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

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СКАЧАТЬ caused by the decision to stop recruiting during the war and the rising antagonism between its Hindu and Moslem members, meant that the rule of that vaunted institution, the Indian Civil Service, could not survive the year. The time for discussion and debate was past. Speed, not deliberation, was needed to avoid a catastrophe.

      Coming from a man of Abell’s stature, those words gave the new Viceroy a dismal shock. Yet they were only the first in a stream of reports which engulfed him during his first fortnight in India. He received an equally grim analysis from the man he’d picked to come with him as his Chief of Staff, General Lord Ismay, Winston Churchill’s Chief of Staff from 1940 to 1945. A veteran of the sub-continent as officer in the Indian Army and military secretary to an earlier Viceroy, Ismay concluded, ‘India was a ship on fire in mid-ocean with ammunition in her hold.’ The question, he told Mountbatten, was: could they get the fire out before it reached the ammunition?

      The first report Mountbatten received from the British Governor of the Punjab warned him ‘there is a civil war atmosphere throughout the province’. One insignificant paragraph of that report offered a startling illustration of the accuracy of the Governor’s words. It mentioned a recent tragedy in a rural district near Rawalpindi. A Moslem’s water buffalo had wandered on to the property of his Sikh neighbour. When its owner sought to reclaim it, a fight, then a riot, erupted. Two hours later, a hundred human beings lay in the surrounding fields, hacked to death with scythes and knives because of the vagrant humours of a water buffalo.

      Five days after the new Viceroy’s arrival incidents between Hindus and Moslems took 99 lives in Calcutta. Two days later, a similar conflict broke out in Bombay leaving 41 mutilated bodies on its pavements.

      Confronted by these outbursts of violence, Mountbatten called India’s senior police officer to his study and asked if the police were capable of maintaining law and order in India.

      ‘No, Your Excellency,’ was the reply, ‘we cannot.’ Shaken, Mountbatten put the same question to Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. He got the same answer.

      Mountbatten quickly discovered that the government with which he was supposed to govern India, a coalition of the Congress Party and the Moslem League put together with enormous effort by his predecessor, was in fact an assembly of enemies so bitterly divided that its members barely spoke to one another. It was clearly going to fall apart, and when it did, Mountbatten would have to assume the appalling responsibility of exercising direct rule himself with the administrative machine required for the task collapsing underneath him.

      Confronted by that grim prospect, assailed on every side by reports of violence, by the warnings of his most seasoned advisers, Mountbatten reached what was perhaps the most important decision he would make in his first ten days in India. It was to condition every other decision of his Viceroyalty. The date of June 1948 established in London for the Transfer of Power, the date he himself had urged on Attlee, had been wildly optimistic. Whatever solution he was to reach for India’s future, he was going to have to reach it in weeks, not months.

      ‘The scene here,’ he wrote in his first report to the Attlee government on 2 April 1947, ‘is one of unrelieved gloom … I can see little ground on which to build any agreed solution for the future of India.’

      After describing the country’s unsettled state, the young admiral issued an anguished warning to the man who had sent him to India. ‘The only conclusion I have been able to come to,’ he wrote, ‘is that unless I act quickly, I will find the beginnings of a civil war on my hands.’

      

^* The impulses thrusting Gandhi to take his vow were not Hindu alone. As Christ’s dictum of turning the other cheek had been vital in helping him formulate his non-violent ideal, so Jesus’ words referring to ‘those who become eunuchs for my sake … for love of the Kingdom of Heaven’, had inspired him in taking his ancient Hindu pledge.

^* The Attlee government had treated Wavell in particularly brutal fashion. He had been in London when Mountbatten was asked to replace him, but given no hint he was about to be sacked. He learned the news only hours before Attlee made it public. It was only on Mountbatten’s insistence that Attlee accorded him the elevation in his rank in the peerage which traditionally was offered a departing Viceroy.

FIVE

       An Old Man and his Shattered Dream

       New Delhi, April 1947

      There was no one else in the room. Not even a secretary unobtrusively taking notes disturbed the two men. Convinced of the urgency of the situation facing him, Mountbatten had decided to employ a revolutionary tactic for his negotiations with India’s leaders. For the first time in its modern history, India’s destiny was not being decided around a conference table, but in the intimacy of private conversation. The tête-à-tête just beginning in the Viceroy’s freshly painted study was the first in a series. Those conversations would determine whether India would be spared the horror of civil war foreseen in Louis Mountbatten’s first report to London. Five men would participate in them, Louis Mountbatten and four Indian leaders.

      Those four Indians had spent the better part of their lives agitating against the British and arguing with each other. All of them were past middle age. All of them were lawyers who had first honed their forensic skills in London’s Inns of Court. For each of them, their coming conversations with India’s new Viceroy would be the greatest argument of their lifetimes, the debate for which each of them had, in a sense, been preparing for a quarter of a century.

      In Mountbatten’s mind, there was no question what the outcome of that debate should be. Like many Englishmen, he looked on India’s unity as the greatest single legacy Britain could leave behind. He had a deep, almost evangelical desire to maintain it. To respond to the Moslem appeal to divide the country was, he believed, to sow the seeds of tragedy.

      Every effort to get India’s leaders to agree to a solution to their country’s problems in the quasi-public glare of a formal meeting had ended in a hopeless deadlock. But here, in the privacy of his study, reasoning with them one by one, Mountbatten hoped he might bring them to agreement in the brief time at his disposal. Supremely confident of his own powers of persuasion, confident, above all, of the compelling logic of his case, he was going to try to achieve in weeks what his predecessors had been unable to achieve in years; to get India’s leaders to agree on some form of unity.

      With his white Congress cap fixed on his balding head, a fresh rose twisted through the third buttonhole of his waistcoat, the man before him was one of the familiar figures on India’s political landscape. In his own slightly feline way, Jawaharlal Nehru was as impressively striking a figure as India’s new Viceroy. The sensual features of a face whose expression could change in an instant from angelic softness to daemonic wrath were often tinged with a glimmer of sadness. While Mountbatten’s features were almost always composed, Nehru’s rarely were. His moods and humours slipped across his face like shadows passing across the waters of a lake.

      He was the only one of the Indian leaders that Mountbatten already knew. The two men had met after the war when Nehru was on a visit to Singapore, where Mountbatten had his SEAC headquarters. Ignoring his advisers, who’d counselled him to have nothing to do with a rebel whose shoes still bore the dust of a British prison yard, Mountbatten had met the Indian leader.^* The two immediately СКАЧАТЬ