September 17th is special for multiple reasons as the day resonates with a wide spectrum of people and stakeholders. Based on various ancient hindu texts, Lord Vishwakarma is said to have been born on this date. As the divine architect and the creator of the universe he is venerated as the ancestor for all artisans. In another era and on the same date in 1948, after an agonising wait of 13 months, the princely state of Hyderabad, that was still languishing under the tyranny of the Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan and the brutality of his militia – the Razakars, was liberated. India’s first Minister of Home Affairs, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had ordered police action under Operation Polo, and within a span of five days, the entire Hyderabad Deccan was finally liberated on 17th September 1948. Exactly two years later, in 1950, our current Prime Minister, Narenda Modi was born. As the first Prime Minister to be born in independent India, and the only Prime Minister in six decades to win three consecutive national elections, he has been nothing short of a trailblazer.
What connects these 3 events of September 17th? The link between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emphasis on skilling and promoting artisanship and craftsmanship has its roots from our ancient texts. In the Puranas, Vishwakarma is believed to have had five faces and each of these faces created a son. Each son became the forefather of one of five major artisan communities – blacksmiths, carpenters, bronze (brass) smiths, stonemasons, and goldsmiths. For millennia, India’s craftsmanship was globally coveted. In 2014, after being voted into office, the Modi Government created a separate Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) to address the huge mismatch between education, employability and employment. The formulation of the Pradhan Mantri Viswakarma Yojana was a logical extension to improve the quality as well as the reach of products and services of artisans and craftspeople so that they can be seamlessly integrated into the domestic and global value chains. Therefore, the inspiration from Vishwakarma is not accidental but a well-designed and carefully crafted action plan .
Lord Vishwakarma is believed to have been an epic builder, he created Dwarka – on the request of Lord Krishna, Hastinapur – the city of Pandavas and Kauravas, apart from designing Lord Vishnu’s Sudarshan Chakra. The Modi Government is also a continuous builder of modern infrastructure by focusing on capital investments leading to a 60% increase in national highways in a decade, the doubling of the number of operational airports to 160, and modernising 1,275 railway stations across the nation. Aspirationally, the focus on building a Viksit Bharat – a developed India free of poverty with ample opportunities for everyone is akin to Vishwakarma’s own magnum opus, Swarg Lok – the abode of the Gods.
On 15th August 2022, as India celebrated 75 years of Independence from British colonialism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. At that time, he spoke of the ‘Pancha praan’ or ‘Five Resolutions’. If building a developed India takes cues from Vishwakarma then another of the resolutions was a call to decolonise our minds and free ourselves from a servile mentality that hung on to old frameworks such as minority appeasement. In fact, it is this blatant minority appeasement and a deeply ingrained colonial mindset in a majority of the national leadership and intellectuals of that time led to the heroic story of the Liberation of Hyderabad being deliberately erased from our national consciousness.
The story is a straightforward one – In 1947 when India attained independence, the Nizam of Hyderabad who ruled over a landmass of about 7% of India and 5% of population, with a large majority hindu population did not want to merge with India. Hyderabad then consisted of the modern day Telangana, north-eastern districts of Kalaburagi, Bellary, Raichur, Yadgir, Koppal, Vijayanagara and Bidar in Karnataka and the Marathwada region in Maharashtra that included the districts of Aurangabad, Beed, Hingoli, Jalna, Latur, Nanded, Osmanabad, and Parbhani. The Nizam was supported by Qasim Rizvi, then President of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM). Rizvi supported the Nizam in his quest for establishing Hyderabad Deccan as an independent Islamic nation and provided about 150,000 MIM volunteers to augment the Nizam’s regular army of 24,000. The Razakars rampaged villages, molested and raped Hindu women, wantonly killed the menfolk, and destroyed everything in sight. India’s former Prime Minister, P.V Narasimha Rao, described the massacres of the Razakars in Rangapuram and Laxmipuram villages as South India’s Jallianwala Bagh. The massacres committed by the Razakars at Bairanapply and Parkal villages are a part of the region’s oral history and are painfully narrated from one generation to another. It was under these circumstances that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel took decisive action and on September 17th 1948 the people of Hyderabad state were liberated and became a part of the Indian Union.
It is these inconvenient truths and this unsavoury past that successive governments at a national level and more recently at a state level have tried to suppress. They equate the 17th September celebrations as an insult to the Nizam and by extension an affront to the Muslim community. This appeasement streak is so strong that people forget that it was muslim journalists, such as Shoebullah Khan, who were at the forefront of the agitation and were killed by the Razakars for advocating a union into India. It forgets that by not celebrating this historic day, it is actually turning a blind eye to the sacrifices made by common citizens, Hindus and Muslims alike, of the erstwhile Hyderabad region to become a part of the Indian Union.
In March 2024, after 76 years of the Liberation of Hyderabad, the Government of India issued a gazette notification to celebrate the 17th day of September every year as “Hyderabad Liberation Day”. Over the last decade many such old, outdated frameworks have been set-aside and new idioms for governance have emerged. We are taking pride in our past and with that as an anchor we are catapulting to a future that delivers on our potential and on our own terms. The architect of this future is none other than India’s modern day Vishwakarma – Prime Minister Narendra Damordas Modi.
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