Freedom at Midnight (15 page)

Strangely, Mountbatten began his revolution with the stroke of a paint brush. To his aides' horror, he ordered the gloomy wooden panels of the viceregal study, in which so many negotiations had failed, covered with a light,

cheerful coat of paint more apt to relax the Indian leaders with whom he would be dealing. He shook Viceroy's House out of the leisurely routine it had developed, turning it into a humming, quasi-military headquarters. He instituted staff meetings, soon known as "morning prayers," as the first official activity of each day.

Mountbatten astonished his new I.C.S. subordinates with the agility of his mind, his capacity to get at the root of a problem and, above all, his almost obsessive capacity for work. He put an end to the parade of chaprassis, who traditionally bore the viceroy his papers for his private contemplation in green leather dispatch boxes. He preferred taut, verbal briefings.

"When you wrote 'May I speak?' on a paper he was to read," one of his staff recalled, "you could be sure you'd speak, and you'd better be ready to say what was on your mind at any time, because the call to speak could come at two o'clock in the morning."

It was, above all, the public image Mountbatten was trying to create for himself and his office that represented a radical change. For over a century, the viceroy of India, locked in the ceremonial splendors of his office, had rivaled the Dalai Lama as the most remote god in Asia's pantheon of ruling gods. Two unsuccessful assassination attempts had left him enrobed in a kind of security cocoon isolating him from all contact with the brown masses that he ruled. Whenever the viceroy's white-and-gold train moved across the vast spaces of India, guards were posted every one hundred yards along its route twenty-four hours in advance of its arrival. Hundreds of bodyguards, police and security men followed each of his moves. If he played golf, the fairways of his course were cleared and police were posted along them behind almost every tree. If he went riding, a squadron of the viceroy's bodyguard and security police jogged along after him.

Mountbatten was determined to shatter that screen. He had surrounded himself with the trappings of imperial grandeur that so delighted India's masses with a deliberate calculation. Part of his reason for doing it was to give himself a pedestal from which the tradition-shattering descents he proposed to make to those masses would have a particular impact.

His first announcement, that he and his wife or daughter would take their morning horseback rides unescorted,

sent a shock wave of horror through the house. It took him some time to get his way, but suddenly the Indian villagers along the route of their morning rides began to witness a spectacle so wholly unbelievable as to seem a mirage: the Viceroy and Vicereine of India trotting past them, waving graciously, alone and unprotected.

Then he and his wife made an even more revolutionary gesture. He did something that no viceroy had deigned to do in two hundred years; he visited the home of an Indian who was not one of a handful of privileged princes. To the astonishment of all India, the viceregal couple walked into a garden party at the simple New Delhi residence of Jawaharlal Nehru. While Nehru's aides looked on dumb with disbelief, Mountbatten took Nehru by the elbow and strolled off among the guests casually chatting and shaking hands.

The gesture had a stunning impact. "Thank God," an awed Nehru told his sister that evening, "we've finally got a human being for a viceroy and not a stuffed shirt."

Anxious to demonstrate that a new esteem for the Indian people now reigned in Viceroy's House, Mountbatten accorded the Indian military, two million of whom had served under him in Southeast Asia, a long-overdue honor. He had three Indian officers attached to his staff as A.D.C.'s. Next, he ordered the doors of Viceroy's House opened to Indians. Only a handful of Indians had been invited into its precincts before his arrival. He instructed his staff that there were to be no dinner parties in the Viceroy's House without Indian guests. And not just a few token Indians. Henceforth, he ordered, at least half the faces around his table were to be Indian.

His wife brought an even more dramatic revolution to the viceregal dining table. Out of respect for the culinary traditions of her Indian guests, she ordered the house's kitchens to start preparing dishes that, in a century of imperial hospitality, had never been offered in Viceroy's House, Indian vegetarian food. Not only that, she ordered the food served on flat Indian trays, with servants holding the traditional wash basins, jugs and towels behind her guests, so that they could, if they chose to, eat with their fingers at the Viceroy's table, then wash their throats with a ritual gargle.

That barrage of gestures large and small, the evident and genuine affection the Mountbattens displayed for the

country in which their own love affair had had its consecration, the knowledge that the new viceroy was a deliverer and not a conqueror, tke respect of the men who had served under him in Asia, all combined to produce a remarkable aura about the couple.

Not so long after their arrival, The New York Times noted that "no viceroy in history has so completely won the confidence, respect and liking of the Indian people." Indeed, within a few weeks, the success of "Operation Seduction" would be so remarkable that Nehru himself would tell the new viceroy only half-jokingly that he was becoming a very difficult man to negotiate with, because ke was "drawing larger crowds than anybody in India."

The words were so terrifying that Louis Mountbatten at first did not believe them. They made even the dramatic sketch of the Indian scene that Clement Attlee had painted for him on New Year's Day seem like a description of some pastoral countryside. Yet, the man uttering them in the privacy of his study had a reputation for brilliance and an understanding of India unsurpassed in the viceregal establishment. A triple blue and honor scholar at Oxford, George Abell kad been the most intimate collaborator of Mountbatten's predecessor.

India, Abell told Mountbatten with stark simplicity, was heading straight for a civil war. Only by finding the quickest of resolutions to her problems was he going to save her. The great administrative machine governing India was collapsing, he warned. The shortage of British officers, which was caused by the decision to stop recruiting during the war, and the rising antagonism between its Hindu and Moslem members meant that tke 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 and actions which engulfed him during his first fortnight in India. He received an equally grim analysis from the man he had hand-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 years on the subcontinent as an officer in the

Indian Army and military secretary to an earlier viceroy, Ismay had concluded that "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 that Mountbatten received from the British governor of the Punjab warned him that "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 onto the property of his Sikh neighbor. 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 humors of a water buffalo.

Five days after the new viceroy's arrival, incidents between Hindus and Moslems took ninety-nine lives in Calcutta. Two days later, a similar conflict broke out in Bombay, leaving forty-one mutilated bodies on its pavements.

Confronted by those 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, the 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 over one fifth of humanity 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 India in his first ten days in the country; 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 that 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 April 2, 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."

98

AN OLD MAN

AND HIS SHATTERED DREAM

Viceroy's House, 'New Delhi, April 1947

There was no one else in the room. Not even a secretary unobtrusively taking notes disturbed the two men. Because of the urgency of the situation facing him, Mountbatten had decided to employ a revolutionary tactic in his negotiation 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 dialogue just beginning in the Viceroy's freshly painted study was the first in a series of conversations that would determine whether India was to be spared the horror of civil war as foreseen in Louis Mountbatten's first report to London. Upon the outcome of these talks would depend the immediate future of four hundred million human beings, one fifth of mankind. Five men would participate in them: Louis Mountbatten and four Indian leaders.

The four Indians had spent the better part of their lives agitating against the British and arguing with one another. All were past middle age. All were lawyers who had learned their forensic skills in London's Inns of Court. For each of them, the coming conversations with India's new viceroy would be the last great argument of a lifetime, the debate for which each had been preparing himself 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 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 a tragedy.

Every effort to persuade India's leaders to agree on a solution to their country's problems at a formal meeting had ended in a deadlock. But here, in the privacy of his study, reasoning with them one by one, Mountbatten hoped that he might bring them to agree 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—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 vest, the man before Mountbatten was one of the familiar figures of India's politics. In his own slightly feline way, Jawaharlal Nehru was as impressive a figure as India's new viceroy. The sensual features of a face whose expression could change in an instant from angelic softness to demonic wrath were often tinged with sadness. While Mountbatten's features were almost always composed, Nehru's rarely were. Moods and humors slipped across his face like images passing across the waters of a lake.

He was the only Indian leader whom Mountbatten already knew. The two men had met after the war, when Nehru was on a visit to Singapore, where Mountbatten had his S.E.A.C. headquarters. Against the advice of his counselors, who had suggested that he have nothing to do with a rebel whose shoes still bore the dust of a British prison yard, Mountbatten had received the Indian leader.* The two immediately liked each other. Nehru rediscovered in the company of Mountbatten and his wife an England that he had not known for forty years, the England that his years hi British jail had almost eradicated from his memory, that open and welcoming England that he had known as a schoolboy. The Mountbattens delighted in

♦On January 22, 1944, while visiting his 33rd Army Corps in Ahmednagar, Mountbatten had learned that Nehru was detained in the city. Noting that he had over a million Indian soldiers under his command, he requested permission to visit the Indian leader. His request was denied.

Nehru's charm, his grace, his quick humor. To the horror of his staff, Mountbatten even rode through Singapore's streets in his open car with Nehru at his side. His action, his advisers had warned, would only dignify an anti-British political rebel.

"Dignify him?" Mountbatten had retorted. "It's he who will dignify me. One day this man will be prime minister of India."