Thread by @Rammyyyyy_

Hyderabad Police action 1948: Survivor recalls Operation Polo. A LONG THREAD.👇🏼

— Gulnar Khanum, was 16-year-old when India forcefully annexed the then Independent princely state of Hyderabad in September 1948. All the men in her house were massacred by the Indian army.

— "I can never forget that September, it was thursday when the military entered the village. Many fled but we thought staying home can be safer. But the military men barged into our house, dragged all men in the family by their hair and aligned them only to shoot on their head.

— The sound of those four gunshots can never be forgotten. All the men were dead. The military entered with tanks firing in all directions, killing men, burning shops, setting homes on fire, followed by goons raping women, looting houses, and stabbing those running for life.

— My mother begged for our lives, and we ran away like people of no land, wandering in search of shelter. What followed after death were the local goons who entered Muslim homes, raped their women. Many women jumped into wells with their babies to save their dignity.

— Ammah ran away with my 3-year-old brother disguising him as a girl making him wear a frock, and putting bangles to save her son. Ammah came running to me with ash in her hand and started rubbing it on my face. I was a fair-skinned young girl, an easy prey in such war, she said.

— My mother was pregnant with my youngest sister, yet she was determined to save each one of her family like all of us were inside her womb. We did not know where to go, and the sky cried in our agony. The rain never stopped that night; the blood was all over the street.

— We strolled back to my Nani’s [grandmother] house in Udgir, 29 km away from Kamal Nagar, hungry and thirsty. When we reached there, one of my uncles was already shot dead and the other was missing.

— After the military action, a new menace of street goons sprang, harassing women on streets, knocking on their doors at night and throwing stones at windows. We never went back to Deoni; there was no home to return to. We were being hunted in our home.

— Amma would sleep with a dagger close to her side, even after a few years of the tragedy. She started working as a weed plucker in fields, harvesting crops, picking grains to raise my seven sisters and a brother.

— After three months of military action, I was married to your grandfather. Even they, in Kalyani [present-day Basavakalyan, Bidar] went through a similar trauma of the incident."

Read this heartbreaking story:
maktoobmedia.com/2021/09/18/hyd…

— The annexation of Hyderabad, with military aggression, is underplayed as ‘police action’ termed as Operation Polo. Muslims of Hyderabad state were massacred in three prong-military invasions, followed by a 3-year economic blockade, disruption of railway lines and & air raids.

— The government-appointed Sunderlal Committee report — declassified in 2013 — states a conservative death toll of nearly 40,000 people. But the oral histories record more than 2 lakh deaths — overwhelmingly Muslims — during those four days of annexation.

— "Apart from killings, the other atrocities recorded were rapes, abduction of women and children, forceful conversions, loot, arson, and desecration of mosques, seizure of property etc. The duty also compels us to add that we had absolutely unimpeachable to the effect..

effect there were instances in which men belonging to the Indian Army and the local police took part in lootings and other crimes," reads the report.

NEVER FORGET. NEVER FORGIVE.