Freedom at Midnight (23 page)

A sudden inspiration struck Mountbatten. He would reassure himself privately, informally, with the Indian leader, whom, to the distress of his staff, he had invited to vacation with him in Simla. More than ever, Mountbatten saw his relations with the gracious and elegant Jawaharlal Nehru as the prime support of his own policies in India, and the prime hope of a warm understanding between Britain and her old Indian Empire in the years to come.

His wife's friendship with the Indian prime minister had grown too. Women like Edwina Mountbatten were rare in the world and rarer still in the India of 1947. No one had been better able to draw Nehru from his shell when moments of doubt and depression gripped him than the attractive aristocrat who radiated so much compassion, intelligence and warmth. Often, over tea, a stroll in the Mogul Gardens, or a swim in the viceregal pool, she had been able to charm Nehru out of his gloom, redress a situation and subtly encourage her husband's efforts.

Determined to follow his hunch, Mountbatten called the members of his staff he had brought to Delhi to his study and explained his concerns and his idea to them.

They were horrified. To show the plan to Nehru without exposing it to Jinnah would be a complete breach of faith with the Moslem leader, they pointed out. If he discovered it, Mountbatten's whole position would be destroyed.

For a long time, Mountbatten sat silently drumming the tabletop with his fingertips.

"I am sorry," he finally announced, "your arguments are absolutely sound. But I have a hunch that I must show it to Nehru, and I'm going to follow my hunch."*

That night, Mountbatten invited Nehru to his study for a glass of port. Casually, he passed the Congress leader a copy of the plan as it had been amended by London, asking him to take it to his bedroom and read it. Then perhaps he might let him know informally what reception it was likely to get from Congress. Flattered and happy, Nehru agreed.

A few hours later, while Mountbatten devoted himself to his regular evening relaxation, constructing his family's genealogical table, Jawaharlal Nehru began to scrutinize the text designed to chart his country's future. He was horrified by what he read. The vision of the India that emerged from the plan's pages was a nightmare, an India divided, not into two parts but fragmented into a dozen pieces. The door that Mountbatten had left open for Bengal would become, Nehru foresaw, a wound through which the best blood of India would pour. He saw India deprived of its lungs, the port of Calcutta along with its mills, factories, steelworks; Kashmir, his beloved Kashmir, an independent state ruled by a despot he despised; Hyderabad become an enormous, indigestible Moslem body planted in the belly of India, half a dozen other princely

* It was not the first time Mountbatten went against the combined advice of his staff to follow a hunch. In February 1941, leading four of his flotilla of K-class destroyers through the bay of Biscay en route to Gibraltar, he received a flash from the First Sea Lord informing him that the German pocket battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had just been sighted steering for Saint-Nazaire, and ordering him to proceed and intercept them. It was sunset. Mountbatten ordered his flotilla to steer a course for Brest. His staff rushed to the bridge protesting that they had been ordered to make for Saint-Nazaire, not Brest. No, Mountbatten said, they had been ordered to intercept the two German ships, and he had a hunch. If he were the admiral commanding those two ships, he said, he would not be steering on his true course at sunset when the last reconnaissance planes of the day were out. The fact they were spotted heading for Saint-Nazaire meant their real destination was Brest. They would stay on the course he had assigned them. Mountbatten's hunch turned out to be entirely correct. The two ships were indeed heading for Brest. Unfortunately, although his destroyers raced for Brest at 32 knots, the German head start was too great. They reached the French port safely.

states clamoring to go off on their own. The plan, he believed, would exacerbate all India's fissiparous tendencies of dialect, culture and race to the point at which the subcontinent would risk exploding into a mosaic of weak, hostile states. The British had run India for three centuries with the byword "Divide and Rule." They proposed to leave it on a new one: "Fragment and Quit." White-faced, shaking with rage, Nehru stalked into the bedroom of his confidant Krishna Menon, who had accompanied him to Simla. With a furious gesture, he hurled the plan onto his bed.

"It's all over!" he shouted.

Mountbatten got his first intimation of his friend's violent reaction in a letter early the following morning. For the confident Viceroy, it was "a bombshell." As he read it, the whole structure he had so carefully erected during the past six weeks came tumbling down like a house of cards. The impression that his plan left, Nehru wrote, was one of "fragmentation and conflict and disorder." It frightened him and was certain to be "resented and bitterly disliked by the Congress Party."

Reading Nehru's words, the poised, self-assured Viceroy, who had proudly announced to the world that he was going to present a solution to India's dilemma in ten days' time, suddenly realized that he had no solution at all. The plan that the British Cabinet was discussing that very day, the plan that he had assured Attlee would win Indian acceptance, would never get past the one element in India that had to accept it, the Congress Party.

Mountbatten's critics might accuse him of overconfi-dence, but he was not a man to brood at setbacks. Instead of descending into a fit of despondency at Nehru's reaction, Mountbatten congratulated himself on his hunch in showing him the plan, and set out to repair the damage. Fortunately for the Viceroy, his friendship with Nehru would survive the shock. At Mountbatten's behest, Nehru agreed to stay on another night in Simla to give the Viceroy time to draft a revised plan which might be acceptable to Congress. It would have to close the loopholes that had so distressed Nehru. The new plan would offer India's provinces and princes only one choice—India or Pakistan.

The dream of an independent Bengal was gone. Mount-batten remained convinced, however, that Jinnah's two-headed state could not survive. Sometime later, he predicted to an Indian friend, C. R. Rajagopalachari, that East Bengal would be out of Pakistan in a quarter of a century. The Bangladesh war of 1971 was to confirm his prediction.

To redraft his plan, Mountbatten called into his study the highest-ranking Indian in his viceregal establishment. It was a supreme irony that at that critical juncture the Indian to whom Mountbatten turned had not even entered that vaunted administrative elite, the Indian Civil Service. No degree from Oxford or Cambridge graced his office walls. No family ties had hastened his rise. V. P. Menon was an incongruous oddity in the rarefied air of Viceroy's House, a self-made man.

Eldest son in a family of twelve, Menon had quit school at thirteen to work successively as a construction laborer, coal miner, a factory hand, stoker on the Southern Indian Railways, unsuccessful cotton broker and schoolteacher. Finally, having taught himself to type with two fingers, he talked his way into a job as a clerk in the Indian administration in Simla in 1929.*

What had followed was probably the most meteoric rise in that administration's history. By 1947, it had carried Menon to the post of Reforms Commissioner, the highest appointment ever held by an Indian on a viceroy's staff, and one in which he had quickly won Mountbatten's confidence and later affection.

Mountbatten informed Menon that before nightfall he would have to redraft the charter that would give Iadia her independence. Its essential element, partition, had to remain, and it must continue to place the burden of choice on the Indians themselves.

* When Menon arrived in Delhi en route to Simla, he discovered that every rupee he owned had been stolen. Despairing, he finally approached an elderly, distinguished Sikh, explained his plight and asked for a loan of 15 rupees, to cover his fare to Simla. The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could pay it back, the Sikh said, "No. Until the day you die, you will always give that sum to any honest man who asks your help." Six weeks before his death, his daughter recalls, a beggar came to the family home in Bangalore. Menon sent his daughter for his wallet, took out fifteen rupees, and gave it to the man. He was still repaying his debt.

Menon finished his task in accordance with Mountbat-ten's instructions by sunset. Between lunch and dinner, he had performed a tour de force. The man who had begun his career as a two-finger typist had culminated it by redrafting, in barely six hours on an office porch looking out on the Himalayas, a plan that was going to encompass the future of one fifth of humanity, reorder the subcontinent, and alter the map of the world.

Stricken with a violent attack of appendicitis, Manu's slender figure shook under the blankets that her great-uncle had heaped over her. Her eyes were dulled by a racking fever. Her little body was hunched into a foetus position in an instinctive effort to minimize the terrible pain in her abdomen. Silent and worried, Gandhi hovered at her side.

Once again, the man whose disciples had disavowed him in passionate debate in New Delhi's Untouchables Colony faced a challenge to his faith. Since he had nursed the ill during a smallpox epidemic in South Africa, Gandhi had had a deep-rooted belief in nature cures. He denounced modern medicine for its emphasis on the body's physical aspects at the expense of the spirit, for prescribing pills and drugs when what was needed was restraint and self-discipline, for being too concerned with money. The fields of India, he maintained, were filled with natural, medicinal herbs placed there by God to cure the nation's ill. To Gandhi, nature cure was an extension of his nonviolent philosophy. It was for that reason that he had refused to allow his wife's body to be subjected to the violence of a hypodermic needle as she lay dying in the Aga Khan's palace.

When Manu had begun to complain of a pain in her abdomen, Gandhi had prescribed the treatment nature cure dictated: mud packs, a strict diet and enemas.

Her condition worsened. Now, thirty-six hours later, a crisis was at hand. For all his faith in nature cures, Gandhi had also studied medicine at great length. He had been around hospitals and the ill for years, and he knew very well what malady was gripping his great-niece.

As it had been in Noakhali, her faith in him was total. She had confided herself entirely to his hands, ready to do whatever he wanted. Gandhi agonized. His nature treat-

ment had failed. To him its failure, as well as Manu's illness, was a manifestation of their spiritual imperfections. But he did not "have the courage to let a girl entrusted to me die like that." He broke down and admitted defeat. "With the utmost reluctance," the man who had denied his dying wife the violent therapy of a hypodermic needle decided to allow his dying grandniece the violence of the surgeon's scalpel. Manu was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy.

As she slipped under the anaesthetic, Gandhi gently placed his palm on her brow. "Hold on to Ramanama," he told her, "and all will be well."

Hours later, one of her doctors, shocked at Gandhi's haggard, tense regard, took the Mahatma aside. Rest, he begged Gandhi, ease the strain on his being. "The people need your services more than ever."

Gandhi looked at him with disconsolate eyes. "Neither the people nor those in power have any use for me," he sadly replied. "My only wish is to die in harness, taking the name of God with my last breath."

PALACES AND TIGERS, ELEPHANTS AND JEWELS

Patiala, Princely India, May 1947

The turbaned servant advanced in reverential silence toward the mammoth figure of his master. Walking barefoot across the tiger, panther and antelope skins that covered the floor, he bore to his employer's bedside a silver tray ordered in London in 1921 to mark the royal tour of India of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. The vermeil teapot set upon it gave off the delicious fragrance of the special blend simmering inside, a mixture flown twice a month from London along with the biscuits accompanying it, by the firm of Fortnum and Mason. On the walls of the bedroom were hung stuffed animal heads and silver trophies, garnered by its occupant with his long-bore hunting rifle, polo stick or cricket bat, all of which he wielded with a gentleman's skill.

The servant set the tray on a bedside table and bent down to his master. The man was a Sikh, and his black beard, tightly rolled in a silk net, circled his sleeping face like an ebony collar.

"Bed tea, master," the servant whispered with obsequious softness.

The six-foot-four-inch figure below him stretched with a long and feline gesture. As he swung to his feet, another servant emerged from the shadows to cover his muscular shoulders with a silk robe. Shaking the sleep from his eyes, His Highness Yadavindra Singh, the eighth Maharaja of the Indian state of Patiala, gazed out on another day.

Yadavindra Singh presided over the most remarkable body in the world, an assembly unlike any other that man had ever devised. He was the Chancellor of the Chamber of Indian Princes. On this May morning, almost two years after the cyclone of Hiroshima and the end of a war that had shaken the world's foundations, the 565 maharajas, nawabs, rajas and rulers composing that chamber still reigned as absolute, hereditary sovereigns over one third of India's land surface and a quarter of her population. They reflected the fact that under the British there had been two Indias, the India of its provinces, administered by the central government in Delhi, and a separate India of her 565 princes.

The princes' anachronistic situation dated to Britain's haphazard conquest of India, when rulers who received the English with open arms or proved worthy foes on the battlefield were allowed to remain on their thrones provided that they acknowledged Britain as the paramount power in India. The system was formalized in a series of treaties between the individual rulers and the British Crown. The princes had recognized the "paramountcy" of the King-Emperor as represented in New Delhi by the viceroy, and they ceded to him control of their foreign affairs and defense. They received in return Britain's guarantee of their continuing autonomy inside their states.