Why is Adityanath reviving memories of the Razakars’ violence of the 1940s now?

The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister referred to Kharge’s personal tragedy; but is silent on the massacre of Muslims in Hyderabad that followed.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath addresses a public meeting in Dhanbad, Jharkhand. November 14, 2024. | Photo Credit: ANI

As BJP leaders launch a highly communal campaign in Jharkhand and Maharashtra, Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, targeted Mallikarjun Kharge, the president of the Congress. He alleged that Kharge was silent on the personal tragedy he suffered for the sake of Muslim votes.

This dark chapter that Adityanath mentioned pertains to the death of Kharge’s mother and sister after an attack by the Razakars, a militia group active in the princely state of Hyderabad in the years preceding Indian Independence. As the Razakars were against the merger of Hyderabad with the Indian Union, they violently targeted people who were in favour of the merger. They were active between August 1947 and September 1948 when the Indian Army successfully invaded Hyderabad ending their brief resistance.

In a volume published to honour Kharge on his 80th birthday, H. T. Pote, a Kannada professor at Gulbarga University, writes, “When the child [Kharge] was six years old, he lost his mother and sister in an orgy of violence let loose by the private militia of the then Nizam of Hyderabad who was opposed to the accession of his princely state to the Indian Union…The father [of Kharge] and son were forced to flee their village [Varavatti village in Bidar district] in the wake of the violence.”

This gory incident has never been used by Kharge to aggrandise his political career and many people in Karnataka remain unaware of this dreadful episode in the life of one of the state’s tallest political leaders. In a lengthy post on X, Priyank Kharge, Kharge’s son and State Minister, said that his father never exploited the tragedy for political gain and did not let “hatred define him”.

Adityanath and other members of the BJP are strategically reviving memories of the violence unleashed by the Razakars in the south eastern Marathwada division of the State, which was part of the erstwhile state of Hyderabad.

Kasim Rizvi, the dreaded leader of the Razakars was from Latur, in Marathwada. A question that needs to be posed to Adityanath though, is whether he is aware of the pogrom unleashed against Muslims in the wake of the Indian Army’s invasion (in “Operation Polo”) when it overran Hyderabad in a mere five days between September 13 and 17, 1948.

Will Adityanath mention the barbaric killing of thousands of Muslims by members of Hindu communal organisations in retaliation to the Razakars’ violence? It is true that the Razakars killed many who favoured Hyderabad’s merger with India but this number is believed to have not exceeded 1,000; but even conservative estimates by the government committee headed by Pandit Sundarlal, which toured the hinterland of Hyderabad between November and December 1948 states that “at least 27 thousand to 40 thousand people [Muslims] lost their lives during and after the police action”.

This mass slaughter of Muslim civilians is a documented but ignored chapter of India’s history. The government committee report details the nature of the anti-Muslim violence. It identified the four worst-affected districts, Osmanabad, Gulbarga, Bidar, and Nanded, which were the “main strongholds of the Razakars and the people of these four districts had been the worst sufferers at the hands of Razakars”.

The report adds that the communal frenzy was not limited to murder. “Rape, abduction of women (sometimes out of the state to Indian towns such as Sholapur and Nagpur) loot, arson, desecration of mosques, forcible conversions, seizure of houses and lands, followed or accompanied the killing.” Tens of crores worth of property was looted or destroyed, and the victims were Muslims who formed a minority in rural areas. “We found definite indications that a number of armed and trained men belonging to a well-known Hindu communal organisation… participated in these riots,” says the report.

An estimate made by the German scholar, Margrit Pernau, summed up the loss of lives “as one-tenth to one-fifth of the male Muslim population primarily in the countryside and provincial towns”. The scale of violence was such that memories of this slaughter fester, to this day, among the Muslims of the peripheral regions of the erstwhile Hyderabad State that are now part of Maharashtra and Karnataka.

No one was held culpable for the slaughter of Muslims but the Razakars were duly punished after the Indian Army’s invasion of Hyderabad. The politician in the princely State of Hyderabad, Kasim Rizvi, was jailed and on his release in 1957, fled to Pakistan. Will Adityanath mention this fact?

This is not the first time that the BJP has strategically raised the issue: Home Minister Amit Shah inaugurated a memorial to the martyrs of Gorta B (a village in Bidar district in Karnataka that was targeted by the Razakars) last year in the lead up to the Telangana election. A film, titled Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad was also released earlier this year, which was criticised as being partisan in its narrative as it chose to highlight and exaggerate only the savagery of the Razakars while choosing to ignore the Muslim massacre that followed.