Freedom at Midnight (21 page)

The situation in the N.W.F.P. was close to disintegrating, he warned, and if that happened, the old British nightmare of invading hordes from the northwest forcing

the gates of the Empire might be realized. The Pathan tribes of Afghanistan were poised to come pouring down the Khyber Pass to Peshawar and the banks of the Indus in pursuit of land they had claimed as theirs for a century. "If we're not jolly careful," he said, "we are going to have an international crisis on our hands."

The portrait drawn by Sir Evan Jenkins, the taciturn governor of the Punjab, was even grimmer than Caroe's. A Welshman, Jenkins had given himself to the Punjab with a passion equal to Caroe's for the Frontier. So total was his devotion to the Punjab that the old bachelor was accused by his critics of having married his Punjab "to the point where he forgot that the rest of India existed." Whatever solution was chosen for India's problems, he declared, it was certain to bring violence to the Punjab. At least four divisions would be needed to keep order if partition was decided upon. Even if it was not, they would still face a demand by the Sikhs for an area of their own. "It's absurd to predict the Punjab will go up in flames if it's partitioned," he said; "it's already in flames."

The third governor, Sir Frederick Burrows of Bengal, was ill in Calcutta, but the briefing of the province's situation as offered by his deputy was every bit as disquieting as the reports from the N.W.F.P. and the Punjab.

When those reports were finally finished, Mountbatten's staff passed out a set of papers to each governor. They carried the details, Mountbatten announced, "of one of the possible plans under examination." It was called, "for easy reference," Plan Balkan, and it was the first draft of the partition plan that Mountbatten had ordered his chief of staff, Lord Ismay, to prepare a week earlier.

A shock wave ran through the assembled governors as they began to turn its pages. They were apostles and architects of Indian unity. Most of them had spent their lives reinforcing the ties which, they now learned, a departing Britain might decide to dismantle.

The plan, aptly named for the Balkanization of the states of Central Europe after World War I, would allow each of India's eleven provinces to choose whether it wished to join Pakistan or remain in India; or, if a majority of both its Hindus and Moslems agreed, become independent. Mountbatten told his assembled governors that he was not going to "lightly abandon hope for a united India." He wanted the world to know that the British had

made every effort possible to keep India united. If Britain failed it was of the utmost importance that the world know it was "Indian opinion rather than a British decision that had made partition the choice." He himself thought a future Pakistan was so inherently unviable that it should "be given a chance to fail on its own demerits," so that later "the Moslem League could revert to a unified India with honor."

Those eleven men who represented the collective wisdom of the service that had run India for a century displayed no enthusiasm for the idea that partition might have to be the answer to India's dilemma. Nor did they have any other solution to propose.

That evening, in the state dining room of Viceroy's House, the oil portraits of India's first nineteen viceroys looking down upon them like ghostly judges from the past, the governors and their wives closed their last conference with a formal banquet presided over by Lord and Lady Mountbatten. At the end of the dinner, the servants brought out decanters of port. When the glasses were filled, Louis Mountbatten stood and raised his glass to their company. None of them realized it, but a tradition was ending with his gesture. Never again would a viceroy of India propose to his assembled governors the traditional toast Mountbatten now offered to his cousin more than four thousand miles away: "Ladies and Gentlemen, the King-Emperor!"

The Frontier and the Punjab — Late April 1947

The awesome white cone of Nanga Parbat filled the round windows of the viceregal York. It thrust its sculptured peak more than 26,000 feet into the air a hundred miles north of the aircraft. From one end of the horizon to another, the plane's passengers could follow the dark snowcapped walls of the great mountain range to which it belonged, the barriers to those desolate frozen reaches known as the roof of the world. The York turned south, flew above the serpentine coils of the Indus and began its approach over the mud-walled, fortresslike compounds of Peshawar, storied capital of the Northwest Frontier Province.

As the plane swept toward the airport, its passengers sud-

denly caught a glimpse of an enormous, milling mob barely restrained by a beleaguered line of police. Louis Mountbatten had decided to suspend temporarily the conversations in his air-conditioned office while he, personally, took the political temperature of his two most troubled provinces, the Punjab and the N.W.F.P.

The news that he was coming had swept over the Frontier. For twenty-four hours, summoned by the leaders of Jinnah's Moslem League, tens of thousands of men from every corner of the province had been converging on Peshawar. Overflowing their trucks, in buses, in cars, on special trains, chanting and waving their arms, they had spilled into the capital for the greatest popular demonstration in its history.

Now those tall 9 pale-skinned Pathans prepared to offer the Viceroy a welcome of an unexpected sort to Peshawar. Tired, their tempers rising in the heat and dirt, barely responsive to their leaders' commands, they were working themselves toward a dangerous frenzy. The police had confined them in an enormous low-walled enclosure running between a railroad embankment and the sloping wall of Peshawar's old Mogul fortress. Irritated and unruly, they threatened to drown the conciliatory tones of Operation Seduction with the discordant rattle of gunfire.

They were there because of the anomalous political situation of a province whose population was 93 percent Moslem, but was governed by allies of the Congress Party. The Congress leader was a Frontier tribal chieftain named Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a bearded giant who resembled an Old Testament prophet and had devoted his life to carrying Gandhi's message of love and passive resistance to Pathan tribesmen, for whom the blood feud and the vendetta were an integral part of existence. His incongruous figure had gotten their support until, faithful to Gandhi, he had opposed Jinnah's call for an Islamic state. Since then, stirred by Jinnah's agents, the population had turned against Ghaffar Khan and the government that he had installed in Peshawar. The huge, howling crowd greeting Mountbatten, his wife and seventeen-year-old daughter Pamela was meant to give final proof that it was the Moslem League and not the "Frontier Gandhi" that now commanded the province's support. The worried governor, Sir Olaf Caroe, bundled the party into a well-escorted car for the trip to his residence. The crowd, growing more unruly

by the hour, threatened to burst out of the area in which the police had herded them and start a headlong rush on the governor's residence. If they did, the vastly outnumbered military guarding the house would have no choice but to open fire. The resulting slaughter would be appalling. It would destroy Mountbatten, his hopes of finding a solution, and his viceroyalty in a sickening blood bath.

The worried governor suggested that there was only one way out, an idea condemned by his police and army commander as sheer madness. Mountbatten might present himself to the crowds, hoping that somehow a glimpse of him would mollify them.

Mountbatten pondered a few moments. "All right," he said, "I'll take a chance and see them." To the despair of Caroe and his security officers, Edwina insisted on coming with him.

A few minutes later, a jeep deposited the viceregal couple and the governor at the foot of the railway embankment. On the other side of that precarious dike, 100,-000 hot, dirty, angry people were shouting their frustration in an indecipherable din. Mountbatten took his wife by the hand and clambered up the embankment. As they reached the top, they discovered themselves only fifteen feet away from the surging waves of the sea of turbans. The ground under their feet shook with the impact of the gigantic crowd stampeding forward in front of them. Before that terrifying ocean of human beings, incarnating in their shrieks and gesticulations the enormity and the passions of the masses of India, the Mountbattens, for an instant, were dizzy. Whirling spirals of dust stirred by thousands of rushing feet clotted the air. The noise of the crowd was an almost tangible layer of air crushing down on them. It was a decisive instant in Operation Seduction, an instant when anything was possible.

Watching their silhouette as they stared uncertainly out at the crowd, Sir Olaf Caroe felt an apprehensive shudder. In that crowd were twenty, thirty, forty thousand rifles. Any madman, any bloodthirsty fool could shoot the Mountbattens "like ducks on a pond." For the first few seconds Caroe sensed that the crowd was in an ugly mood. It's going to go wrong, he thought.

Mountbatten did not know what to do. He couldn't articulate a syllable of Pushtu, the crowd's language. As he pondered, a totally unexpected phenomenon began to still

the mob, stopping perhaps with its strange vibrations an assassin's hand. For this entirely unplanned meeting with the Empire's most renowned warriors, Mountbatten happened to be wearing the short-sleeved, loose-fitting bush jacket that he had worn as Supreme Allied Commander in Burma. Its color, green, galvanized the crowd. Green was the color of Islam, the blessed green of the hadjis, the holy men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Instinctively, those tens of thousands of men read in that green uniform a gesture of solidarity with them, a subtle compliment to their great religion.

His hand still clutching hers, but his eyes straight ahead, Mountbatten whispered to his wife, "Wave to them." Slowly, graciously, the frail Edwina raised her arm with his to the crowd. India's fate seemed for an instant suspended in those hands climbing above the crowd's head. A questioning silence had drifted briefly over the unruly crowd. Suddenly, Edwina's pale arm began to stroke the sky; a cry, then a roaring ocean of noise burst from the crowd. From tens of thousands of throats came an interminable, constantly repeated shout, a triumphant litany marking the successful passing of the most dangerous seconds of Operation Seduction.

"Mountbatten Zindabad!" those embittered Pathan warriors screamed, "Mountbatten Zindabad!" ("Long live Mountbatten!")

Forty-eight hours after their confrontation with the Pathans, Mountbatten and his wife landed in the Punjab. Sir Evan Jenkins immediately led the viceregal pair to a little village twenty-five miles from Rawalpindi. There a shocked Mountbatten was able to verify the accuracy of the governor's warning, issued fourteen days earlier, that his province was in flames, and to get his first direct contact with the horrors sweeping India in the cruel springtime of 1947.

The naval officer who had seen most of his shipmates die in the wreck of his destroyer off Crete, the leader who had led millions through the savage jungle war in Burma, was overwhelmed by the spectacle he discovered in that village of 3,500 people, which had once been typical of India's half million villages.

For centuries, Kahuta's dirt alleys had been shared in

peace by 2,000 Hindus and Sikhs and 1,500 Moslems. That day, side by side in the village center, the stone minaret of its mosque and the rounded dome of the Sikhs' gu-rudwara were the only identifiable remnants of Kahuta left on the skvline of the Punjab.

Just before Mountbatten's visit, a patrol of the British Norfolk Regiment on a routine reconnaissance mission passed through the village. Kahuta's citizens, as they had been doing for generations, were sleeping side by side in mutual confidence and tranquility. By dawn, Kahuta had for all practical purposes ceased to exist, and its Sikhs and Hindus were all dead or had fled in terror into the night.

A Moslem horde had descended on Kahuta like a wolf pack, setting fire to the houses in its Sikh and Hindu quarters with buckets of gasoline. In minutes, the area was engulfed in fire and entire families, screaming pitifully for help, were consumed by the flames. Those who escaped were caught, tied together, soaked with gasoline and burned alive like torches. Totally out of control, the fire swept into the Moslem quarter and completed the destruction of Kahuta. A few Hindu women, yanked from their beds to be raped and converted to Islam, survived; others had broken away from their captors and hurled themselves back into the fire to perish with their families.

"Until I went to Kahuta," Mountbatten reported back to London, "I had not appreciated the magnitude of the horrors that are going on."

After his confrontation with the crowd in Peshawar, the atrocious spectacle of one devastated Punjabi village was the last proof Mountbatten needed. The judgment he had made after ten days of meetings in his air-conditioned New Delhi study was sound. Speed was the one absolute, overwhelming imperative if India was to be saved. If he did not move immediately, India was going to collapse and the British raj and his viceroyalty would collapse in disarray along with her. And if speed was -essential, then there was only one way out of the impasse, the solution from which he personally recoiled, but which India's political situation dictated—partition.

The last, painful phase in the lifelong pilgrimage of Ma-hatma Gandhi began on the evening of May 1, 1947, in the

same spare hut in New Delhi's sweepers' colony in which a fortnight before he had unsuccessfully urged his colleagues to accept his plan to hold India together. Cross-legged on the floor, a water-soaked towel plastered once again to his bald head, Gandhi followed with sorrow the debate of the men around him, the high command of the Congress Party. The final parting of the ways between Gandhi and those men, foreshadowed in their earlier meeting, had been reached. All Gandhi's long years in jail, his painful fasts, his hartals and his boycotts had been paving stones on the road to this meeting. He had changed the face of India and enunciated one of the original philosophies of his century to bring his countrymen to independence through nonviolence; and now his sublime triumph threatened to become a terrible personal tragedy. His followers, their tempers worn, their patience exhausted, were ready to accept the division of India as the last, inescapable step to independence.