THE RECORD OF CONGRESS
SIR,—Mr. Edward Thompson does not strengthen the argument of his etter in your issue of July 13 by inaccurate statements about an Indian State, obviously about Hyderabad. He says that any Political Officer who s served in Hyderabad can tell Mr. Rawlinson that not five per cent. f the higher posts go to Hindus. No officer with experience of modern Hyderabad could possibly say this. The English Civil List of the State current in May last showed a total of 1,765 gazetted officers in the civil services of the State. Of them Muslims constituted 68 per cent., Hindus 24 per cent., and others 8 per cent.; Muslims held only 58 per cent. of the 1o2 highest posts carrying salaries of 0.S.Rs.2,000 or 'more. At present distinguished Hindus hold a seat on the Executive Council, the post of Chief Justice, three other seats on the High Court Bench, and the important posts of Managing Director of the Nizam's State Railways, Director of the Medical and Public Health Department and State Trans- port Officer. There are Hindus in high and responsible positions in every civil department, in the Osmania University and in the Army. Admittedly their number is much smaller than that of the Muslims, though the Muslim percentage of the total population is only 13. But the causes of this Muslim preponderance are historical and obvious, in a territory for boo years under continuous Muslim rule ; they have no bearing on what has or has not happened under a recent regime in British India.
No less irrelevant to the record of that regime is what, with all respect, must be described as Mr. Thompson's utterly misleading statement that In Hyderabad the medium of University instruction is Urdu, " which ardly any of its people, Moslem or Hindu, speak." The 1941 census showed total population of Hyderabad State to be 16,338634. Of these 2,187,0o5 returned Urdu as their mother-tongue and 2,238,264 more as their second language ' • the total number of Muslims was 2,097,475. The non-Muslim peoples of the State speak one of three major languages, Telugu, Marathi or Kanarese, and yet other languages are spoken by various, minorities. The only language spoken by someone in almost every village of the State is Urdu or Hindustani, which for generations has been the lingua franca of Hyderabad and other wide areas of India. In every public university in India except the Osmania the medium of instruction is English, the mother-tongue of no Indians. Once the founders of the Osmania University bad boldly decided to have.an Indian and not a foreign language as the medium of instruction, the only prac- cable language was Urdu, the mother-tongue of one and the second
language of another out of every eight Hyderabadis, and the only language common to the State and the greater part of India.—I am, Sir, your Revenue Member, Executive Council of His Exalted Highness The Nizam Cambridge. of Hyderabad and Berar.
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