Freedom at Midnight (36 page)

At the height of Britain's imperial power, men on the benches of Westminster had been able to call the world's unruly to order with the dispatch of a gunboat or topple a foreign despot with the vision of a thin red line of British soldiers. The last European nation to embark on the imperial adventure, the British had sailed more seas, opened more lands, fought more battles, squandered more lives, drained more exchequers, administered more people and administered more fairly than any other imperial power. Indeed, something in their island-people's character

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seemed to have fitted them for that brief moment in history when it was held a self-evident moral imperative that white, Christian Europeans should "hold dominion over palm and pine."

The vehicle by which a new generation of men in Westminster would end all that was tucked into a wallet embellished with the Royal Arms and a gold thread. It lay in a pile of similar documents on the long table dividing the chamber in which the House of Lords sat.

The Indian Independence Bill was a model of conciseness and simplicity. To give India her freedom, the half-hundred members of Parliament had required only twenty clauses and sixteen typewritten pages. Never had so momentous a measure been drafted and enacted with comparable speed. Barely six weeks had been required to prepare it and send it through its readings in the House of Parliament. The debates accompanying those readings had been marked by dignity and restraint. There had been instances in history, Clement Attlee had told the House of Commons in introducing the historic bill, "in which a state at the point of a sword has been forced to surrender power to another people, but it was very rare for a people who had long enjoyed power over another nation to surrender it voluntarily."

Even Winston Churchill, giving his melancholy consent to what he had labeled "a tidy little bill," had paid a rare tribute to his rival Attlee for the wisdom he had displayed in selecting Louis Mountbatten as his last viceroy. Probably none of the words uttered in the course of those debates, however, had caught as accurately the mood of Britain's lawmakers as a remark by Viscount Herbert Samuel.

"It may be said of the British raj," he noted, "as Shakespeare said of the Thane of Cawdor: 'Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.' "

Now, Prime Minister Clement Attlee at their head, a thirty-member delegation from the House of Commons took their place behind the bar in the House of Lords to witness the final act in its passage.

Dominating one end of the chamber were twin symbols of the royal power, a pair of gilded thrones on a dais under a tapestry embroidered with the Royal Arms. Before them was the woolsack, the upholstered seat of the Lord High Chancellor of England. Between the thrones and the

woolsack was a long table on which were piled the bills awaiting the assent of George VI that day.

The King's representative, the Clerk of the Crown, took his place on one side of the long table. The Clerk of Parliament took his opposite him. He reached out for the first bill in the pile, and in a solemn voice, read out its title: "The South Metropolitan Gas Bill."

"Le Roi le veult" ("It is the King's wish"), replied the Clerk of the Crown in the ancient Norman phrase which for centuries had signified a sovereign's pleasure at the enactment of a royal decree or a bill of Parliament.

The Clerk of Parliament took the next bill from the stack before him.

"The Filexstowe Pier Bill," he said.

"Le Roi le veult," the Clerk of the Crown intoned in return.

The Clerk of Parliament reached for another bill.

"The Indian Independence Bill," he read.

"Le Roi le veult" came the reply.

Attlee flushed lightly and lowered his eyes, at those words. A hush filled the Chamber as the echoes of the Clerk's voice died. It was over. In four words of archaic French, in the company of a gas works and a fishing pier, Britain's great Indian Empire had been consigned to history.

It was the last assembly of the world's most exclusive fraternity. Sweating profusely under their brocaded tunics, their decoration-covered uniforms, their bejeweled turbans, seventy-five of the most important maharajas and nawabs of India and diwans (prime ministers) representing seventy-four others, waited in the drenching humidity of a New Delhi summer day to learn from the mouth of the Viceroy the fate that history held in store for them.

Mountbatten, decorations glittering on his admiral's white dress uniform, entered the little hemicycle of the Chamber of Princes. The Chamber's black-bearded, six-foot-four-inch Sikh Chancellor, the Maharaja of Patiala, escorted him to the podium, where he gazed calmly out at that host of unhappy men before him.

The Viceroy was ready to start tossing the apples into Vallabhbhai Patel's basket. His most bitter opponent, Sir Conrad Corfield, was at that moment in a plane flying

back to London and a premature retirement. He had left India rather than urge on that bizarre body of rulers to whom he had devoted his career a policy of which he did not approve.

The Viceroy was quite happy to see him go. Convinced that his course represented the best arrangement the princes could possibly hope for, Mountbatten intended to herd them, however reluctantly, however anguished their protests, into Patel's waiting basket.

Speaking without notes, his tone a mixture of frankness and fervor, he urged his listeners to sign the Act of Accession, which would join their states to either India or Pakistan. A resort to arms, he stressed, would produce only bloodshed and disaster. "Look forward ten years," he begged them; "consider what the situation in India and the world will be then, and have the foresight to act accordingly."

The tides of history, however, were a less impressive argument to that motley gathering than the next point the Viceroy advanced. They were on the verge of extinction, the world as they had known it was collapsing, but the argument that moved them the most concerned the bits of colored enamel gleaming on their chests. Sign the acts, Mountbatten urged, and he had good reason to believe that Patel and Congress would allow them to continue to receive from his cousin the King those honors and titles they so cherished.

When his speech was finished, the Viceroy invited questions from the princes. Mountbatten was stunned by their absurdity. So ludicrous did some of their princely preoccupations appear that the Viceroy wondered if these men and their prime ministers really understood what was about to happen to them. The prime concern of one member of that distinguished gathering was whether he could retain the exclusive right to hunt tigers in his state if he acceded to India. The diwan of another prince, whose employer at this critical juncture had found nothing better to do than to go on a tour of Europe's gambling casinos and cabarets, pleaded that as his ruler was on the high seas, he did not know what course of action to adopt.

Mountbatten pondered a moment, then picked up a large round glass paperweight which rested on the rostrum before him. Twisting it in his hand like some ancient

Oriental sage, he announced: "I will look into my crystal ball for the answer."

Furrowing his brows, he fixed the ball with the most intensely mysterious gaze of which he was capable. For ten seconds a heavy silence, broken only by the labored breathing of some of the more corpulent rulers, stifled the chamber. The occult was after all not a matter taken lightly in India, even by maharajas.

"Ah," Mountbatten whispered after milking all the drama he could from the gesture, "I see your prince. He's sitting at the captain's table. He says—'Yes, what is it?'— he says, 'Sign the Act of Accession.

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The following day, for the last time, a formal banquet assembled a viceroy of India and her ruling princes, the heirs to the generations of rulers who had been the staunchest supports of Britain's Indian Empire. Profoundly saddened by his awareness of what was happening, Mountbatten called for a final toast to the King-Emperor from his oldest and most faithful allies.

"You are about to face a revolution," he told them. "In a very brief moment you'll lose forever your sovereignty. It is inevitable. Do not," he pleaded, "turn your backs on the India emerging August 15. That India will not have enough capable men to represent her overseas." She was going to need doctors, lawyers, able administrators, trained officers to replace the British in her army. Many of those princes, educated abroad, experienced in handling the affairs of their states, combat veterans, had skills that India would need. They could become playboys on the beaches of the Riviera, or they could offer their services to the nation and find new roles for themselves and their class in Indian society. He had no doubt of the course they should follow. "Marry the new India," he begged them.

Kashmir, July 1947

Like a canoe shooting the rapids, the station wagon twisted through the ruts and rocks of the dirt path paralleling the torrents of the Trika river. The driver's face with his pouting lips, his wary, mistrustful eyes, his chin, its outlines lost under soft pouches of flesh, was an accurate reflection of his character. He was a weak, vacillating

man, whose perversions and orgies had given him the reputation of a Himalayan Borgia. Unfortunately, Hari Singh, the man who as "Mr. A" had titillated the readers of Britain's penny press before the war, was something else. He was the hereditary Hindu maharaja of the most strategically situated princely state in India, the vast, sparsely settled crossroads state of Kashmir, where India, China, Tibet and Pakistan were destined to meet.

This morning, a particularly distinguished visitor occupied the seat beside Hari Singh. Louis Mountbatten had known the Hindu ruler since they had galloped side by side on the manicured grass of his polo field at Jammu during the Viceroy's tour with the Prince of Wales. Mountbatten had deliberately arranged his state visit to Hari Singh's capital Srinagar to force a decision on Kashmir's future out of its hesitant ruler.

Logic seemed to dictate that Kashmir join with Pakistan. Its people were Moslem. It had been one of the areas originally selected for an Islamic state by Rahmat AH when he first formulated his impossible dream. The k in Pakistan was for Kashmir.

The Viceroy accepted that logic. He had, he told the Maharaja, brought with him the guarantee of Vallabhbhai Patel on behalf of the future government of India that if, as seemed natural with his overwhelming Moslem population and his geographic situation, Hari Singh joined Pakistan, India would understand and raise no objection. Furthermore, Jinnah had assured him that Hari Singh, even though he was a Hindu ruler, would be welcomed and given an honored place in his new dominion.

"I don't want to accede to Pakistan on any account," Hari Singh answered.

"Well," Mountbatten said, "it's up to you, but I think you should consider it very carefully, since after all almost 90 percent of your people are Moslem. But, if you don't, then you must join India. In that case, I will see that an infantry division is sent up here to preserve the integrity of your boundaries."

"No," replied the Maharaja, "I don't wish to join India either. I wish to be independent."

Those were just the words the Viceroy did not want to hear. "I'm sorry," he exploded, "you just can't be independent. You're a landlocked country. You're oversized and underpopulated. What I mind most, though, is that your

attitude is bound to lead to strife between India and Pakistan. You're going to have two rival countries with daggers drawn for your neighbors. You'll be the cause of a tug of war between them. You'll end up being a battlefield. That's whatll happen. You'll lose your throne and your life, too, if you're not careful."

The Maharaja sighed and shook his head. He kept a gloomy silence until he reached the fastidious fishing camp that his servants had set up by a bend on the river for the trout fishing that he was offering his distinguished visitor. For the rest of the day, Hari Singh made certain that Mountbatten had no chance to corner him alone. Instead, the Viceroy spent his day casting in the Trika's crystalline waters for trout. Even they were not prepared to accommodate the frustrated Viceroy. His A.D.C. caught all the fish.

For the next two days, Mountbatten repeated the process. Finally, on the third day, Mountbatten felt his old | friend beginning to waver. He insisted that they have a formal meeting the following morning before his departure, with their staffs and the Maharaja's prime minister present I to draw up an agreed policy statement.

"All right," the Maharaja agreed, "If you insist on it."

The following morning an A.D.C. came to Mountbat ten's suite. His Highness was sorry, he declared, but he was suffering from an upset stomach, and his doctor would not allow him to attend their little meeting. The story, Mountbatten was sure, was "absolute baloney." Invoking doctor's orders, however, Hari Singh refused even to see his old friend before he left. A problem that would | embitter India-Pakistan relations for a quarter of a century and imperil world peace had found its genesis in that I diplomatic bellyache.

Elsewhere, Mountbatten enjoyed considerably more success in his efforts to fill Vallabhbhai Patel's basket. For some of the rulers, appending their signature to the Instrument of Accession was a cruel tragedy. One Raja of Central India collapsed and died of a heart attack seconds after signing. The Rana of Dholpur told Mountbatten with tears in his eyes: "This breaks an alliance between my ancestors and your king's ancestors which has existed since 1765." The Gaekwar of Baroda, one of whose forebears had fed his British resident diamond dust, collapsed, weep-

ing like a child, in the arms of V. P. Menon after signing. One ruler of a tiny state hesitated for days before appending his signature because he still believed in the divine right of kings. The eight maharajas of the Punjab signed their Instrument together during a formal ceremony in the state banquet hall at Patiala, where Sir Bhupinder Singh "the Magnificent" had once lavished the most prodigious hospitality in India on his guests. This time, one participant recalled, "the atmosphere was so lugubrious we might have been at a cremation."