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

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СКАЧАТЬ a perfect stranger must have seemed appalling.

      Gamely Mountbatten struggled on, summoning up all the reserves of his gregarious, engaging personality. For what seemed to him like hours, his only reward was a series of monosyllabic grunts from the man beside him. Finally, after almost two hours, Jinnah began to soften. As the Moslem leader left his study, Mountbatten sighed to Alan Campbell-Johnson, his press attaché: ‘My God, he was cold! It took most of the interview to unfreeze him.’

      The man who would one day be hailed as the father of Pakistan had first been exposed to the idea at a black-tie dinner at London’s Waldorf Hotel in the spring of 1933. His host was Rahmat Ali, the graduate student who had set the idea on paper. Rahmat Ali had arranged the banquet with its oysters and un-Islamic Chablis at his own expense hoping to persuade Jinnah, India’s leading Moslem politician, to take over his movement. He received a chilly rebuff. Pakistan, Jinnah told him, was ‘an impossible dream’.

      The man whom the unfortunate graduate student had sought to make into the leader of a Moslem separatist movement had, in fact, begun his political career by preaching Hindu-Moslem unity. His family came from Gandhi’s Kathiawar peninsula. Indeed, had not Jinnah’s grandfather for some obscure reason become a convert to Islam, the two political foes would have been born into the same caste. Like Gandhi, Jinnah had gone to London to dine in the Inns of Court and be called to the bar. Unlike Gandhi however, he had come back from London an Englishman.

      He wore a monocle and superbly cut linen suits which he changed three or four times a day so as to remain cool and unruffled in the soggy Bombay climate. He loved oysters and caviare, champagne, brandy and good claret. A man of unassailable personal honesty and financial integrity, his canons were sound law and sound procedure. He was, according to one intimate, ‘the last of the Victorians, a parliamentarian in the mode of Gladstone or Disraeli.’

      A brilliantly successful lawyer, Jinnah moved naturally to politics and for a decade worked to keep the Hindus and Moslems of Congress united in a common front against the British. His disenchantment with Congress dated from Gandhi’s accession to power. The impeccably dressed Jinnah was not going to be bundled off to some squalid British jail half naked in a dhoti wearing a silly little white cap. Civil disobedience, he told Gandhi, was for ‘the ignorant and the illiterate’.

      The turning point in Jinnah’s career came after the 1937 elections when Congress refused to share with him and his Moslem League the spoils of office in those Indian provinces where there was a substantial Moslem minority. Jinnah was a man of towering vanity and he took Congress’s action as a personal rebuke. It convinced him he and the Moslem League would never get a fair deal from a Congress-run India. The former apostle of Hindu-Moslem unity became the unyielding advocate of Pakistan, the project he had labelled an ‘impossible dream’ barely four years earlier.

      A more improbable leader of India’s Moslem masses could hardly be imagined. The only thing Moslem about Mohammed Ali Jinnah was his parents’ religion. He drank, ate pork, religiously shaved his beard each morning and just as religiously avoided the mosque each Friday. God and the Koran had no place in Jinnah’s vision of the world. His political foe, Gandhi, knew more verses of the Moslem Holy Book than he did. He had been able to achieve the remarkable feat of securing the allegiance of the vast majority of India’s Moslems without being able to articulate more than a few sentences in their traditional tongue, Urdu.

      Jinnah despised India’s masses. He detested the dirt, the heat, the crowds of India. Gandhi travelled India in filthy third-class railway carriages to be with the people. Jinnah rode first-class to avoid them.

      Where his rival made a fetish of simplicity, Jinnah revelled in pomp. He delighted in touring India’s Moslem cities in princely processions, riding under victory arches on a kind of Rosebowl style float, preceded by silver-harnessed elephants and a band booming out ‘God Save The King’ because, Jinnah observed, it was the only tune the crowd knew.

      His life was a model of order and discipline. Even the phlox and petunias of his gardens marched out from his mansion in straight, disciplined lines, and when the master of the house paused there it was not to contemplate the beauty of his plants but to verify the precision of their alignment. Law books and newspapers were his only reading. Indeed, newspapers seemed to be this strange man’s passion. He had them mailed to him from all over the world. He cut them up, scrawled notes in their margins, meticulously pasted them into scrapbooks that grew in dusty piles in his office cupboards.

      Jinnah had only scorn for his Hindu rivals. He labelled Nehru ‘a Peter Pan’, a ‘literary figure’ who ‘should have been an English professor, not a politician’, ‘an arrogant Brahmin who covers his Hindu trickiness under a veneer of Western education’. Gandhi, to Jinnah, was ‘a cunning fox’, ‘a Hindu revivalist.’

      The sight of the Mahatma, during an interval in a conversation in Jinnah’s mansion, stretched out on one of his priceless Persian carpets, his mudpack on his belly, was something Jinnah had never forgotten – or forgiven.

      Among his Moslems Jinnah had no friends, only followers. He had associates, not disciples and, with the exception of his sister, ignored his family. He lived alone with his dream of Pakistan. He was almost six feet tall but weighed barely one hundred and twenty pounds. The skin on his face was stretched so fine that his prominent cheekbones below seemed to emit a translucent glow. He had thick, silver-grey hair, and – curiously enough for a man whose sole companion for seventeen years had been a dentist, his sister – a mouthful of rotting yellow teeth. So stern, so rigorously composed was Jinnah’s appearance he gave off an aura of steely, spartan strength. It was an illusion. He was a frail, sick man who already, in the words of his physician, had been living for three years on ‘will-power, whisky and cigarettes’.

      It was the first of those that was the key to the character and achievements of Jinnah. His rivals accused him of many a sin, his friends of many a slight. But no one, friend or foe, would ever accuse Mohammed Ali Jinnah of a lack of will-power.

      Mountbatten and Jinnah held six critical meetings during the first fortnight of April 1947. They were the vital conversations – not quite ten hours in length – which ultimately determined the resolution of the Indian dilemma. Mountbatten went into them armed with ‘the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right thing, not because I am persuasive so much as because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favourable light’. As he would later recall, he ‘tried every trick I could play, used every appeal I could imagine’, to shake Jinnah’s resolve to have partition. Nothing would. There was no argument that could move him from his consuming determination to realize the impossible dream of Pakistan.

      Jinnah owed his commanding position to two things. He had made himself absolute dictator of the Moslem League. There were men below him who might have been prepared to negotiate a compromise but, so long as Mohammed Ali Jinnah was alive, they would hold their silence. Second, more important, was the memory of the blood spilled in the streets of Calcutta a year before.

      Mountbatten and Jinnah did agree on one point at the outset – the need for speed. India, Jinnah declared, had gone beyond the stage at which a compromise solution was possible. There was only one solution, a speedy ‘surgical operation’. Otherwise, he warned, India would perish.

      When Mountbatten expressed concern lest partition might produce bloodshed and violence, Jinnah reassured him. Once his ‘surgical operation’ had taken place, all troubles would cease and India’s two halves would live in harmony and happiness. It was, Jinnah told Mountbatten, like a court case he’d handled between two brothers embittered by the shares assigned them under their father’s will. Yet, two years after the court had adjudicated their dispute, they were the greatest friends. That, he promised the Viceroy, would be the case in India.

      The Moslems СКАЧАТЬ