Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

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СКАЧАТЬ quintessential politician. He was an Oriental Tammany Hall boss who ran the machinery of the Congress Party with a firm and ruthless hand. He should have been the easiest member of the Indian quartet for Mountbatten to deal with. Like the Viceroy, he was a practical, pragmatic man, a hard but realistic bargainer. Yet the tension between them was so real, so palpable, that it seemed to Mountbatten he could reach out and touch it.

      Its cause was in no way related to the great issues facing India. It was a slip of paper, a routine government minute issued by Patel’s Home Ministry, dealing with an appointment. Mountbatten, however, had read in its tone, in the way Patel had put it out, a calculated challenge to his authority.

      Patel had a well-earned reputation for toughness. He had an instinctive need to take the measure of a new interlocutor, to see how far he could push him. That piece of paper on his desk, Mountbatten was convinced, was a test, a little examination he had to go through with Patel before he could get down to serious matters.

      Vallabhbhai Patel was passed a cable announcing his wife’s death as he was pacing the floor of a Bombay court-room summing up his case for the jury. He glanced at it, thrust it into his pocket, and continued his peroration without breaking off his sentence.

      That incident formed part of the legend of Vallabhbhai Patel and was a measure of the man. Emotion, one of his associates once observed, formed no part of his character. The remark was not wholly exact. Patel was an emotional man, but he never let those emotions break through the composed façade he turned to the world. If he gave off one salient impression, it was that of a man wholly in control of himself.

      In a land in which men threw their words around like sailors their money after three months at sea, Patel hoarded his phrases the way a miser hoards coins. His daughter, who had been his constant companion since his wife’s death, rarely exchanged ten sentences with him a day. When Patel did talk, however, people listened.

      Patel was Indian from the uppermost lump of his bald head to the calluses on the soles of his feet. His Delhi home was filled with books but every one of them was written by an Indian author about India. He was the only Indian leader who sprang from the soil of India. His father had been a peasant farmer in Gujerat province near Bombay and Patel still lived his life at a peasant’s rhythm. He rose faithfully at 4 a.m. and was in bed just as regularly each night at 9.30. The first waking hours of each day Patel spent on his toilet, doing the bulk of his reading, 30 newspapers sent to him daily from every part of India. His life was watched over with jealous vigilance by his daughter and only child, Maniben. For two decades, she had been his secretary, his ADC, his confidante, the mistress of his household. So close was their relationship they even shared the same bedroom.

      Patel’s vocation for Indian nationalism had come from his father who’d gone off to fight the British at the side of a local warlord in the 1857 Mutiny. He’d spent the winter nights of his boyhood around the dung fire of their peasants’ hut, listening to his old soldier’s tales. Soon after, he left the land for good to work in the great textile mills of Ahmedabad where Gandhi was to found his first Indian ashram. He studied at night, saved almost every rupee he earned until, at 33, he was able to send himself to London to study the law.

      He never saw the London of the Mayfair drawing-rooms where Nehru had been an admired guest. The London he knew best was the library of the Inns of Court. He walked twice a day the ten miles separating the courts from his lodging to save the bus fare. The day he was called to the bar, he took another walk, to the docks, to book a passage home. Once he returned, he never left India again.

      He settled in Ahmedabad, practising law with brilliant effect for the mill owners whose wage slave he’d once been. Patel had not even looked up from his nightly bridge game the first time he’d heard Gandhi speak in the Ahmedabad Club. Someone, however, brought him a text of the Mahatma’s speech and as he read its lines a vision rose from its pages: the vision his father had inspired around a dung fire in the winter nights of his boyhood.

      He sought Gandhi out and offered him his services. In 1922 Gandhi, anxious to see what civil disobedience might achieve, asked Patel to organize an experimental campaign among 87,000 people in 137 villages in the county of Bardoli outside Bombay. His organization was so comprehensive, so complete, that the campaign succeeded beyond even Gandhi’s hopes. From that moment on, Patel had shared with Nehru the place just below Gandhi’s in the independence movement. Employing his special genius he had assembled the Congress Party’s machine, thrusting its tentacles into the remotest corners of India.

      Patel had always been profoundly wary of his brother in Congress khadi, Nehru. The two men were natural rivals and their ideas of what independent India should be were markedly different. Patel had no use for Nehru’s Utopian dream of building a new society. He dismissed his visions of a brave new Socialist world as ‘this parrot cry of Socialism’. Capitalist society worked, he maintained, the problem was to Indianize it, to make it work better, not jettison it for an impracticable ideal.

      ‘Patel,’ one of his aides noted, ‘came from an industrial town, a centre for machines, factories and textiles. Nehru came from a place where they grew flowers and fruit.’

      He scorned Nehru’s fascination with foreign affairs, the great debates of the world. He knew where power was to be found and that was where he was, in the Home Ministry, developing the loyalty of what would be independent India’s police, security, and information services, as he had developed the loyalty of the Congress machine. Nehru might wear Gandhi’s mantle but he walked with an uneasy tread, because he knew the legions behind him longed for another Caesar. Like Jinnah, with whom his relations were cordial, Patel was underestimated, his importance undervalued by a world whose regards were riveted on Gandhi and Nehru. It was an error. Patel, one of his aides said, ‘was India’s last Moghul’.

      The Viceroy looked at the note which had offended him, then passed it across his desk to Patel. Quietly he asked him to withdraw it. Patel brusquely refused.

      Mountbatten studied the Indian leader. He was going to need the support of this man and the machinery he represented. But he was sure he would never get it if he did not face him down now.

      ‘Very well,’ said Mountbatten, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to order my plane.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Patel, ‘why?’

      ‘Because I’m leaving,’ Mountbatten replied. ‘I didn’t want this job in the first place. I’ve just been looking for someone like you to give me an excuse to throw it up and get out of an impossible situation.’

      ‘You don’t mean it!’ exclaimed Patel.

      ‘Mean it?’ replied Mountbatten. ‘You don’t think I am going to stay here and be bullied by a chap like you, do you? If you think you can be rude to me and push me around, you’re wrong. You’ll either withdraw that minute or one of us is going to resign. And let me tell you that if I go, I shall first explain to your Prime Minister and to Mr Jinnah why I am leaving. The breakdown in India which will follow, the blood that will be shed, will be on your shoulders and no one else’s.’

      Patel stared at Mountbatten in disbelief.

      Come, come, he declared, Mountbatten wasn’t going to throw over the Viceroyalty after only a month on the job.

      ‘Mr Patel,’ Mountbatten answered, ‘you evidently don’t know me. Either you withdraw your minute here and now, or I shall summon the Prime Minister and announce my resignation.’

      A long silence followed. ‘You know,’ Patel finally sighed, ‘the awful part is I think you mean it.’

      ‘You’re damned right I do,’ answered СКАЧАТЬ