ABSTRACT
Born in an ordinary family, Kasim Razvi was rather a frail and thin man, but circumstances made him a sort of ‘Supreme Leader’ of Hyderabad’s Muslims.
Razvi was born in 1900. He was educated at the Aligarh Muslim University, from where he obtained the BA and LLB degrees. He started criminal practice at Latur. Later he joined the Ittehad-ul-Muslameen, a radical or hard-line Muslim organisation founded by Sadr-Yar Jung in 1936. In 1946 Razvi was elected president of the Ittehad.
As India’s independence began to appear certain and not too far away, the Nizam, as well as Razvi, resolved to preserve Hyderabad’s identity as an ‘independent Muslim state’. A separate volunteer force called the razakars was created by the Ittahad. As Lord Birkenhead has observed in his biography of Sir Walter Monckton, Razvi and the razakars ‘were determined to wreck any negotiations which might lead to [any] compromise with India’.
Razvi was prosecuted in some cases: for instance, the Shoebullah murder case, the Bibinagar riots case and some others. Sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, he was released on 11 September 1957. He went to Pakistan on 18 September 1957. He died in Karachi on 15 January 1970.
