Freedom at Midnight (60 page)

R.S.S.S. bands kidnapped a Moslem woman shrouded in her burqa, soaked her in gasoline and set her ablaze at the gate of Jawaharlal Nehru's York Road residence as a protest against their prime minister's efforts to protect India's Moslems. Later, guarded by a squad of Gurkha soldiers, a score of Moslem women took refuge in Nehru's garden.

Warned by Sikh bands that any house sheltering a Moslem would be burned, hundreds of Hindu, Sikh, Parsi and Christian families turned their faithful servants into the streets, condemning them to the Sikhs' swords or a hasty flight to an improvised refugee camp.

The only beneficiaries of Delhi's wave of atrocities were the spindly horses of the city's Moslem tonga drivers who had fled or been massacred. Turned loose, they joyously celebrated their freedom on the greensward of those immense spaces with which the British had ventilated their

imperial capital beside another species of animal, the Sacred Cow.

The riots sweeping Delhi, however, threatened more than just another city. They threatened all India. A collapse of order in Delhi could menace the entire subcontinent. And that was exactly what was happening. The city's Moslem policemen, over half its force, had deserted. There were only nine hundred troops on hand. The administration, already reeling under the impact of events in the Punjab, was grinding to a halt. So bad had the situation become that Nehru's private secretary, H. V. R. Iyengar, had to deliver the Prime Minister's mail himself in his own car.

Early in the evening of September 4, with more than a thousand people already dead, V. P. Menon, the man who had prepared a final draft of Mountbatten's partition plan, called a secret meeting of a handful of key Indian Civil Servants.

Their conclusion was unanimous: there was no effective administration in Delhi. The capital and the country were on the verge of collapse.

A few hours later, in his own dramatic way, Colonel M. S. Chopra, a veteran of years of skirmishing on the turbulent frontier, came to the same conclusion. Standing on the terrace of a friend's bungalow, he could hear all around him in the dark night the clatter of machine-gun and rifle fire.

The Frontier, Colonel Chopra thought, has come to Delhi.

Simla, September 1947

For the first time since he had flown into Palam airport in March, an exhausted Louis Mountbatten had been able to find time to rest. Independence had lifted a crushing burden from his shoulders when its chimes of midnight had shifted him from one of the most powerful offices in the world to a purely symbolic one. He was deeply disturbed by the violence shaking the Punjab, but as governor general he no longer had the authority to do anything about it. That appalling charge lay in Indian hands now. And so, not wishing to appear to be interfering in their actions so soon after independence, he had

slipped discreetly out of Delhi to that Olympian paradise of the now dead raj, Simla. The storm raged over the plains below, but that strange and fascinating little city still remained untouched by it. The asphodels and rhododendrons were in bloom in its handsome stands of fir trees, and the snow-tipped cones of the Himalayas glistened through the clear late-summer air. The city's Gaiety Theater was showing Jane Steps Out, one of Simla's amateur theatricals that had so amused Kipling in the summer capital sixty years before.

The former viceroy was, in a sense, a world away from India's strife when the telephone rang in his library in the old Viceregal Lodge at ten o'clock Thursday evening, September 4. He was on the distant bank of the Rhine, absorbed in climbing the branches of his family tree through the Germany of Hesse, Prussia and Saxe-Coburg, assembling the genealogical tables that were his favorite relaxation.

His caller was V. P. Menon. There was no one in India for whose advice and counsel Mountbatten had more respect.

"Your Excellency," Menon said, "you must return to Delhi."

"But, V. P.," Mountbatten protested, "I've just come away. If my Cabinet wishes me to countersign something just send it up here and 111 countersign it."

That was not it at all, Menon said. "The situation has gone very bad since Your Excellency left. The trouble has broken out here in Delhi. We just don't know how far it's going to go. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister are both very worried. They think it's essential for Your Excellency to come back."

"Why?" Mountbatten asked.

"They need more than your advice now," Menon said; "they need your help."

"V.P.," Mountbatten said, "I don't think that's what they want at all. They've just gotten their independence. The last thing they want is their constitutional chief of state coming back and putting his fingers in their pie. I'm not coming. Tell them."

"Very well," replied Menon, "I will. But there's no sense in changing your mind later. If Your Excellency doesn't come down in twenty-four hours, don't bother to come at all. It will be too late. We'll have lost India."

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There was a long, stunned silence at the other end of the phone. Then Mountbatten said, very calmly: "All right, V. P., you old swine, you win. I'll come down."

For the next quarter of a century, the results of the meeting beginning in Mountbatten's study in New Delhi on the morning of Saturday, September 6, 1947, would be the most closely guarded secret of the last viceroy's life. Had the decisions taken at it become known, the knowledge would have destroyed the career of the charismatic Indian statesman who would emerge in the years to come as one of the world's major figures.

Three people were present: Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel. The two Indian leaders were somber, visibly depressed men. They looked, to the Governor General, "like a pair of chastened schoolboys." The situation in the Punjab was out of control. The migration was exceeding their worst fears. Now violence in Delhi threatened to bring down the capital itself.

"We don't know how to hold it," Nehru admitted.

"You have to grip it," Mountbatten told him.

"How can we grip it?" Nehru replied. "We have no experience. We've spent the best years of our lives in your British jails. Our experience is in the art of agitation, not administration. We can barely manage to run a well-organized government in normal circumstances. We're just not up to facing an absolute collapse of law and order."

Nehru then made an almost unbelievable request. That he, the proud Indian who had devoted his life to the independence struggle, could even articulate it was a measure of both his own greatness and the gravity of the Indian situation. He had long admired Mountbatten's capacity for organization and swift decision. India, he felt, desperately needed those skills now, and Nehru was too great a man to let his pride stand in the way of her having them.

"While you were exercising the highest command in war, we were in a British prison," he said. "You are a professional, high-level administrator. You've commanded millions of men. You have the experience and knowledge that colonialism has denied us. You English can't just turn this country over to us after being here all our lives and simply walk away. We're in an emergency and we need help. Will you run the country?"

"Yes," seconded Patel at Nehru's side, "he's right. You've got to take it."

Mountbatten was aghast. "My God," he said, "I've just gotten through giving you the country, and here you two are asking me to take it back!"

"You must understand," Nehru said. "You've got to take it. We'll pledge ourselves to do whatever you say."

"But this is terrible," Mountbatten said. "If anyone ever finds out you've turned the country back to my hands, you'll be finished politically. The Indians keep the British Viceroy and then put him back in charge? Out of the question."

"Well," said Nehru, "we'll have to find a way to disguise it, but if you don't do it, we can't manage it."

Mountbatten thought a moment. He loved a challenge and this was a formidable one. His personal esteem for Nehru, his affection for India, his sense of responsibility left him no out.

"All right," he said, "I'll do it and I can pull the thing together, because I do know how to do it. But we must agree that nobody finds out about this. Nobody must know you've made this request. You two will ask me to set up an Emergency Committee of the Cabinet and I will agree. Will you do that?"

"Yes," replied Nehru and Patel.

"All right," said Mountbatten, "you've asked me. Now will you invite me to take the chair?"

"Yes," replied the two Indians, already dazed by the pace at which Mountbatten was moving, "we invite you."

"The Emergency Committee," Mountbatten continued, "must consist of the people I nominate."

"Oh," protested Nehru, "we must have the whole Cabinet."

"Nonsense," said Mountbatten. "That would be a disaster. I want the key people, the people who really do things, the Director of Civil Aviation, the Director of Railways, the head of the Indian Medical Services. My wife will take on the volunteer organization and the Red Cross. The Committee's secretary will be General Er-skine-Crum, my conference secretary. The minutes will be typed up in relays by British stenographers, so they'll be ready when the meeting's over. You invite me to do all this?"

"Yes," replied Nehru and Patel, "we invite you."

"At the meetings," Mountbatten continued, "the Prime Minister will sit on my right and the Deputy Prime Minister on my left. I'll always go through the motions of consulting you, but whatever I say, you're not to argue with me. We haven't got time. I'll say: "I'm sure you'd wish me to do this,' and you'll say, 'Yes, please do.' That's all I want. I don't want you to say anything else."

"Well, can't we—" Patel began to protest.

"Not if it's going to delay things," Mountbatten said. "Do you want me to run the country or not?"

"Ah, all right," growled the old ward boss, "you run the country."

In the next fifteen minutes the three men put together the list of the members of their Emergency Committee. "Gentlemen," Mountbatten said, "we will hold our first meeting at five o'clock this afternoon."

After three decades of struggle, after years of strikes, mass movements, after all the bonfires of British cloths— above all, after barely three weeks of independence, India was once again, for one last moment, being run by an Englishman.

THE GREATEST MIGRATION IN HISTORY

New Delhi, September 1947

It was as though some extraordinary turn of the wheel of life had delivered Mountbatten back to an earlier incarnation. He was the Supreme Commander again, energetically filling the role he knew best. Within hours of receiving his invitation to head the Emergency Committee, he had the red-sandstone palace Lutyens had designed as a backdrop for the ceremonials of an empire running like an army headquarters in wartime.

Indeed, one of his aides noted, Nehru and Patel had barely left his study when "all hell broke loose." Mount-batten commandeered his old Viceroy's Executive Council Chamber for the meetings of the Committee. He ordered Ismay's office next door converted into a map and intelligence center. He had the best maps of the Punjab hand-delivered from Army headquarters. He instructed the Air Force to begin dawn-to-dusk reconnaissance flights over India's half of the province. The pilots were told to radio hourly reports on every refugee column—its size, it length, its progress, its apparent route.

Railway lines were placed under aerial surveillance. With his passion for communications, Mountbatten sketched out and ordered installed a radio net linking Government House to the key areas in the Punjab. He got Major General Pete Rees, whose Punjab Boundary Force had earlier been broken down into its Pakistan and Indian

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halves, to take charge of the intelligence center.* Determined that everyone would make some contribution to the solution of the problems, he assigned his seventeen-year-old daughter, Pamela, to work with Rees as his secretary.

Mountbatten opened the Emergency Committee's first session by exposing the Indian leaders to the terrifying reality on the maps and charts ringing his intelligence center. For many, it was their first graphic glimpse into the magnitude of the problem confronting them. To Mountbatten's astute press attache, Alan Campbell-Johnson, their reaction was "one of dazed bewilderment and aimlessness before the unknown." Nehru seemed "inexpressibly sad and resigned"; Patel "clearly disturbed," seething with "deep anger and frustration."

Mountbatten drove ahead. In the weeks to come the men around that table would discover a new face to the urbane and charming man who had been India's last viceroy. The dominant quality now would be toughness and a ruthless determination to get things done. His Government House stenographers had copies of the Committee's* first decisions ready for distribution when the meeting broke up; the rest would be delivered by motorcy-' cle in an hour. The first item of business at the next meeting, he said, would be making sure the directives on them had been carried out.

A number of distinguished men in that room would in the period ahead feel the cutting edge of Mountbatten's wrath because they could not keep that pace. One day, H. V. R. Iyengar, Nehru's principal private secretary, recalled, the Director of Civil Aviation failed to get an airplane with emergency medical supplies off to the Punjab on schedule.

"Mr. Director," Mountbatten said, "you will leave the room. You will go immediately to the airport. You will not leave, eat or sleep until you have personally seen that

* The Boundary Force had been divided at the insistence of the Indian and Pakistani governments, who insisted that there was no possibility of restoring order in the Punjab if the armed forces operating there responded not to them, but to a third authority. Their insistence nearly precipitated a major crisis when Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, the last commander in chief of the Indian Army and one of the Force's sponsors, threatened to resign if the Force was dissolved. Auchinleck was convinced that the two nations simply wished to get hold of their armed forces to turn them to communal purposes.

plane go and reported its departure back to me." Hurt and humiliated, the man staggered out of the room, but the plane left.