why do you think was the nizam allowed to retain power even after the merger
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
British High Court judgment on the Hyderabad funds case on October 2 may well mark the closure of a seven-decade-long litigation, although Pakistan can still appeal to the Supreme Court. The proximate reason for the long legal proceedings was obvious enough — an India-Pakistan tangle over money. But the amount was in relative terms paltry for both countries. The significance of the case was symbolic and in both countries its metaphoric value is what explained its long history.
The facts are straightforward enough. Just before Operation Polo in September 1948 — the police action that preceded the merger of the princely state of Hyderabad — the finance minister of Hyderabad transferred a sum of one million British pounds to an account in the name of the then Pakistan high commissioner to the United Kingdom. Immediately after the merger, the Nizam asked the bank concerned to reverse the transaction since it was carried out without his authorization. The bank refused. The Nizam thereafter went to court in 1954 against Pakistan and the bank. Pakistan claimed sovereign immunity from any legal proceedings in the UK. Pakistan’s claim of sovereign immunity was upheld, finally, by the British House of Lords and this froze, so to say, all proceedings for the next almost six decades. The money remained in the account, growing with accumulation of interest to the present level of £35 million. The government of India formally became a claimant in 1965 after the Nizam assigned to it and to his heirs his claims on the fund. This was in effect only a legal change, since Pakistan’s immunity in British courts meant that legal proceedings were not available as an option to settle the case.
From time to time the matter was discussed, during periods of an upswing in ties, between India and Pakistan — for an out-of-court settlement. The pragmatic reasons for doing so were obvious — if no legal outcome was feasible why let the British bank and lawyers benefit? An out-of-court settlement had appeal for pragmatists who saw this as one more issue in the India-Pakistan undergrowth, impossible to settle on merit because of widely divergent approaches. Thus dealing with it on a matter-of-fact basis appeared to be a sensible way to put aside one contested legacy of the emergence of India and Pakistan as independent states.
The pragmatic approach, however, never developed sufficient traction to move towards success. Firstly, periods of thaw in the India-Pakistan permafrost have been, although not infrequent, relatively brief. There was never a long enough time frame to have a real focus on what was at best a minor item on the India-Pakistan agenda. But there were more significant reasons also and these related to the metaphoric and symbolic values attached to the case by both countries.
In 2013, all the hidden subtexts came into the open. This happened when Pakistan instituted a case against the bank for releasing to it the funds in the account, in effect also withdrawing from its position of sovereign immunity. The change was a fundamental one — hitherto Pakistan had been in the position of resisting or denying the Nizam’s and, later, India’s claim and it had done so on the procedural ground of its immunity from British law. By now claiming the funds for itself, it created a situation where the ownership of the money could be decided in a court of law. India and the Nizam’s heirs accordingly became a party to this case by claiming ownership for themselves jointly. Arguments on both sides now covered all the substantive issues involved, revealing, not surprisingly, the widely divergent readings of the history of the events around the accession of Hyderabad to India.
Reduced to its bare essentials, Pakistan’s case was that the funds were no more than reimbursement of expenditure it had already incurred to procure arms for the Nizam’s army to fend off a widely expected Indian forcible occupation of the state. These arms were being transported from Karachi to Hyderabad by aircraft flown by a most colourful Australian mercenary pilot — Sydney Cotton — undertaking these sorties at night to escape detection by the Indian air force. In Pakistan’s view, the Nizam and his government tried hard to resist the forcible Indian occupation and also petitioned the United Nations security council. The Nizam, after Operation Polo and the accession of the state, was no longer a free agent but was acting under duress. His claim that the transfer of funds be reversed was therefore one made under duress and should be disregarded.