Freedom movement in Hyderabad state
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“An independent Hyderabad constituted a ‘cancer in the belly of India.’” Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is famously noted to have said this about what was perhaps the most complicated challenge among the princely states of India. When India rose to its independence on the midnight of August 15, 1947, it was still struggling with a much larger complication of knitting together the 500 odd princely states that dotted across its newly formed geography. While Patel along with V P Menon had been actively engaged in cajoling and convincing the princely states to accede to the Indian union from the early 1940s itself, and most had in fact agreed by the hour of Independence, there were still a few who either dreamt of an autonomous government or were inclining toward Pakistan.
Among the princely states that had not acceded to the Indian union by August 1947, the case of Hyderabad was perhaps of the most complex, mainly by virtue of its location. As historian Reginald Coupland once noted about the case of Hyderabad, “India could live if its Moslem limbs in the north-west and north-east were amputated, but could it live without a midriff?” As late as August 1948, the Nizam Mir Usman Ali had refused to sign the Instrument of Accession. On September 13, Patel took a decisive step when he sent across a contingent of Indian troops to Hyderabad and in a matter of four days, they had full control of the state.
But when the Congress was struggling to devise ways and means of bringing Hyderabad under its fold, a parallel movement was taking place there, one that strove to attain freedom from the Nizam. The Hyderabad state that came into being on September 17, 1948, was not just a product of the freedom struggle against the British, but also against the Nizam.