Game of the name

Move to rename Hyderabad revives a long-buried past

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has placed so much importance on a municipal election that it has deployed a host of heavyweights led by Union Home Minister Amit Shah to campaign for the party in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections scheduled today. The motive is transparent: To create the ground for the party in the Telangana Assembly elections due in 2023 (the BJP has two seats in the 120-member House). This is a valid political objective; the toxic communal rhetoric and historical fabrications on which the party is campaigning are not. Hyderabad’s integrated Hindu-Muslim ethos has long been part of the city’s appeal. The BJP’s attack on this integrative culture is easy to understand, given the party’s Hindutva agenda, but that is no reason to support it or re-name the city Bhagyanagar.

The BJP has provided no proof or evidence that the city founded by the Qutb Shahi dynasty — one of the multiple breakaway kingdoms from the once mighty Bahmani kingdom — was originally called Bhagyanagar and came to be called Hyderabad under its Muslim rulers. Nor is there any need to rename Hussain Sagar Lake, created by a Sufi saint, “Vinayak Sagar”. It is true that the city did have a history of communal violence in the immediate post-independence period. The Owaisi family’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), which holds 44 of the 150 seats in the GHMC, was undeniably complicit in the Razakar militia group’s large-scale attacks on Hindus when Hyderabad was under the Nizam’s rule and opposed the state’s merger with India. This was, in part, the provocation for the Indian army moving in to stop the killings and integrate the princely state with the Union of India, following which Hindus moved in from outside the state (mostly from west of the state) and took revenge by slaughtering Muslims.

But this sorry history has been left behind, and there is no reason to create a fresh divide between the two communities that have lived amicably for all the decades since, achieving a level of integration seen rarely in other parts of the country. In that context, Union minister Smriti Irani’s claims that the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and AIMIM have been complicit in “appeasing” Muslims by harbouring 75,000 Rohingya Muslims as well as infiltrators from Pakistan and Bangladesh in the city appear baseless and also beg the question of why the Union home ministry, with a panoply of investigative and enforcement agencies at its disposal, had not acted on this information before.

The irony of turning the Hyderabad elections into a testing ground for communal rhetoric is that the voters’ real concerns are being ignored in a welter of irrelevant issues. The Urban Distress and Reforms Study, 2020, which was conducted in 15 out of the 24 Assembly constituencies within the GHMC, showed that over 60 per cent of the voters were concerned with poor roads and sanitation, about half with poor health, and about a third with poor education in municipal schools. Given that these findings indicate a clear dissatisfaction with the governance of the TRS, a clear agenda for “development” exists for any new challenger to exploit. But the BJP appears to have jettisoned that platform for an overtly divisive one.