that is why it came to be called Operation Polo,” he claimed.

 Going on air over All India Radio (AIR) on September 18, then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru appealed against communal antagonism. The next day, crowds greeted Indian Army columns entering Secunderabad with flags, petals and garlands. Looting and assaults were also recorded, and Muslim families left some localities as homes and shops were looted.

“September 17 did not bring an immediate end to the struggles within Telangana. The Communist-led Telangana peasant armed struggle against feudalism continued even after 1948 and lasted until 1951,” said Dr Dyavanapalli Satyanarayana, historian and curator of Tribal Museums, the government of Telangana.

Raunaq Yar Khan sees the post-1948 arrangement as evidence that the transition was more complicated than a ruler simply being defeated and removed. “Mir Osman Ali Khan was not exiled; he remained in Hyderabad, and later, he became the Rajpramukh of Hyderabad State,” he said.

That complexity also appears in the terms used for September 17. According to Satyanarayana, “Police Action” describes the military operation between September 13 and 17, “integration” of Hyderabad joining the Indian Union, and “liberation” the end of the Nizam’s political authority. “The terms emphasise different aspects of the same historical transition,” he said.

Family memories reflect the same differences. Among Hyderabadis spoken to, “Police Action” surfaced most often. One said “Liberation Day” was never used at home. Another family, with roots in the former Hyderabad State in present-day Maharashtra, passed down accounts of violence against Muslim households and the killing of a paternal great-uncle. A third remembered Razakar atrocities against non-Muslims and September 17 as Liberation Day.

Sibghat Khan, founder and managing trustee of The Deccan Archive Foundation, also grew up hearing “Police Action” from his grandfather.. “When I began reading more about it, I realised that the term itself can be misleading because this was a full-scale military operation, not a police action in the ordinary sense.”

He believes such fragments survived partly because many who lived through 1948 did not speak about it. “The violence around Partition is spoken about much more openly than the violence surrounding Operation Polo. I sense that many of our grandparents, who lived through what was a deeply traumatic period, did not want to pass that trauma on to their children. They kept much of it to themselves.”

Raunaq Yar Khan prefers the language of integration to liberation. “I would describe September 17 as Hyderabad joining or being integrated into India rather than as ‘Liberation Day’. I grew up looking at it as the point at which Hyderabad became part of the new Indian Union,” he said.

With several versions of what happened, he added, “Sometimes it becomes difficult to know where the truth lies. These were decisions being taken at the highest levels, while ordinary people experienced only what was happening around them.”