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

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      ‘India has never been a true nation,’ Jinnah asserted. ‘It only looks that way on the map. The cows I want to eat, the Hindu stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me he has to wash his hands. The only thing the Moslem has in common with the Hindu is his slavery to the British.’

      Their arguments became, the Viceroy would later recall, an ‘amusing and rather tragic game of round and round the mulberry bush‘; Jinnah, the March Hare of Alice in Wonderland, never conceding a point; Mountbatten, the determined advocate of unity, driving at Jinnah from every angle, until he was afraid lest, as he noted at the time, ‘I drove the old gentleman quite mad.’

      For Jinnah, the division he proposed was the natural course. That division, however, would have to produce a viable state and that, Jinnah argued, meant that two of India’s great provinces, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to go into his Pakistan, despite the fact that each contained enormous Hindu populations.

      Mountbatten could not agree. The basis of Jinnah’s argument for Pakistan was that India’s Moslem minority should not be ruled by its Hindu majority. How then justify taking the Hindu minorities of Bengal and the Punjab into a Moslem state? If Jinnah insisted on dividing India to get his Islamic state, then the very logic he’d used to get it would compel Mountbatten to divide the Punjab and Bengal as part of the bargain.

      Jinnah protested. That would give him an economically unviable, ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’. Mountbatten, who didn’t want to give him any Pakistan at all, told the Moslem leader, that if he felt the nation he was to receive was as ‘moth-eaten’ as all that, he’d prefer he didn’t take it.

      ‘Ah,’ Jinnah would counter, ‘Your Excellency doesn’t understand. A man is a Punjabi or a Bengali before he is Hindu or Moslem. They share a common history, language, culture and economy. You must not divide them. You will cause endless bloodshed and trouble.’

      ‘Mr Jinnah, I entirely agree.’

      ‘You do?’

      ‘Of course,’ Mountbatten would continue. ‘A man is not only a Punjabi or Bengali before he is a Hindu or a Moslem, he is an Indian before all else. You have presented the unanswerable argument for Indian unity.’

      ‘But you don’t understand at all,’ Jinnah would counter, and the discussions would start around the mulberry bush again.

      Mountbatten was stunned by the rigidity of Jinnah’s position. ‘I never would have believed,’ he later recalled, ‘that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in the Inns of Court, was capable of simply closing his mind as Jinnah did. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the point. He did, but a kind of shutter came down. He was the evil genius in the whole thing. The others could be persuaded, but not Jinnah. While he was alive nothing could be done.’

      The climax to their talks came on 10 April, less than three weeks after Mountbatten’s arrival in India. For two hours he begged, cajoled, argued, and pleaded with Jinnah to keep India united. With all the eloquence he could command, he painted a picture of the greatness India could achieve, 400 million people of different races and creeds, bound together by a Central Union Government, with all the economic strength that would accrue to them from increased industrialization, playing a great part in world affairs as the most progressive, single entity in the Far East. Surely, Mr Jinnah did not want to destroy all that, to condemn the sub-continent to the existence of a third-rate power?

      Jinnah remained unmoved. He was, Mountbatten sadly concluded, ‘a psychopathic case, hell bent on this Pakistan.’

      Meditating alone in his study after Jinnah’s departure, Mountbatten realized he was probably going to have to give him what he wanted. His first obligation in New Delhi was to the nation that had sent him there, Britain. He longed to preserve India’s unity, but not at the expense of his country becoming hopelessly entrapped in an India collapsing in chaos and violence.

      He had to have a solution, he had to have it fast, and he could not impose it by force. Military command had given Mountbatten a penchant for rapid, decisive actions, such as the one he now took. In future years, his critics would assail him for having reached it too quickly, for acting like an impetuous sailor and not a statesman. Mountbatten, however, was not going to waste any more time on what he was certain would be futile arguments. He could argue with Jinnah, he concluded, until hell froze over, and hell in India would be the only consequence.

      He was prepared to acknowledge with blunt realism that Operation Seduction had failed to make an impact on the Moslem leader. The partition of India seemed increasingly the only escape. It now remained for Mountbatten to get Nehru and Patel to accept the principle and to find a plan for it which could win their support.

      The following morning he reviewed his talk with Jinnah for his staff. Then, sadly, he turned to his Chief of Staff, Lord Ismay. The time had come, he said, to begin drawing up a plan for the partition of India.

      Inevitably, Mountbatten’s decision would lead to one of the great dramas of modern history. Whatever the manner in which it was executed, it was bound to end in the mutilation of a great nation whose unity was the most imposing result of three and a half centuries of British colonization. To satisfy the exigent demands of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, two of India’s most distinctive entities, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to be carved up. The result would make Pakistan a geographic aberration, a nation of two heads separated by 970 miles of Himalayan peaks and Indian territory. Twenty days, more time than was required to sail from Karachi to Marseilles, would be needed to make the sea trip around the sub-continent from one half of Pakistan to the other. A non-stop flight between its two parts would require a four-engined aircraft, machines which would prove expensive luxuries for the new state.

      If the geographical distance dividing the two halves of Pakistan would be great, however, the psychological distance between the two peoples inhabiting them would be staggering. Apart from a common faith in Allah the One, the Merciful, Punjabis and Bengalis shared nothing. They were as different as Finns and Greeks. The Bengalis were short, dark and agile, racially a part of the masses of Asia. The Punjabis, in whose veins flowed the blood of thirty centuries of conquerors, were scions of the steppes of Central Asia, and their Aryan features bore the traces of Turkestan, Russia, Persia, the deserts of Arabia. Neither history nor language nor culture offered a bridge by which those two peoples might communicate. Their marriage in the common state of Pakistan would be a union created against all the dictates of logic.

      The Punjab was the crown jewel of India. Half the size of France, it ran from the Indus River in the north-west all the way to the outskirts of Delhi. It was a land of sparkling rivers and golden fields of wheat, great rich fields rolling down to a distant blue horizon, an oasis blessed by the Gods in the midst of India’s arid face. Its name meant ‘Country of Five Rivers’, after the five torrents to whose waters the Punjab owed its natural fertility. The most famous of them was one of the great rivers of the globe, the Indus, which had given its name to the Indian sub-continent.

      Five thousand years of tumultuous history had fashioned the Punjab’s character and given it its identity. Its plains had resounded to the galloping hooves of Asia’s conquering hordes. It was in the Punjab that the celestial song of Hinduism’s sacred book, the Bhagavad Gita, had been inspired by a mystic dialogue between Lord Krishna and the warrior king Arjuna. The Persian legions of Darius and Cyrus, the Macedonians of Alexander the Great had camped on its plains. Mauryas, Scythians, Parthians had occupied them before being dispersed by waves of Huns and the Caliphs of Islam bringing their monotheistic faith to India’s polytheistic Hindu millions. Three centuries of Moghul domination brought India to the apogee of its power and, sprinkled it with its priceless heritage of monuments. Finally the СКАЧАТЬ