Freedom at Midnight (33 page)

For all his royal ties and his friendship with the princes, Mountbatten was a tough-minded realist, committed to those liberal principles which had made him acceptable to a Labour government. The princes' fathers might have been the surest friends of the raj; in the new era opening in India, Britain would have to find her friends elsewhere, among the Socialists of Congress. Mountbatten was determined to make them, and he knew he was not going to do it by subordinating India's natural interests to those of a little caste of anachronistic autocrats.

The best he could do for his friends was to try to save them from themselves, from the fantasies, the megaloma-niacal dreams it had been so easy to nurture in the privileged isolation of their states. Since he had been a young man, one terrible vision had always haunted Mountbatten and could, even in 1947, bring tears to his eyes. It was a sight he had often imagined but never seen, the grisly spectacle of the cellar of Ekaterinburg where his uncle the Tsar, the cousins with whom he had played, including

Marie, the princess he had secretly hoped to marry, were murdered. There were, he knew, hotheads among the princes of India irresponsible enough to launch themselves on adventures that could turn their palaces into charnel houses like the Tsar's cellar. The course that his own Political Secretary, Corfield, wanted some of them to follow could lead to just that.

Many of those princes assumed that Mountbatten was going to be their savior, that he was going to perform the miracle that would preserve them and their privileged existence. He was not. He had neither the power nor the desire to do so. Instead, he was going to try to convince his dear and lifelong friends that their only course was to go quiet and unprotesting into oblivion.

He wanted them to abandon any claims to independence and to proclaim their readiness to join either India or Pakistan before August 15. He, in return, was prepared to use his viceregal authority with Nehru and Jinnah to obtain, as the price of their cooperation, the best arrangements possible for their personal futures.

Mountbatten proposed his deal first to Vallabhbhai Patel, the Indian minister responsible for dealing with the states. If Congress, Mountbatten said, would agree to allow the princes to retain their titles, their palaces, their privy purses, their immunity from arrest, their right to British decorations and their quasi-diplomatic status, he, in turn, would try to persuade them to sign before August 15 an Act of Accession renouncing their temporal power, acceding to the Indian Union and abandoning their claim to independence.

It was a very tempting offer. Patel knew that there was no one in the Congress ranks who could rival Mountbat-ten's authority in dealing with the princes. But, he told the Viceroy, "it's got to be everybody. If you can bring me a basket filled with every apple off the tree, I'll buy it. If it hasn't got all the apples, I won't."

"Would you leave me a dozen?" the Viceroy asked.

"That's too many," Patel replied, "I'll let you have two."

"Too few," Mountbatten said.

For a few minutes, the last Viceroy and India's future minister of states bargained like rug merchants over those states which encompassed a population two thirds that of

the United States of America. Finally, they agreed on a figure: six. That hardly lightened the formidable task before Mountbatten. Five hundred and sixty-five maharajas minus six and a few more for Pakistan, that still left Mountbatten with over 550 apples to pluck from a resistant tree in the few weeks remaining before August 15.

The offer that Jawaharlal Nehru was making was the most extraordinary an Englishman would ever receive from an Indian. It would remain unique in the annals of empire. In the viceregal study in which they had spent so many anxious hours together, Jawaharlal Nehru formally asked the last viceroy, the last occupant of the throne that had symbolized the power against which so many Indians had been struggling, to become the first occupant of the most prestigious office an independent India would have to offer, that of its governor general.

The germ of Nehru's idea had come from his rival Jin-nah. Anxious to make sure that Pakistan received its fair share of the subcontinent's assets, Jinnah had suggested that Mountbatten stay on after August 15 as a kind of supreme arbiter until their division was completed.

Despite the magnitude of the honor, Mountbatten had grave reservations about accepting. He had succeeded brilliantly in his four months in India. He and his wife could now go out, as they had hoped, "in a blaze of glory." He was only too well aware that troubles loomed ahead and that if he stayed on they could tarnish his earlier achievements. And if he was to function properly, he felt that he would have to have a similar offer from Jinnah.

The dying Moslem leader, however, could not resist the pomp, the gaudy ceremonials of the top office of the state for which he had worked so hard. He himself, he told Mountbatten, would be Pakistan's first governor general.

Mountbatten argued that Jinnah had picked the wrong job. Under the British constitutional process, which would prevail in the two dominions, it was the prime minister who had all the power. The governor general's role was a symbolic one akin to the sovereign's, with no real power attached to it.

His argument did not move Jinnah. "In Pakistan," he

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coldly replied, "I will be governor general, and the prime minister will do what I tell him to do."

Attlee, Churchill, his cousin the king, all conscious of the amplitude of the honor being paid England by Nehru's offer, urged Mountbatten to accept it. So, too, did Jinnah.

Before he could accept, however, the blessing of one man was necessary. That the man who had led India to freedom should give his blessing to the appointment of an Englishman as independent India's first chief of state seemed at first unthinkable. Besides, the Mahatma in a characteristically quixotic gesture had already given the world his ideal nominee for the post: an Untouchable sweeper girl "of stout heart, incorruptible and crystallike in her purity."

For all their differences, however, a real affinity had grown up between Gandhi and the admiral thirty years his junior. Mountbatten was fascinated by Gandhi. He loved his puckish humor. From the moment when he arrived, he had rejected all the raj stereotypes and looked on the Mahatma and his ideas with an open mind. With each of their meetings, his and his wife's personal affection for Gandhi had grown.

Gandhi, an affectionate man himself, had sensed the Mountbattens' warmth and responded to it. One July afternoon, the man who had spent so many years in British jails walked into the Viceroy's study. There Gandhi asked Mountbatten to accept Congress's invitation to become the first governor general of the nation it had taken him thirty-five years to wrest for his countrymen.

Gandhi's words were an immense personal tribute to Mountbatten and an equally immense tribute to the British. Looking at him, lost in his enormous armchair, Mountbatten was overwhelmed. "We've jailed him, we've humiliated him, we've scorned him. We've ignored him," he thought, "and he still had the greatness of spirit to do this." Touched almost to tears, Mountbatten thanked Gandhi for his encouragement.

Gandhi acknowledged his words with barely a nod and continued his speech. With a wave of his delicate hand, he indicated the sweep of Viceroy's House and its great Mogul Gardens. All this, he said to the Viceroy, who loved every regal inch of the place, who reveled in its

pomp, its pageantry and glamour, who delighted in its servants, its cuisine, who savored every one of its luxuries —all this would have to go, in an independent India. Its arrogant opulence, its associations with the past were an affront to India's impoverished masses. Her new leaders would have to set an example. Mountbatten as their first chief of state would, he hoped, give the lead. Move out of Viceroy's House and live in a simple home without servants, he urged. Lutyens Palace could be converted into a hospital.

Mountbatten stiffened, and a wry smile crossed his face. Wily Gandhi, he thought, he's all but asking me to clean out my own toilet. Attlee, the King, Nehru and Jinnah were thrusting him into a task about which he had the gravest forebodings. And now this delightful, devilish little old man was trying to turn him into India's first Socialist, a symbolic leader presiding over a fifth of mankind from some Spartan bungalow he'd have to sweep out himself each morning.

The gleaming whiteness of Mountbatten's study seemed to Sir Cyril Radcliffe a world away from the foreboding gloom of his own law chambers, a difference almost as great as that between the description of his task that he had received in London and the one he was getting from the Viceroy hours after his arrival in New Delhi.

In theory, Mountbatten explained, he was to be assisted in each province by a panel of four judges who were supposed to submit to him joint recommendations as to where the boundary lines should run. In fact, Mountbatten informed him, he alone would have to accept the responsibility for making all the decisions, as it was most unlikely that those judges, selected by the conflicting parties to serve as mutually hostile advocates of two differing points of view, would ever be able to agree on anything.

He was to draw his boundary lines "ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Moslems and non-Moslems." In doing so he would "take into account other factors." No one had any intention of spelling out for him what those other factors should be or what weight he should give them. To do so would have led Nehru and Jinnah into another of their unending arguments.

Ironically, the one specific criterion he was given was

based on a totally erroneous assumption. Convinced that the future relations between India and Pakistan would be friendly, the commander in chief of the Indian Army, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, authorized Radcliffe to ignore the elements that were usually the first concern of a nation in setting its frontiers, defense considerations.

Those points, however, were only preliminary jolts before the real shock that was awaiting Radcliffe. If his task promised to be difficult, Radcliffe had come to Delhi convinced that he would at least have the time and facilities to carry it out in a deliberate, judicious manner.

Now he heard Mountbatten explain that it was imperative that his decision be ready by August 15, a date only weeks away. Mountbatten's words meant that he would never be able even to glimpse the lands that he was supposed to divide. If this awful haste was really forced on him, he warned Mountbatten, errors and mistakes, some of them perhaps grave, were bound to creep into the boundary lines.

Mountbatten acknowledged that he was technically right. But there was no time. India would just have to accept whatever anomalies crept into his decision as inevitable and necessary. He would have only one set of instructions to give Radcliffe, but they would be firm ones: finish the job by August 15.

A stubborn, independent man, Radcliffe was not going to take the Viceroy's word as final. He called personally on both Nehru and Jinnah. To each he put the same question: Was it absolutely essential to have definitive partition lines, however defective, drawn by August 15? Both insisted that it was.

Given their insistence, Radcliffe had no choice but to refuse or comply. It was not, he realized, a surgeon's scalpel that he was going to require to perform his vivisection of the Punjab and Bengal. What he would need was a butcher's axe.

The Punjab, July 1947

Barely a dozen miles from the windows of the Viceroy's study began the first fields of one of the two great Indian provinces destined to be severed by Cyril Radcliffe's hand, the Punjab. Never had the granary of India promised a harvest as abundant as the one ripening in

those golden fields of barley and sunburnt wheat, in their undulating ranks of corn and sugar cane. Already, with their slow, painful shuffle, the bullocks lurched along the dusty roads, tugging the wooden-wheeled platforms on which were heaped the first fruit of the richest soil in India.

With few variations, the villages toward which they strained were identical: a water tank covered by a slick of green scum, where women beat their clothes and where boys, flicking switches, washed black, dung-crusted water buffaloes; a cluster of mud-walled compounds in which buffaloes, goats, cows, dogs and barefoot children churned their way through ankle-deep mud and puddles of cow urine evaporating in the sun; a humpbacked ox plodding dumbly around the eternal circle of the millstone crushing grain to meal; a bevy of women patting steaming piles of fresh cow dung into the flat cakes that would fuel their cooking fires.

The heart of the Punjab was the city which had been the capital of the empire of a Thousand and One Nights, Lahore, the pampered princess of the Mogul emperors. Upon it they had lavished the finest flowering of their artisan's skill: Aurangzeb's great mosque, its faiences still glistening across the dust of centuries, the ninety-nine names of God writ in marble upon its cenotaph; the sprawling enormity of Akbar's fort with its enameled terraces and its marble grilles sculptured like lace; the mausoleum of Nur Jahan, the captive beauty who married her jailer and became an empress; the tomb of Anarkali, "Pomegranate Blossom," jewel of Akbar's harem, buried alive for bestowing a smile on his son; the three hundred sibilant fountains of the Shalamar Gardens.

More cosmopolitan than Delhi, more aristocratic than Bombay, older than Calcutta, the city was for many the most attractive in India. Its heart was the Mall, a wide boulevard flanked by cafes, shops, restaurants and theaters.

Lahore boasted more bars than bookshops. More customers crowded its cabarets than faithful its temples and mosques. Its red-light district was the most elegant in India, and the city had long savored the reputation of being the Paris of the Orient.

It was here that the English had chosen to build the best of those educational institutions in which they had nur-

tured a new generation of leaders for India. From the Gothic spires of their chapels to their cricket fields, their Latin- and Greek-filled curriculums, their cane-swinging masters, their school caps and blazers with their seals and mottoes like "Heavens' Light Our Guide" and "Courage to Know," those schools were perfect replicas of their English models, transplanted onto the hot plains of the Punjab.