Operation Polo

The events before and after Operation Polo in Hyderabad post-Independence

After the country won its freedom, Indian Army forces were sent in to overcome the kingdom’s troops. The aftermath of this event on September 13, 1948, is still being researched, investigated and written about

The Partition of India and Pakistan is a dark chapter in the history of humanity that led to the death, displacement and destruction of property of millions of people. A much more complex story, albeit on a smaller scale, unfolded in the princely kingdom of Hyderabad. Ruled by Nizam Osman Ali Khan who was as whimsical and unpredictable as they come, the kingdom had 81.17% Hindus and a 12.83% Muslim population according to the 1941 Census.

When India became free on August 15, 1947, Hyderabad remained independent. Rather, it tried to stay independent citing the communal bonhomie, size of the kingdom and its infrastructure. But it was not to be. Beginning on September 13, 1948, at 4.30 a.m. the Indian Army attacked from four frontiers and made short work of the kingdom’s armed forces.

The events leading up to what was called Operation Polo and its aftermath is still being researched, investigated and written about.

The newest book to join this corpus is Afsar Mohammed’s Remaking History — 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Afsar’s book looks at the events of ‘Police Action’ through the prism of fiction and non-fiction mostly in Telugu and Urdu languages. Juxtaposed with oral histories collected over the past decade, Afsar tries to show how people dealt with the trauma and change in the social fabric.

Reliving a trauma

Traumatic events are pushed out of memory. This is also true of Operation Polo, where the ruling class of Muslims and Hindu upper caste elite suddenly found themselves to be equal citizens. This sense of loss is captured in the title Hyderabad — After the Fall, edited by Omar Khalidi. The book published in 1988 in the U.S. has essays, eye-witness accounts and also the first extract from the secret report commissioned by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru into the post-merger violence in Hyderabad. The violence led to the killing of around 30,000 to 40,000 people, according to this report. It makes for a grim read.

Fall of Hyderabad by K.M. Munshi is a first-person account of India’s Agent General in Hyderabad during the tumultuous period. Being a key player in the drama where he was put under house arrest for a few days, Munshi’s account is key to understanding this period. But the version, rather the role Munshi claims to have played, is at variance with other accounts.

Relying on documentary evidence and archival material, V.K. Bawa’s Last Nizam spans the lifetime of the last ruler of the Asaf Jahi dynasty. When it was first published in 1997, the book created a stir as it revealed the deep divisions and the inner working inside the palace of Nizam Osman Ali Khan.

This autobiographical account of V.P. Menon, the right-hand man of Vallabhbhai Patel, shows the delicate minuet in Delhi as he carried out a nuanced diplomatic game. In The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, Menon devotes three chapters to the issue but lays the groundwork for a generation of researchers.

The last prime minister of Hyderabad, Mir Laik Ali, who was an industrialist has written an account trying to justify the endgame of the Nizam’s reign. In The Tragedy of Hyderabad, Laik Ali is at the centre of everything trying to solve the transmission codes of the army, the deployment of troops and planning the destruction of transport lines.

Noorani’s sharp account

Published in 2014 to critical acclaim, A.G. Noorani’s The Destruction of Hyderabad is a poignant but sharper account of the events before and after Operation Polo. Buttressed with legal documents, personal letters and the complete Sunderlal Report, this one makes a grim reading about an event that had an element of certainty. It shows the key players including Nizam Osman Ali Khan, M.A. Jinnah, Sardar Patel and Mountbatten in an unflattering light.

Mohammed Hyder was a bureaucrat in Osmanabad at the time of ‘Police Action’. Hyder became a suspect, was tried and exonerated. His account October Coup narrates the sequence of events as the war wound down in five days. The memoir’s title comes from the events in October 1947 when India and Hyderabad came close to signing a Standstill Agreement but were thwarted by the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. The ringside account is riveting but some of the framing of larger events is fanciful.

From Autocracy to Integration by Lucien D. Benichou trawls a vast amount of information between 1938 and 1948 to present a neutral account of events leading up to Operation Polo. The author doesn’t sanitise the account and tells the impact on Muslims as it is. This makes for an uncomfortable but necessary read to understand the post-Operation Polo violence.