India’s Vice President Hamid Ansari payed rich tributes to the glorious legacy of history and culture of Hyderabad on Thursday and hoped it would continue.
“Its inherited tradition of tolerance, co-existence, inclusiveness and cultural effervescence…to signal its uniqueness and remain an example for the country,” he noted.
The Vice President delivered the first Mohammad Quli Qutb Shah Memorial Lecture instituted by Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) to help consolidate and promote the convention of peaceful living among all citizens.
“Contemporary Hyderabad has crafted with skill and success a place for itself in the world of 21st century,” which it should continue with full vigor said Ansari.
He recited a powerful couplet:
“Hum ko mita sake yeh zamane meiN dam nahiN/Hum say zamana khud hai, zamaney se hum nahiN.”
The Vice President asked Hyderabadis by inference to declare that Epoch does not have the power to eliminate them; Epoch is there because of them not otherwise.
He even spoke in detail about power struggle in the medieval India.
“To a historian, or a student of geopolitics, the power equation of the Moghals and the Qutb Shahis on the one hand, and of the Moghuls and the Safawids (of Iran) on the other, sheds interesting light on the rules of the game of political chess that have an abiding quality and transience limitations of time and geography.
“Equally evident is the persisting nature of instrumentalities—threat or use of force, interference on pretexts of faith, use and misuse of trade and traders, and attempts to seek ‘fifth columns’ based on affinities of race or religion—that were used to further policy objectives.”
Concluding his lecture that carried quotations from a variety of historians and researchers, he said, “Another set of historians, even normal citizens, would search for the perennial rather than the transitory in the legacy of the Mohammad Quli Qutb Shah and his successors and perhaps raise two questions: What kind of political and socio-economic culture did the successor states of Hyderabad inherit? Was there anything of value left by the state of Hyderabad and can it still contribute to the Indian polity.”
Notable among dignitaries to attend the lecture were Governor E. S. L. Narasimhan, Telangana’s Deputy Chief Minister Mohammad Mahmood Ali, MANUU vice chancellor Aslam Parvaiz, State Minorities Commission chairman Abid Rasool Khan, and media personality Mir Ayoob Ali Khan.
Video: First Quli Qutb Shah Memorial Lecture
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKsuE6ILocY]