Freedom at Midnight (6 page)

In the most spiritual area on earth, it was inevitable that the freedom struggle should take on the guise of a religious crusade, and Gandhi made it one. No man was ever more tolerant, more genuinely free of any taint of religious prejudice than Gandhi. He desperately wanted to associate the Moslems with every phase of his movement. But he was a Hindu, and a deep belief in God was the very essence of his being. Inevitably, unintentionally, Gandhi's Congress Party movement began to take on a Hindu tone and coloration that aroused Moslem suspicions.

Their suspicions were strengthened as narrow-minded local Congress leaders persistently refused to share with their Moslem rivals what electoral spoils British rule allowed. A specter grew in Moslem minds: in an independent India they would be drowned, by Hindu majority rule, condemned to the existence of a powerless minority in the land their Mogul forebears had once ruled.

The creation of a separate Islamic nation on the subcontinent seemed to offer an escape from that fate. The idea that India's Moslems should set up a state of their own was formally articulated for the first time on four and a half pages of typing paper in a nondescript English cottage at 3 Humberstone Road in Cambridge. Its author was a forty-year-old Indian Moslem graduate student named Rahmat Ali, and the date at the head of his proposal was January 28, 1933. The idea that India formed a single nation, Ali wrote, was "a preposterous falsehood." He called for a Moslem nation carved from the provinces of northwest India, where the Moslems were predominant, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, the Frontier, Baluchistan. He even had a name to propose for his new state. Based on the names of the provinces that would compose it, it was Pakistan —"land of the pure."

"We will not crucify ourselves," he concluded, in a fiery, if inept, metaphor, "on a cross of Hindu nationalism."

Adopted by the body that was the focal point of Mos-

lem nationalist aspirations, the Moslem League, Rahmat Ali's proposal gradually took hold of the imagination of India's Moslem masses. Its progress was regularly nurtured by the chauvinistic attitude of the predominantly Hindu leaders of Congress, who remained determined to make no concession to their Moslem foes.

The event that served to catalyze into violence the building rivalry of India's Hindu and Moslem communities took place on August 16, 1946, just five months before Gandhi set out on his penitent's march. The site was Calcutta, the second city of the British Empire, a metropolis whose reputation for violence and savagery was unrivaled. Calcutta, with the legend of its Black Hole, had been, to generations of Englishmen, a synonym for Indian cruelty. Hell, a Calcutta resident once remarked, was being born an Untouchable in Calcutta's slums. Those slums contained the densest concentration of human beings in the world, fetid pools of unrivaled misery, Hindu and Moslem neighborhoods interlaced without pattern or reason.

At dawn on August 16, Moslem mobs howling in a quasi-religious fervor came bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing in a human skull. They came in answer to a call issued by the Moslem League, proclaiming August 16 "Direct Action Day," to prove to Britain and the Congress Party that India's Moslems were prepared "to get Pakistan for themselves by 'Direct Action' if necessary."

They savagely beat to a pulp any Hindu in their path and left the bodies in the city's open gutters. The terrified police simply disappeared. Soon tall pillars of black smoke stretched up from a score of spots in the city, Hindu bazaars in full blaze.

Later, the Hindu mobs came storming out of their neighborhoods, looking for defenseless Moslems to slaughter. Never, in all its violent history, had Calcutta known twenty-four hours as savage, as packed with human viciousness. Like water-soaked logs, scores of bloated cadavers bobbed down the Hooghly river toward the sea. Other corpses, savagely mutilated, littered the city's streets. Everywhere, the weak and helpless suffered most. At one intersection, a line of Moslem coolies lay beaten to death where a Hindu mob had found them, between the poles of their rickshaws. By the time the slaughter was over, Calcutta belonged to the vultures. In filthy gray packs they

scudded across the sky, tumbling down to gorge themselves on the bodies of the city's six thousand dead.

The Great Calcutta's Killings, as they became known, changed the course of India's history. They triggered bloodshed in Noakhali, where Gandhi was, in Bihar, and on the other side of the subcontinent, in Bombay.

The threat that the Moslems had been uttering for years, their warnings that a cataclysm would overtake India if they were denied their state, took on a terrifying reality. Suddenly, India was confronted by the awful vision that had sickened Gandhi and sent him into the jungles of Noakhali: civil war.

To another man, to the cold and brilliant lawyer who had been Gandhi's chief Moslem foe for a quarter of a century, that prospect now became the tool with which to pry India apart.

History, beyond that written by his own people, would never accord Mohammed Ali Jinnah the high place his achievements merited. Yet, it was he, more than Gandhi or anyone else, who held the key to India's future on New Year's Day, 1947. It was with that stern and uncompromising Moslem messiah, leading his people to another man's Promised Land, that Queen Victoria's great-grandson would have to contend when he reached India.

In a tent outside Bombay in August 1946, he had evaluated for his followers in the Moslem League the meaning of Direct Action Day. If Congress wanted war, he declared, then India's Moslems "accept their offer unhesitatingly."

Pale lips pressed into a grim smile, his piercing eyes alight with repressed passion, Jinnah had that day flung down the gauntlet to Congress, to the British.

"We shall have India divided," he vowed, "or we shall have India destroyed."

"LEAVE INDIA TO GOD"

London, January 1947

"Look," said Louis Mountbatten, "a terrible thing has happened."

The two men were alone in the intimacy of a Buckingham Palace sitting room. At times like this, there was never any formality between them. They sat side by side like a couple of old school friends chatting as they sipped their tea. Today, however, a special nuance enlivened Mountbatten's conversational tone. His cousin King George VI represented his court of last resort, the last faint hope that he might somehow avoid the stigma of becoming the man to cut Britain's ties with India. The King was, after all, Emperor of India and entitled to a final word on his appointment as viceroy. It was not to be the word the young admiral wished to hear.

"I know," replied the King with his shy smile, "the Prime Minister's already been to see me and I've agreed."

"You've agreed?" asked Mountbatten, slightly aghast. "Have you really thought it over?"

"Oh, yes," replied the King quite cheerfully. "I've thought it over carefully."

"Look," said Mountbatten, "this is very dangerous. Nobody can foresee any way of finding an agreement out there. It's almost impossible to find one. I'm your cousin. If I go out there and make the most deplorable mess, it will reflect very badly on you."

"Ah, said the sovereign, "but think how well it will reflect on the monarchy if you succeed."

"Well," said Mountbatten, sinking back into his chair, "that's very optimistic of you."

He could never sit there in that little salon without remembering another figure sitting in the chair across from his, another cousin, his closest friend who had stood beside him on his wedding day at St. Margaret's, Westminster, the man who should have been king, David, the Prince of Wales. From early boyhood, they had been close. When in 1936, as Edward VIII, David had abdicated the throne, for which he had been so superbly trained, because he was not prepared to rule without the woman he loved at his side, Dickie Mountbatten had haunted the corridors of his palace, the King's constant solace and companion.

How ironic, Mountbatten thought. It was as David's A.D.C. that he had first set foot on the soil of the land that he was now to liberate. It was November 17, 1921. India, the young Mountbatten had noted in his diary that night, "is the country one had always heard about, dreamt about, read about." Nothing on that extraordinary royal tour would disappoint his youthful expectations. The raj was at its zenith then, and no attention was too lavish, no occasion too grand, for the heir to the imperial throne and his party. They traveled in the white-and-gold viceregal train, their journey a round of parades, polo games, tiger hunts, moonlit rides on elephants, tea dances, banquets and receptions of unsurpassed elegance, proffered by the Crown's stanchest allies, the Indian princes. Leaving, Mountbatten thought that India was the most marvelous country and the viceroy had the most marvelous job in the world.

Now, with the confirming nod of another cousin, that "marvelous job" was his.

A brief silence filled the Buckingham Palace sitting room. With it, Louis Mountbatten sensed a shift in his cousin's mood.

"It's too bad," the King said, a melancholy undertone to his voice. "I always wanted to come out to see you in Southeast Asia when you were fighting there, and then go to India, but Winston* stopped it. I'd hoped to at least go

* Churchill.

out to India after the war. Now I'm afraid I shall not be able to.

"It's sad," he continued, "I've been crowned Emperor of India without ever having gone to India and now I shall lose the title from here in London."

Indeed, George VI would die without ever setting foot on that fabulous land which had been the linchpin of the empire that he had inherited from his elder brother. There would never be a tiger hunt for him, a parade of elephants jangling past him in silver and gold, a line of bejeweled maharajas bowing to his person.

His had been the crumbs of the Victorian table, a reign unexpected in its origin, conceived and matured in the shadows of war, now to be accomplished in the austerity of a postwar, Socialist England. On the May morning in 1937 when the Archbishop of Canterbury had pronounced Prince Albert, Duke of York, as George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, sixteen million of the fifty-two million square miles of land surface of the globe had been linked by one tie or another to his crown.

The central, historic achievement of George VFs reign would be the melancholy task foretold by the presence of his cousin in his sitting room. He would be remembered by history as the monarch who had reigned over the dismemberment of the British Empire. Crowned King-Emperor of an empire that exceeded the most extravagant designs of Rome, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Caliphs and Napoleon, he would die the sovereign of an island kingdom on its way to becoming just another European nation.

"I know I've got to take the / out of G.R.L I've got to give up being King-Emperor," the monarch noted, "but I would be profoundly saddened if all the links with India were severed."

George VI comprehended perfectly well that the great imperial dream had faded and that the grandiose structure fashioned by his great-grandmother's ministers was condemned. But if it had to disappear, how sad it would be if some of its achievements and glories could not survive it, if what it had represented could not find an expression in some new form more compatible with a modern age.

"It would be a pity," he observed, "if an independent India were to turn its back on the Commonwealth."

The Commonwealth could indeed provide a framework in which George VTs hopes might be realized. It could become a multiracial assembly of independent nations, with Britain prima inter pares at its core. Bound by common traditions, a common past, by common symbolic ties to his crown, the Commonwealth could exercise great influence in world affairs. The imperial substance would have disappeared, but London might still be London, cultural, spiritual, financial and mercantile center for much of the world. A shadow would remain to differentiate George VTs island kingdom from those other nations across the English Channel.

If that ideal was to be realized, it was essential that India remain within the Commonwealth when she got her independence. If India refused to join, the Afro-Asian nations, which in their turn would accede to independence in the years to come, would almost certainly follow her example. That would condemn the Commonwealth to becoming just a grouping of the Empire's white dominions instead of the body the King longed to see emerge from the remains of his empire.

Influenced by a long anti-imperial tradition, George VTs prime minister and his Labour colleagues did not share the King's aspiration. Attlee had not even told Mountbatten that he was to make an effort to keep India in the Commonwealth.

George VI, as a constitutional monarch, could do virtually nothing to further his hopes. His cousin could, and Louis Mountbatten ardently shared the King's aspirations. No member of the royal family had traveled as extensively in the old Empire as he had. His intellect had understood and accepted its imminent demise; his heart ached at the thought.

Sitting there in their Buckingham Palace sitting room, Victoria's two great-grandsons reached a private decision that January day. Louis Mountbatten would become the agent of their common aspiration for the Commonwealth's future.

In a few days Mountbatten would insist that Attlee include in his terms of reference a specific injunction to maintain an independent India, united or divided, inside the Commonwealth if at all possible. In the weeks ahead,

there could be no task to which India's new viceroy would devote more thought, more persuasiveness, more cunning than the one conceived that afternoon in George VI's sitting room, that of maintaining a link between India and his cousin's crown.

In a sense, no one might seem more naturally destined to occupy the majestic office of Viceroy of India than Louis Mountbatten. His first public gesture had occurred during his christening when, with a wave of his infant fist, he knocked the spectacles from the bridge of his great-grandmother's imperial nose.