When the Communist Party(CPI) was working together with Congress to overthrow the feudal rule of Nizam,Congress leaders were secretly making alliances with landlords. In 1946, when Sangham started seizing and redistributing the land of big landlords, Congress squads started raiding and launching attacks on the people, in support of the exploiting landlords. Congress had adopted the policy of expelling all CPI members holding office in the Andhra Mahasabha and other organisations. Congress was legalised by the Nizam in 1946. When the agitation started, and the forces of Nizam unleashed a crackdown on communists, the state Congress remain neutral. In 1947, Nehru signed the standstill agreement with Nizam, despite ongoing atrocities by Razakars, because of the fear that Indian invasion will help the communists to strengthen their position. This agreement allowed the Nizam breathing space to organise repression. The direct fight against the Razakars during the one year of the standstill agreement was taken up solely by the Communist Party of India. Indian army marched into Hyderabad on September 13, 1948. The military intervention was welcomed by the peasant communes. They believed the army was there to help them defeat the Nizam’s government. The rebels handed over arms and ammunition to the army and returned to their villages with the belief that the armed conflict was over. But, Nehru Government not only permitted the hated Nizam to continue as Rajpramukh and Kasim Razvi to migrate to Pakistan, but also directed its main attack against the hard-won gains of the Telangana peasantry. The communists were described as the primary target rather than the Nizam and the Razakars. V.P. Menon (Secretary to the Government of India in the Ministry of the States) had briefed the American embassy about the intervention and promised them that the communists would be eradicated in return for their support in justifying the military action to the international community. The military administration promoted feudal restoration in Telangana. The CPI was banned and the army launched a military offensive against the peasant communes. The destruction of the popular democratic peasant movement became the principal aim and the immediate task of the Indian Government and its armed forces. A huge 50,000-strong force of armed personnel of different categories was deployed to violently suppress the movement and restore the shattered landlord rule. The class that benefitted the most from the military regime was big landlords. They became allies of the police and returned to their respective villages to identify Sangham leaders and members of the Communist Party to teach them a lesson. The redistributed lands were granted back to their original owners. Army ordered indiscriminate arrests, burning down of entire villages where land redistribution had occurred and extrajudicial killings of suspects after capture.
By December 1949, as many as 6,000 peasants were killed; more than 10,000 Communist cadres and people’s fighters were thrown into detention camps and sentenced to life imprisonment; some to continuous imprisonment of 40 to 50 years, out of which 108 were sentenced to death; more than 50,000 people were dragged into police and military camps from time to time to be beaten, tortured, and terrorised for weeks and months together; tribal communities were evicted from their villages and placed in large detention camps, thousands of communists were hanged along the trees leading to the villages, several lakhs of people in thousands of villages were subjected to regular police and military raids and suffered cruel lathi charges and firing, thousands of women were molested and had to undergo all sorts of humiliations and indignities; in a word, the entire region was subjected to a brutal police and military terror rule for five years, initially by the Nizam and his Razakars, and subsequently by the combined armed forces of the Union Government and the State Government of Hyderabad. After the communists, the poor Muslims became the target of police action, the basis of which was the rule of Muslims over a predominantly Hindu population. The fact that the feudal rule of Nizam was as oppressive as the rule of any other Hindu Raja was sidelined. The conditions of the peasantry in other princely states ruled by a Hindu King were no less different. Surprisingly, ruthless individuals such as Kasim Rizvi, leader of the Razakars, big landlords, and Nizam were let off by the police. Ironically, the Sunderlal Committee, in its investigations, noted that in Latur, the hometown of Rizvi, almost 1,000 Muslims had been killed by armed forces. Communalism became rife when Hindu communal organisations Hindu Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj became active (Patel’s strategy against Nizam’s Hyderabad to save the Hindu Mahasabha leaders in Gandhi Assasination Case and to use them in Hyderabad). Incidents of forceful conversion and tattooing of Muslims, including women, with Hindu symbols were widely noted by the Sundarlal committee report. The Communist Party played its role during this period of communal conflagration. The reprisals against Muslims after the ‘police action’ were prevented in the Telangana area where the revolution was strong and Sanghams were present, whereas in many areas in the Marathwada region, where the movement was not as strong as in Telangana, reprisals occurred on a large scale.
On 25th October 1951, the CPI Central Committee officially declared the end of the rebellion. The struggle was withdrawn, without talking to the guerillas and party ranks or consolidating whatever achievements were made. The Polit Bureau, instead of realising the correctness of the line and working out a line for Indian Revolution, denounced it outright and rejected as reformist, and decided to participate in the forthcoming elections. This step of the leadership, which was expected to take up the responsibility of helping the struggle in all its aspects, was again a stab in the back of the struggle which was already undergoing critical phases due to suppression by Nizam and Indian military forces. The party betrayed the great Telangana Armed Peasant Struggle and stepped in parliament. This strengthened right opportunism in the Party. If we see the later strategy of the Party, the leadership of the Party made a gimmick of words and started considering India as a fundamentally independent capitalist country. It praised the big, comprador capitalists as progressive and moved to the parliamentary path. However, therevolutionary faction in the Party never accepted this right opportunist tendency and later in the leadership of Charu Majumdar CPIML was formed. Telangana will always remain a glorious chapter in the history of peasant struggles. It was a remarkable struggle that was characterized by the radical egalitarian politics and participation of all sections of the peasantry. The violence employed by the state was met by popular resistance, which for a time, employing guerrilla war tactics and all manners of weapons, was able to carve out a political space in which a revolutionary society began to be created. It was the first serious effort by sections of the communist party leadership to learn from the experiences of the Chinese revolution and the teachings of Mao and to develop a comprehensive line for India’s democratic revolution. It was radical not only in its basic questions but also in terms of its pioneering spirit that stands as a beacon for all militant peasant movements in the sub-continent even today. Sixteen years after the official withdrawal of the Telangana armed struggle in 1951, it was Srikakulam which responded immediately to the call given by Naxalbari in 1967. Today, when the Indian government is making new policies to oppress the farmers, when the Indian peasantry has been bled by neo-liberal policies and farmers’ suicide has become endemic, we must remember the lessons of the Telangana revolution. An exploitation-free new world can be created and it must be created- comrades of Telangana have taughtusthis.
