The Myth of the Genocide of Hyderabadi Muslims

India at the Time of Independence in 1947

A large number of left leaning academics have been perpetuating this nonsensical myth of the forceful takeover of Hyderabad for a while. I had responded earlier on a Twitter thread, and I am going to tell you that the claims of 200,000 Hyderabadi Muslims being slaughtered to death by the Indian forces are a ruse. This is essentially to cover up what the Razakars that resolved to uphold the Nizamiyat and make it a Khilafat did to the powerless majority of the princely state. 

let us take a look at the 1951 census data and compare it with the data of the 1941 census. 1941 Census of Hyderabad tells us that there were 2.09 million Muslims. It can be seen here for those wishing to get references.

In contrast, what do we see with the 1951 census?

The Muslim population of the Hyderabad state was 2.2 million.

That is right. 2.2 million. That is an increase of 0.11 million between ten years. i.e. a growth rate of 5.2% in the decade 1941-51

This clearly shows that the claims that 40,000 Muslims died are laughable, for it means to say that nearly 2% of the population was wiped out by the Indian forces during Operation Polo. Those peddling the claim perhaps are so weak in the domains of mathematics as well as in understanding magnitude that they fail to see the more than obvious absurdity of the argument.

Moreover think of the time scale we are looking at. Razakars were not some gangsters, but were rather well armed people. To kill so many would take months at least. One must remember that Operation Polo lasted just six days.

In contrast, it took months to quell the Moplah Khilafat rebellion in North Malabar in 1920-21. As Arun Anand wrote for The Print:

It took more than four months for the British to control the rebellion. The official records show 2,266 killed, 1,615 wounded, 5,688 captured, while 38,256 surrendered during military engagements. 

To think that well armed resistors could be killed in such droves is just utter rubbish.

What is hidden from the eyes of the common people instead is something far more important - the high number of Muslims who migrated to Pakistan after the annexation, including Kasim Rizvi, the man who headed the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), today headed by the lawyer turned politician Asaduddin Owaisi.

Let us compare Muslims as percentage of total population from the two censuses of 1941 and 1951.

1941 - 12.7% 1951 - 12.03%

Even if you claimed that 40,000 were killed, you could never get 0.63 percentage point population disappear unless they migrated to Pakistan.

A substantial population of these people actually went on to live in Karachi, and descendants are still called Hyderabadi Muslims. Taking Pakistan's annual growth rate of 2.7% per annum, in 2001 there were about 200,000 Hyderabadi Muslims in Karachi alone, as estimated in Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora edited by Crispin Bates. Plotting backwards crudely, that gives us 51,000 odd Hyderabadi Muslims moving to Pakistan post Operation Polo.

Fits very well into the Missing Muslims number, doesn't it?

Even if I were to account for factors of error, the number would hover in the range of 35-45,000 easily. All those Muslims went to Pakistan. Hardly any died. So the next time someone says 'genocide' of Hyderabad state Muslims, ask them to pipe down.