Hyderabad State: 1948 to 1956

Between the Police Action of September 1948 and the merger of November 1956, Hyderabad State lived an entire compressed lifetime: fourteen months of military rule, two years of an appointed civil government, a first democratic election, a first elected government of its own people, and, in 1952, the first police firing on students demanding that Telangana's jobs go to Telangana's people. Everything that happened after 1956 was rehearsed here first.

When India became independent on 15 August 1947, Hyderabad did not join. Of the 562 princely states, four initially stayed out: Travancore, Junagadh, Kashmir and Hyderabad, the largest of them all. On 12 June 1947 Nizam Osman Ali Khan had declared himself a sovereign independent ruler. In November 1947 he signed a one-year Standstill Agreement with the Indian government, under which Hyderabad's defence, foreign affairs and communications came under Indian control and a democratic government was to be formed within a year. With the appointment of Mir Laiq Ali as Prime Minister that December, the breach of the agreement began, and through 1948, the Razakars under Kasim Razvi unleashed terror across the state.

The Indian government's answer came in September 1948. It was called the Police Action, the name chosen by C. Rajagopalachari, because under international principles one country could not conduct military action on another. Its military name was Operation Polo.

Five Days in September

The Outsiders Arrive First

The pattern that would define the next six decades began in these four years, before the merger was even proposed. Between 1948 and 1952, under military and appointed rule, hundreds of non-Mulki employees were brought into Hyderabad's government from Madras state on the claim that Hyderabad lacked trained, English-speaking staff, in violation of the Mulki Rules that the Nizam had formalised in 1919 and that the military government itself had re-issued in November 1949. Andhra officers were appointed as chief administrators ranking above Hyderabad's own district collectors; in the starkest case, a Krishna-district tahsildar was made Chief Administrator of Hyderabad district itself. The newspaper The Star of Hyderabad reported the repeated violations; Padmaja Naidu raised the corruption of the new appointees in Parliament.

Thousands of Hyderabad state's own employees, especially Muslims, were removed from service in the same years. Under military administration there were no civil rights through which the public could express resentment. The grievance built quietly, and in 1952, with an elected government finally in place, it erupted.

1952: The First Blood of the Mulki Cause

The Gair-Mulki movement of 1952 began in Warangal, where a Divisional Inspector of Schools named Parthasarathi had been transferring Mulki teachers en masse (180 at once) and installing non-locals in their places. On 26 July 1952, when a Deputy Director of Education came to Hanumakonda to investigate, some four thousand students marched to the inquiry site: the first rally of the movement. Two days later the students formed a Joint Action Committee, met Chief Minister Burgula, and demanded a cabinet sub-committee on the Mulki Rules and the removal of employees holding fake Mulki certificates. Through August the movement spread to Hyderabad city, with the slogans that would echo for decades: "Non-Mulki go back."

On 3 September 1952, the Police Commissioner banned all strikes, meetings and rallies. Students protested regardless. Police opened fire on Mulki protesters at City College and Pattarghat; on 4 September there was firing again at Afzalganj, and those who fell there were not students but ordinary people, a factory worker, a rickshaw puller, private employees: proof of how completely the public had joined the students' cause. Six of the dead are named in the record: Mohammad Khasim, Shaik Mohammad, Mohammad Khan, Ramulu, Shaik Mukhtar and Jamaluddin. The TRS submission to the Sri Krishna Committee, counting the firings across the agitation, records that at least thirteen were killed before it was crushed.

The judicial inquiry that followed (Justice Pingali Jaganmohan Reddy's committee, which examined about a hundred witnesses including the Chief Minister) did not treat the firing as a law-and-order episode. It found that the students' anger arose from a genuine state of insecurity among the local population. Justice Jaganmohan Reddy would later write in his autobiography that the Mulki riots arose from the misconduct of Andhra officials towards the Telangana people. Everything the movement of 1969 would say, and everything the movement of 2001 to 2014 would prove, was already in that finding, seventeen years before 1969, and four years before the merger.

What the Elected Government Built

This is the state that the merger of 1956 dissolved: not a backward region waiting to be rescued, but a functioning polity with its own elected government, its own land reforms ahead of most of India, its own education policy, its own surplus revenues, and its own, already-bleeding grievance about outsiders taking its jobs. When the States Reorganisation Commission arrived in 1954 to ask what the people wanted, the events of 1952 were the freshest memory in Telangana's political mind. What the Commission concluded, and what was done to its conclusion, is where this chapter's story continues.

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