In September 1948, India's military invaded the princely state of Hyderabad, whose Muslim ruler (the Nizam) had resisted joining the Indian Union, in an operation India termed a 'police action' and annexed the state within days. The operation was followed by widespread violence, principally targeting the state's Muslim population; a government-commissioned inquiry (the Sunderlal Committee) estimated 27,000–40,000 people killed, though the report was suppressed for decades and other estimates range higher. Some Hyderabadi Muslims subsequently migrated to Pakistan. The episode remains one of the more disputed integrations of a princely state into independent India.
The Indian Army invaded and annexed the princely state of Hyderabad, ruled by the Nizam, in a five-day military operation followed by large-scale communal violence
The 1941 census of the princely state counted 16,338,534 people, roughly 85 per cent Hindu and 12-13 per cent Muslim under a Muslim ruling establishment. The Sunderlal committee, whose report the Indian government suppressed until 2013, estimated 27,000-40,000 deaths in the communal violence that followed Operation Polo, while other contemporary estimates ran as high as 200,000.
The Sunderlal Committee, appointed by Jawaharlal Nehru's government in late 1948, concluded 'at a very conservative estimate that in the whole state at least 27 thousand to 40 thousand people lost their lives during and after the police action', overwhelmingly Muslims. The report was suppressed for decades and only surfaced publicly in the 2010s; higher figures of up to 200,000 circulate in some Hyderabadi Muslim and Pakistani accounts but rest on no documented enumeration, while the Government of India has never adopted an official toll.
The Sunderlal Committee report documented mass killings of Muslims, rape and abduction of women, looting and arson, seizure of houses and lands, and the desecration of mosques and forcible conversions.
India, Pakistan