Freedom at Midnight (29 page)

All the frustrations generated by his dealings with Jinnah welled up in Mountbatten. Jinnah had gotten his damn Pakistan. Even the Sikhs had swallowed the plan. Everything he had been working for he had finally gotten, and here, at the absolute eleventh hour, Jinnah was preparing to destroy it all, to bring the whole thing crashing down with his unfathomable inability to articulate just one word, "yes."

, Mountbatten simply had to have his agreement. Attlee was standing by in London waiting to make his historic announcement to the Commons in less than twenty-four hours. He had gone on the line personally to Attlee, to his government, with firm assurances that this plan would work; that there would be no more abrupt twists like that prompted by Nehru in Simla; that this time, they could be certain, they had approved a plan that the Indian leaders would all accept. He had, with enormous difficulty, coaxed a reluctant Congress up to this point, and, finally, they were prepared to accept partition. Even Gandhi, temporarily at least, had allowed himself to be bypassed. A final hesitation, just the faintest hint that Jinnah was maneuvering to secure one last concession, and the whole carefully wrought package would blow apart.

"Mr. Jinnah," Mountbatten said, "if you think I can hold this position for a week while you summon your

followers to Delhi, you must be crazy. You know this has been drawn up to the boiling point.

"You've got your Pakistan, which at one time no one in the world thought you'd get. I know you call it moth-eaten, but it's Pakistan. Now all this depends on your agreeing tomorrow along with everyone else. The Congress has made their acceptance dependent on your agreement. If they suspect you're holding out on them, they will immediately withdraw their agreement and we will be in the most terrible mess."

No, no, Jinnah protested, everything had to be done in the legally constituted way. "I am not the Moslem League," he said.

"Now, now, Mr. Jinnah, come on," said Mountbatten, icy calm despite his growing frustration, "don't try to tell me that. You can try to tell the world that. But please don't try to kid yourself that I don't know who's who and what's what in the Moslem League!"

No, said Jinnah, everything had to be done in the proper, legal way.

"Mr. Jinnah," said Mountbatten, "I'm going to tell you something. I don't intend to let you wreck your own plan. I can't allow you to throw away the solution you've worked so hard to get. I propose to accept on your behalf.

"Tomorrow at the meeting," Mountbatten continued, "I shall say I have received the reply of the Congress with a few reservations that I am sure I can satisfy, and they have accepted. The Sikhs have accepted.

"Then I shall say that I had a very long, very friendly conversation with Mr. Jinnah last night, that we went through the plan in detail, and Mr. Jinnah has given me his personal assurance that he is in agreement with this plan.

"Now at that point, Mr. Jinnah," Mountbatten continued, "I shall turn to you. I don't want you to speak. I don't want Congress to force you into the open. I want you to do only one thing. I want you to nod your head to show that you are in agreement with me.

"If you don't nod your head, Mr. Jinnah," Mountbatten concluded, "then you're through, and there'll be nothing more I can do for you. Everything will collapse. This is not a threat. It's a prophecy. If you don't nod your head at that moment, my usefulness here will be ended, you will

have lost your Pakistan, and as far as I am concerned, you can go to hell."

The meeting that would formally record the Indian leaders' acceptance of the Mountbatten plan to divide India began exactly as Mountbatten had said it would. Once again, on the morning of June 3, the Viceroy condemned the leaders to an unfamiliar silence by dominating the conversation himself. As he had expected, he said, all three parties had had grave reservations about his plan and he was grateful that they had aired them to him. Nonetheless Congress had signified its acceptance. So, too, had the Sikhs. He had had, he said, a long and friendly conversation the previous evening with Mr. Jinnah, who had assured him the plan was acceptable.

As he spoke those words, Mountbatten turned to Jinnah, seated at his right. At that instant Mountbatten had absolutely no idea what the Moslem leader was going to do. The captain of the Kelly, the supreme commander who had had an entire army corps encircled and cut off by the Japanese on the Imphal Plain, would always look back on that instant as "the most hair-raising moment of my entire life." For an endless second, he stared into Jinnah's impassive, expressionless face. Then, slowly, reluctance crying from every pore, Jinnah indicated his agreement with the faintest, most begrudging nod he could make. His chin moved barely half an inch downward, the shortest distance it could have traveled consonant with accepting Mountbatten's plan.

With that brief, almost imperceptible gesture, a nation of forty-five million human beings had received its final sanction. However abortive its form, however difficult the circumstances that would attend its birth, the "impossible dream" of Pakistan would at last be realized. Mountbatten had enough agreement to go ahead. Before any of the seven men could have a chance to formulate a last reservation or doubt, he announced that his plan would henceforth constitute the basis for an Indian settlement.

While the enormity of the decision they had just taken began to penetrate, Mountbatten had a thirty-four-page, single-spaced document set before each man. Clasping the last copy himself with both hands, the Viceroy lifted it

over his head and whipped it back down onto the table. At the sharp crack that followed the slap of paper on wood Mountbatten read out the imposing title on his equally imposing document—"The Administrative Consequences of Partition."

It was a carefully elaborated christening present from Mountbatten and his staff to the Indian leaders, a guide to the awesome task that now lay before them. Page after page, it summarized in its dull bureaucratic jargon the appalling implications of their decision. None of the seven was in even the remotest way prepared for the shock they encountered as they began to turn the pages of that document. Ahead of them lay a problem of a scope and on a scale no people had ever encountered before, a problem vast enough to beggar the most vivid imagination. They were now going to be called upon to settle the contested estate of 400 million human beings, to unravel the possessions left behind by thirty centuries of common inhabitation of the subcontinent, to pick apart the fruit of three centuries of technology. The cash in the banks, stamps in the post offices, books in the libraries, debts, assets, the world's third-largest railway, jails, prisoners, inkpots, brooms, research centers, hospitals, universities, institutions and articles staggering in number and variety would be theirs to divide.

A stunned silence filled the study as the seven men measured for the first time what lay ahead of them. Mountbatten had carefully stage-managed the whole scene, and their reaction was exactly what he had hoped it would be. He had forced these seven men to come to grips with a problem so imposing that it would leave them neither the time nor the energy for recrimination in the few weeks of coexistence left to them.

Gandhi received the news of the decision as he was having a footbath after his evening walk. While one of his female disciples massaged his feet with a stone, another burst in with an account of the Viceroy's second meeting with the leaders. Sorrow seemed to spread like a stain over his pinched features as she talked. "May God protect them

and grant them all wisdom," he sighed when she had finished.

Shortly after seven o'clock on that evening of June 3, 1947, in the New Delhi studio of All India Radio, the four key leaders formally announced their agreement to divide the subcontinent into two separate sovereign nations.

As befitting his office, Mountbatten spoke first. His words were confident, his speech brief, his tones understated. Nehru followed, speaking in Hindi. Sadness grasped the Indian leader's face as he told his listeners that "the great destiny of India" was taking shape, "with travail and suffering." Baring his own emotions, he urged acceptance of the plan that had caused him such deep personal anguish, by concluding that "it is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals to you."

Jinnah was next. Nothing would ever be more illustrative of the enormous, yet wholly incongruous nature of his achievement than that speech. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was incapable of announcing to his followers the news that he had won them a state in a language that they could understand. He had to tell India's ninety million Moslems of the "momentous decision" to create an Islamic state on the subcontinent in English. An announcer then read his words in Urdu.

The prophet of nonviolence got his voice back on the day following the leaders' acceptance of the Viceroy's plan. The brief respite accorded Mountbatten by his day of silence was over, and the confrontation that he had dreaded was at hand. Shortly after noon, June 4, Mountbatten received an urgent communication: Gandhi was preparing to break with the Congress leadership and denounce the plan at his evening prayer meeting. Mountbatten immediately sent an emissary to Gandhi inviting him to come to see him.

Gandhi walked into Mountbatten's study at 6 p.m. His prayer meeting was at seven. That left Mountbatten less than an hour in which to ward off a potential disaster. His first glance at the Mahatma told Mountbatten how deeply upset he was. Crumpled up in his armchair "like a bird with a broken wing," Gandhi kept raising and dropping

one hand lamenting in an almost inaudible voice: "It's so awful, it's so awful."

In that state Gandhi, Mountbatten knew, was capable of anything. A public denunciation of his plan would be disastrous. Nehru, Patel and the other leaders the Viceroy had so patiently coaxed into accepting it would be forced to break publicly with Gandhi or break their agreement with him. Vowing to use every argument his fertile imagination could produce, Mountbatten began by telling Gandhi how he understood and shared his feelings at seeing the united India he had worked for all his life destroyed by his plan.

Suddenly as he spoke, a burst of inspiration struck him. The newspapers had christened the plan the "Mountbatten Plan," he said, but they should have called it the "Gandhi Plan." It, was Gandhi, Mountbatten declared, who had suggested to him all its major ingredients. The Mahatma looked at him perplexed.

Yes, Mountbatten continued, Gandhi had told him to leave the choice to the Indian people and this plan did. It was the provincial, popularly elected assemblies which could decide India's future. Each province's assembly would vote on whether it wished to join India or Pakistan. Gandhi had urged the British to quit India as soon as possible, and that was what they were going to do.

"If by some miracle the assemblies vote for unity," Mountbatten told Gandhi, "you have what you want. If they don't agree, I'm sure you don't want us to oppose their decision by force of arms."

Reasoning, pleading, employing all of his famous charm and magnetism on the elderly man opposite him, Mountbatten put his case, as one of Gandhi's intimates later noted, "with a skill, persuasiveness and flair for salesmanship which the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People might have envied." The man on whose words much of India's future might hinge in less than an hour was still vehemently opposed to partition. Yet he was shaken by the Viceroy's vigorous plea for his plan. Approaching seventy-eight, Gandhi was, for the first time in thirty years, uncertain of his grip on India's masses, at odds with the leaders of his party. In his despair and uncertainty, he was still searching in his soul for an answer, still waiting for an illuminating whisper of the inner voice that had guided him in so many of the grave crises of his

career. That June evening, however, the voice was silent, and Gandhi was assailed by doubt. Should he remain faithful to his instincts, denounce partition, even as he had urged, at the price of plunging India into violence and chaos? Or should he listen to the Viceroy's desperate plea for reason?

Mountbatten had not finished presenting his case when the time came for Gandhi to leave. He excused himself; he never allowed himself to be late for a prayer meeting, he told Mountbatten.

Less than an hour later, cross-legged on a raised platform in a dirt square in the midst of his Untouchables colony, Gandhi delivered his verdict. Many in the crowd before him had come, not to pray, but to hear from the lips of the prophet of nonviolence a call to arms, a fiery assault on Mountbatten's plan. No such cry would come this evening from the mouth of the man who had so often promised to offer his own body for vivisection, rather than accept his country's division.

It was no use blaming the Viceroy for partition, he said. Look to yourselves and in your own hearts for an explanation of what has happened, he challenged. Louis Mount-batten's persuasiveness had won the ultimate and most difficult triumph of his viceroyalty.

As for Gandhi, many an Indian would never forgive him his silence, and the frail old man whose heart still ached for India's coming division would one day pay the price of their rancor.

Never had the handsome chamber built to shelter the debates of India's legislators seen a performance to rival it. Speaking without notes, with an authority and clarity that awed even his most virulent critics, Mountbatten revealed to Indian and world opinion the details of one of the most important birth certificates in history, the complex plan that would order the accession to full independence of one fifth of humanity and serve as the precursor of a new assembly of the peoples of the planet, the Third World.

It was the second time in the history of Britain's Indian Empire that a Viceroy was giving a press conference. It was also the last. Three hundred journalists, correspondents of the U.S.S.R., the United States, China and Europe mixed with the representatives of India's press—all

followed with extraordinary intentness the monologue of the Viceroy.

For Mountbatten the press conference was the apotheosis, the final consecration of a remarkable tour de force. In barely two months, virtually a one-man band, he had achieved the impossible, established a dialogue with India's leaders, set the basis of an agreement, persuaded his Indian interlocutors to accept it, extracted the wholehearted support of both government and the opposition in London. He had skirted with dexterity and a little luck the pitfalls marring his route. And as his final gesture he had entered the cage of the old lion himself, convinced Churchill to draw in his claws and left him, too, murmuring his approbation.