NEW DELHI: Seventy five years ago this week, India launched a military operation (its second after Partition) to annex the princely state of Hyderabad into its fold. Then Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, had resisted the idea of merging his state, among the richest princely states then and which had a Hindu-majority population, with India. He had an army of about 25,000-30,000 which began unleashing mayhem on the Hindu population. On September 13, 1948, the Indian Army launched a strike led by Maj. Gen. JN Chaudhuri, who later went on to become the Army Chief. It was a swift military operation that lasted five days and eventually Hyderabad acceded to India. But it was officially called ‘police action’. In this episode of ‘Simply Nitin’, StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale explains the how and why of the police action that wasn’t.
