Amidst the focus on BJP national president Amit Shah’s visit to Gorta, a village in the Karnataka–Maharshtra border, academics and historians allege that the party has only portrayed a selective version of the controversial and turbulent history of the village.
While the BJP’s president will launch work on a memorial for those who died in Gorta in 1948 fighting the Razakars, the Nizam’s private militia that opposed accession of Hyderabad, little has been said about the documents recording the alleged retaliatory violence that left thousands dead, according to some experts.
What happened after the accession of Hyderabad is an important but suppressed part of history, says Vaijanath Suryavanshi, a Dalit ideologue of Bidar.
Private armies called “Tolis” cropped up across the erstwhile Nizam State of Hyderabad and massacred Muslims and Dalits in villages, towns and Hyderabad city, he said.
His father and uncles witnessed the violence, Mr. Suryavanshi added.
“It cannot be denied that Razakars committed atrocities and it is recorded history. But ordinary Muslims were subjected to retaliatory violence after the accession of Hyderabad, which has been brushed under the carpet,” alleged Khaji Arshed Ali, journalist and former MLC.
Mr. Ali quotes from A.G. Noorani’s book The Destruction of Hyderabad that contains references to the Goodwill Mission, headed by Pandit Sunderlal and K.M. Abdul Ghaffar, which reported that around 40,000 to 50,000 Muslims were killed in the retaliatory attacks.
Responding to the report, Pandit Nehru had noted that “there was little doubt that a very large number of outbreaks took place in the small towns and villages resulting in the massacre of possibly thousands of Muslims”.
The report was submitted to the Union government but there was no follow-up action, according to Mr. Noorani.
Apart from Mr. Noorani, leftist leader P. Sundarayya, German scholar Margrit Pernau and British historian Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith have also written about the retaliatory attacks.
