Talk:Annexation of Hyderabad

Pakistani propaganda report

You would notice that I have removed the {{unreliable source?}} for the BBC News article on the Sunderlal Report. I had forgotten why this tag was added back in 2017 and had to refresh my memory. It was because the BBC News had put up the fake Pakistani propaganda version of the report in its image. The write-up was fine, but the image was that of the fake report. (BBC has now fixed the image.)

The Pakistani version still exists. It has been printed in full in Omar Khalidi's book. It starts with the paragraph:

Before the Military Action (i.e., before 13 September 1948) the general situation in the state was peaceful. However, in the districts of Nalgonda and Warangal the Communists were active, and the Razakars (volunteers belong to the MIM) were involved in crimes in the villages bordering Indian provinces such as in Nanded and Aurangabad. Instances of murder and kidnapping were rare....

The real report says nothing of the sort. Somebody just cooked up whatever they wanted to say, and produced a report look-alike to fool the world. I suppose this will remain as a perennial proof of the kind of games Pakistan plays.

The real report was published for the first time in the 2014 book of Noorani. He got the original from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, which is the only copy known to exist. Since it wasn't a government report there were no copies anywhere else, except perhaps with the authors and Sardar Patel (who was the other recipient of the report).

The reason I am bringing this up now is that William Dalrymple apparently used the same fake report in his book. The book is being cited and sourced in the article:

• Dalrymple, William (2004) [1998]. "Under the Char Minar". The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters. pp. 210. ISBN 9780143031093.

Should we get rid of it? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 02:32, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Support removal of Dalrymple. He is far from an expert in this area. And, the error is obvious. TrangaBellam (talk) 15:16, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

This is just another balatant attempt to cover up the atrocities committed in Hyderabad during annexation. Terming whatever comes against 'Pakistani propaganda' is totally unfair but it has been normalised on Wikipedia over the years. I think some neutral editors should look into this. Pinging Fowler&fowler... USaamo ^(t@lk) 12:47, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

It's very regrettable that nothing was done about this and that Kautilya3's tendentious edits were allowed to go into effect, not just here but also at Hyderabad massacres. The result is an article that severely downplays the extent of the atrocities, and in fact even blames the victims for the crimes committed against them— as an example of the latter, over the course of several years Kautilya3 and pals have slowly wittled down the "Goals" in the infobox of Hyderabad massacres to just two things, one of which is "Retributive violence", which uncritically reproduces the Hindutva apologetic that "the Muslims had it coming" while ignoring the vast body of scholarship that challenges this assertion. Can you imagine if the article for The Holocaust or even WWII claimed that German violence was "retributive"? They have also conspired to remove categorization of the events as genocide, even though multiple reliable sources have made this claim.

Pinging again @USaamo and @Fowler&fowler— both these articles are genocide-apologetic travesties as currently written. Brusquedandelion (talk) 01:49, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Would you be ok as dismissing the report by the Indian government as "pro-Indian propaganda"? Does the Wikipedia article on The Holocaust dismiss Allied estimates of the death toll as "Allied propaganda"? I can't think of any other instances where estimates reckoned by the very government responsible for the atrocities (the Indian government) are somehow taken as inherently more reliable than those of other countries, even "enemy" countries. Brusquedandelion (talk) 01:52, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

It was because the BBC News had put up the fake Pakistani propaganda version of the report in its image. The write-up was fine, but the image was that of the fake report. (BBC has now fixed the image.)

This is the earliest version of the BBC article on the Wayback Machine. You will note that the image it has of the report is the same one that is on the current, live version of the article.

Notably, a verbatim copy of the exact same text as in the image can be found in the version of the report published in Appendix 14 of Noorani's book:

[...]overtook the remaining eight. Out of these again the worst sufferers have been the districts of Osmanabad, Gulburga, Bider and Nander, in which four the number of people killed during and after the police action was not less, if not more than 18,000. In the other four districts viz. Aurangabad, Bir, Nalgunda and Medak those who lost their lives numbered at least 5 thousand.

 

We can say 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.

So exactly what are you referring to? Can you provide an archived version of the BBC article that references the fake version of the report in any way?

Also, even if it were true that the BBC had commited this error initially, if they fixed the image, as you claim, how exactly does it remain an unreliable source? Especially given that you removed the citation even in places where it was used without reference to the image at all? Brusquedandelion (talk) 09:08, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

References

Requested move 15 August 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Not moved. (non-admin closure) Natg 19 (talk) 00:24, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

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Annexation of Hyderabad → Annexation of Hyderabad by the Dominion of India – better descriptive title, consistent with other such articles. Peter Ormond 💬 19:58, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. Per Category:Annexation there is a mixture of title conventions. The current title is not ambiguous so there's no real need for a longer title. Ivar the Boneful (talk) 00:22, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

The title is incomplete. It is about "Annexation of Hyderabad", but doesn't mention "annexation by whom"? Peter Ormond 💬 02:30, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose - Per Ivar the Boneful. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 03:05, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose Per Ivar the Boneful and WP:TITLE. The current title is descriptive, recognizable, concise, and natural enough. --RegentsPark (comment) 09:09, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose: unless there is another example of an annexation of Hyderabad, there is no need for the disambiguation.  Bait30  ^{Talk 2 me pls?} 22:39, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose unnecessary disambiguation -- DaxServer (talk) 07:54, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Major changes of wording

182.48.219.128 (talk · contribs) has been making major changes regarding the wording of the article. Before more changes are made, I would like to ask them to discuss the changes here on the talk page so that consensus can be reached. Remember that Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view. Thank-you, Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 16:10, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Recent edits— over quotation and other problems

Dear @Capitals00: I see you reverted my edit (as well as some purely CE-related edits I made subsequently) which was itself a revert of a few of your edits, chiefly this one. I'd like to note that per the WP:BRD cycle, when your edits are challenged via a revert (with an explanation), you are supposed to take it to the talk page, but I'm not going to get into an edit war with you. I will instead respond to your edit summary here.

First, you state that [t]here is no prohibition on quotes. This is strictly true, in that Wikipedia policies are rarely formulated as strict prohibitions. However, Wikipedia warns against excessive reliance on quotes (see WP:OVERQUOTE and WP:OVERQUOTING). Excessive quotation is especially problematic when such quotes are WP:PRIMARY sources, as your Nehru quotes are; Wikipedia articles should primarily be based on reliable WP:SECONDARY sources, with occasional supplementation from primary and WP:TERTIARY sources. The reasons for this are numerous; I suggest you read the articles I've linked outlining these policies and guidelines, but of special relevance here is the WP:NPOV issues such quotes can introduce to the article. Nehru is about as far from an impartial source as there could be on this topic, even if he weren't a primary source. Uncritically relying on such quotes without secondary source evaluations is a recipe for a poor, likely biased article. And again— this is not the only issue with excessive primary source quotation; I'm not here to rewrite the contents of the pages I linked earlier, so please refer to them.

Also, in some cases (for example, with the paragraph that in your version starts with Nehru, in a letter to V. K. Menon...), you replaced content sourced to reliable secondary sources with extensive Nehru quotes that actually substantively change the meaning of the content. It is unclear why you made these changes. It is one thing to add new content, and it would be bad enough if the new content was lengthy primary source quotes subbing for secondary source analysis, but quite another to do this with primary source quotes that don't make the same point. And I don't even necessarily mean "make the same point" in terms of POV issues; I mean the old paragraph and the new one are just straight up talking about different, or contradictory, things. In this paragraph, for instance, the original content pointed out two important things: first, that Nehru was reluctant to attack due to fear of Pakistani intervention; and second, that such fears were fundamentally misplaced, as Pakistan had no such plans. The replacement text consists of a quote (that is frankly largely fluff) in which Nehru expresses something closer to the opposite sentiment as what the original content suggested: he states instead that Military action becomes essential, with no mention of concerns about a Pakistani intervention. After this, your version does contain the briefest mention of this issue: It was also believed that there could be a possible military response by Pakistan. However, for reasons that remain unexplained by you and opaque to me, the part about how such fears were unsubstantiated is just deleted.

Next, you claimed in the edit summary that I did blanket revert against mainly non-quote text. "Mainly non quote text" is not an accurate characterization of your edits. I would say easily half, perhaps closer to 60-70% of your edits consists of excessively long Nehru quotations; this is exacerbated by the fact that some of these quotes replaced higher quality, secondary source content. Additionally, this is not the only problem with it: a number of edits you seem to have effected for stylistic or CE reasons actually had the opposite effect, and resulted in prose that was either non-standard/non-idiomatic or stylistically just worse. This issue by itself would not warrant reversion, but combined with the other issues I pointed out, I felt that, on balance, reverting your edit was the best course of action.

Please note that the purpose of my revert was not to keep you from ever including any of the content you added in the article. You should tighten up the Nehru quotes, and supplement them with secondary sources that critically evaluate them; then I will have no objection. I can help with fixing the CE related issues as well if I see you are willing to work on the former task. But if you are unwilling or unable to do this in the near future, I think the article is better off remaining in its prior state until such time as you are able to compose a better set of changes.

Also, for future reference, it's better to break up your edits rather than making one giant edit; this makes it easier for users to revert less helpful edits while retaining more useful changes. Brusquedandelion (talk) 04:59, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I removed what couldn't be verified or it was entirely undue and added the essential information. Instead of dedicating various sentences to that point, I simply made it "It was also believed that there could be a possible military response by Pakistan" which is accurate and does not enforce any validity.

There are only 2 quotes (with <blockquote>) in the entire article and both were added by me. That's why you don't have to go after them by saying that the article "already" has a problem with quotation. Capitals00 (talk) 05:08, 15 March 2024 (UTC)