Telangana
When India became independent from the British Empire in 1947, the Nizam of Hyderabad did not want to merge with the Indian Union and wanted to remain independent. The Government of India annexed Hyderabad State on 17 September 1948 after a military operation called Operation Polo. It appointed a civil servant, M. K. Vellodi, as first chief minister of Hyderabad State on 26 January 1950. He administered the state with the help of English-educated bureaucrats from the Madras and Bombay states, who were familiar with British systems of administration unlike the bureaucrats of Hyderabad State who used a completely different administrative system. The official language of the state was switched from Urdu to English.
20th-century events
In India, Mahatma Gandhi became a global icon for his non-violent struggle to achieve Indian independence. This was achieved in 1947 with the end of British rule in India and the partition of the territory into modern day India and Pakistan, which would later also further divide, leading to the creation of the People's Republic of Bangladesh in 1971. Elsewhere in Asia, The United States granted independence to the Philippines, its major Pacific possession in 1946. In French Indochina, armed insurrections forced the French out in the early 1950s, leading to the formation of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.