Freedom at Midnight (30 page)

Mountbatten concluded his talk, to a burst of applause, and opened the floor to questions. He had no apprehension in doing so. "I had been there," he would recall later. "I was the only one who had been through it all, who'd lived every moment of it. For the first time the press were meeting the one and only man who had the whole thing at his fingertips."

Suddenly, when the long barrage of questions began to trickle out, the anonymous voice of an Indian newsman cut across the chamber. His final question was the last square left to Mountbatten to fill in in the puzzle he had been assigned six months before.

"Sir," the voice said, "if all agree that there is most urgent need for speed between today and the transfer of power, surely you should have a date in mind?"

"Yes, indeed," replied Mountbatten.

"And if you have chosen a date, sir, what is that date?" the questioner asked.

A number of rapid calculations went whirring through the Viceroy's mind as he listened to those questions. He had not, in fact, selected a date. But he was convinced it had to be very soon.

"I had to force the pace," he recalled later. "I knew I had to force Parliament to get the bill through before their summer recess to hold the thing together. We were sitting on the edge of a volcano, on a fused bomb and we didn't know when the bomb would go off." Like the blurred images of a horror film, the charred corpses of Kahuta flashed across Louis Mountbatten's mind. If an outburst of similar tragedies was not to drag all India into an apoca-

lypse, he had to go fast. After three thousand years of history and two hundred years of Pax Britannica, only a few weeks remained, the Viceroy believed, between India and chaos.

He stared at the packed assembly hall. Every face in the room was turned to his. A hushed, expectant silence broken only by the whir of the wooden blades of the fans revolving overhead stilled the room. "I was determined to show I was the master of the whole event," he would remember.

"Yes," he said, "I have selected a date for the transfer of power."

As he was uttering those words, the possible dates were still spinning through his mind like the numbers on a revolving roulette wheel. Early September? Middle of September, middle of August? Suddenly the wheel stopped with a jar and the little ball popped into a slot so overwhelmingly appropriate that Mountbatten's decision was instantaneous. It was a date linked in his memory to the most triumphant hours of his own existence, the day in which his long crusade through the jungles of Burma had ended with the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire. A period in Asian history had ended with the collapse of that feudal Asia of the Samurai. What more appropriate date for the birth of the new democratic Asia arising to take its place than the second anniversary of Japan's surrender?

His voice constricted with sudden emotion; the victor of the jungles of Burma, about to become the liberator of India, announced:

"The final transfer of power to Indian hands will take place on August 15, 1947."

Mountbatten's spontaneous decision to announce the date of Indian independence on his own initiative was a bombshell. In the corridors of the Commons, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, the news came as a shock. No one, not even Attlee himself, had suspected that Mount-batten was ready to bring down the curtain on Britain's Indian adventure so precipitously. In Delhi, the Viceroy's most intimate collaborators had had no inkling of what Mountbatten was going to do. Not even the Indian leaders with whom he had spent so many hours in the trying

months of April and May had received a hint that he would act with such decisive haste.

Nowhere did his choice of the date for India's independence cause as much surprise and consternation as it did in the ranks of a corporation that ruled the lives of millions of Hindus with a tyranny more oppressive than that of the English, the Congress and the maharajas combined. Mountbatten had committed the unpardonable fault of announcing this choice without first consulting the representatives of the most powerful occult body in India, the astrologers.

No people in the world were as subservient to the authority and rulings of astrologers as were the Indians. Nowhere did their competence extend into so many domains. Every maharaja, every temple, every village had one or two astrologers who ruled like little dictators over the community and its inhabitants. Millions of Indians wouldn't dream of setting out on a trip, receiving a guest, signing a contract, going hunting, putting on a new suit, buying a new jewel, cutting a mustache, marrying a daughter, or even having their own funerals arranged, without prior consultation with an astrologer.

Discerning the divine order of things in their reading of their celestial charts, the astrologers arrogated to themselves a power that made them masters of millions of lives. Children born under an unlucky star were often abandoned by their parents. Men elected to commit suicide at the hour seen by the astrologers as particularly favorable to the act. They announced what days of a given week would be auspicious and what days would not. Sunday was inevitably an inauspicious day; so, too, was Friday. Anybody in India could have discovered with the aid of a chart no more occult than a calendar that in the year 1947, August 15 happened to fall on a Friday.

As soon as the radio announced Mountbatten's date, astrologers all over India began to consult their charts. Those in the holy city of Benares and several others in the South immediately proclaimed August 15 a date sd inauspicious that India "would be betted advised to tolerate the British one day longer rather than risk eternal damnation."

In Calcutta, Swami Madananand rushed to his celestial charts as soon as he heard the date announced in a radio broadcast. He took out his navamanch, an enormous circular chart composed of a succession of concentric circles

on which were plotted the days and months of the year, the cycles of the sun and moon, the planets, the signs of the Zodiac and the positions of the twenty-seven stars influencing the destiny of the earth. At its center was a map of the world. He twisted the circles on his chart until they were all set for the fifteenth of August. Then, fixing one tip of a divider on the map of India in the chart's core, he began to draw lines out to the edge of his wheel. As he did, he sat up aghast. His calculations foretold a disaster. India on August 15 would lie under the Zodiacal sign of Makra (Capricorn), a sign one of whose particularities was its unrelenting hostility to all centrifugal forces, hence to partition. Far worse, India that day would be passing through the influence of Saturn, a notably inauspicious planet, under the star Rahu, the star scornfully labeled by astrologers "the star with no neck," a celestial body whose manifestations were almost wholly malign. From midnight August 14 through August 15, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus would all lie in the most accursed site of the heavens, the ninth house of Karamstahn. Like thousands of his colleagues, the young astrologer looked up from his chart overcome by the magnitude of the disaster they had revealed.

"What have they done? What have they done?" he shouted to the heavens whose machinations he interpreted for man.

Despite the discipline of his physical and spiritual forces acquired in years of yoga, meditation and tantric studies in a temple in the hills of Assam, the astrologer lost control of himself. Seizing a piece of paper he sat down and wrote an urgent appeal to the man inadvertently responsible for this celestial catastrophe.

"For the love of God," he wrote to Mountbatten, "do not give India her independence on August 15. If floods, drought, famine and massacres follow, it will be because free India was born on a day cursed by the stars."

THE MOST COMPLEX DIVORCE IN HISTORY

New Delhi, June 1947

Never before had anything even remotely like it been attempted. Nowhere were there any guidelines, any precedents, any revealing insights from the past to order what was going to be the biggest, the most complex divorce action in history, the breakup of a family of four hundred million human beings along with the assets and household property they had acquired in centuries of living together on the same piece of earth.

There were exactly seventy-three days in which to draw up the divorce papers. To keep everybody concerned working under constant, unrelenting pressure, Mountbat-ten had printed a day-by-day tear-off calendar, which he ordered displayed in offices everywhere in Delhi. Like a count-down to an explosion, a large red square in the middle of each page of the calendar registered the number of days left to August 15.

The responsibility for preparing the gigantic, unimaginably complicated property settlement accompanying partition fell ultimately on two men, both lawyers. They lived in almost identical bungalows, drove to their offices located only doors apart in prewar American Chevrolets, earned the same salary and paid with equal fidelity their monthly contributions to the same retirement fund. One was a Hindu. The other was a Moslem.

Every day from June to August, with their dispatch boxes, their neat handwritten stacks of files, each knotted

firmly by its twists of red ribbon, with only the orderly thought processes and sound procedures taught by their British tutors to guide them, Chaudhuri Mohammed Ali, the Moslem, and H. M. Patel, the Hindu, labored to divide the goods and chattels of their four hundred million countrymen. As a final irony, they parceled out the bits and pieces of India in the language of their colonizers, English. Over a hundred bureaucrats, split into a score of committees and subcommittees, submitted reports to them. Their recommendations went in turn for final approval to a Partition Council chaired by the Viceroy.

At the outset, Congress claimed the most precious asset of all, the name "India." Rejecting a proposal to name their new dominion "Hindustan," Congress insisted that since Pakistan was seceding, the name India and India's identity in groups like the United Nations remain theirs.

As in most divorce cases, the bitterest arguments between the two parties came over money. The most important sums were represented by the debt that Britain would be leaving behind. After having been accused for decades of exploiting India, Britain was going to end her Indian adventure five billion dollars in debt to the people she was supposed to have been exploiting. That enormous sum had been run up during the war, part of the crippling price that Britain had had to pay for the victory which left her bankrupt and hastened the great historical process now beginning.

In addition, there were the liquid assets to be divided, the cash in the state banks, the gold ingots in the vault of the Bank of India, everything down to the few soiled rupees and the frayed postage stamps in the petty-cash box of the District Commissioner in his hut among the headhunting Naga tribes.

So intractable did that problem prove that it was not solved until H. M. Patel and Mohammed Ali were locked up in Sardar PatePs bedroom and told to stay there until they reached an agreement. Haggling like date peddlers in the Lahore bazaar, they finally agreed that Pakistan would get 17^ percent of the cash in the bank and the sterling balances and in return cover 17V6 percent of India's national debt.

The two men also recommended that the movable assets in India's vast administrative machine should be divided up, 80 percent going to India, 20 percent to Pakistan. All

across India, government offices began to count up their chairs, tables, brooms and typewriters. Some of the resulting tabulations had a particularly poignant echo. They showed, for example, that the entire physical resources of the Food and Agricultural Department of the most famine-haunted country on the globe consisted of 425 clerk's tables, 85 large tables, 85 officer's chairs, 850 ordinary chairs, 50 hat pegs, 6 hat pegs with mirrors, 130 bookshelves, 4 iron safes, 20 table lamps, 170 typewriters, 120 fans, 120 clocks, 110 bicycles, 600 inkstands, 3 staff cars, 2 sets of sofas and 40 chamber pots.

Arguments, bargains and fights broke out over the division of the goods. Department heads tried to hide their best typewriters or substitute their broken desks and chairs for new ones assigned to their rival community. Some offices became souks, with dignified men, joint secretaries in linen suits, whose writ ran over hundreds of thousands of people, bargaining an inkpot against a water jar, an umbrella rack for a hat peg, 125 pin cushions for a chamber pot. The arguments over the dishes, the silverware, the portraits in state residences were ferocious. One item, however, escaped discussion. Wine cellars always went to Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan received a credit for what they contained.

The meanness of spirit and the petty-mindedness that those divisions sometimes produced were staggering. In Lahore, Superintendent of Police Patrick Rich divided his equipment between a Moslem and a Hindu deputy. He split up everything: leggings, turbans, rifles, lathi staves. The last lot consisted of the instruments in the police band. Rich split them up, a flute for Pakistan, a drum for India, a trumpet for Pakistan, a pair of cymbals for India until one instrument, a trombone, was left. Before his unbelieving eyes his two deputies, who had been comrades for years, got into a fist fight over which dominion would get that last trombone.

Days were spent arguing about who should pay the pensions of widows of seamen lost at sea. Would Pakistan be expected to pay all Moslem widows wherever they were? Would India pay Hindu widows in Pakistan? Pakistan would have 4,913 miles of India's 18,077 miles of roads and 7,112 miles of her 26,421 miles of railroad tracks. Should the bulldozers, wheelbarrows and shovels of the highway department and the locomotives, coaches and

freight cars of the railways be divided according to the 80-20 rule or the percentage of the track and road mileage each nation would have?

Some of the bitterest arguments came over the books in India's libraries. Sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were religiously divided up, alternate volumes to each dominion. Dictionaries were ripped in half with A to K going to India, the rest to Pakistan. Where only one copy of a book was available, the librarians were supposed to decide which dominion would have the greater natural interest in it. Some of those supposedly intelligent men actually came to blows arguing over which dominion had a greater natural interest in Alice in Wonderland and in Wuthering Heights.