PART II
CHAPTER 10
A RELATIVELY SMALL GATHERING AWAITED THE DESCENT OF A plane to Palam Airfield, south-west of New Delhi, in the early afternoon of 22 March 1947. In it were representatives of the Muslim League and Congress, whose appearances a well-informed bystander would have had no trouble decoding. Liaquat Ali Khan, General Secretary of the Muslim League, wore a European suit with an astrakhan Jinnah cap. Jawaharlal Nehru, effective leader of Congress, wore a Gandhi cap and Indian sherwani suit. The 14th Punjab Regiment, the Royal Air Force and the Royal Indian Air Force had mounted guards of honour for the occasion. A collection of photographers waited in the heat, polishing the dust from their lenses.
The York transporter plane made its lazy approach to the runway. The wheels came down, the back end sank to meet the tarmac, the nose levelled, and the aircraft juddered to a halt. As the four engines whirred down into silence, the door opened and a group of people emerged into the Delhi haze. Foremost among these was Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the new Viceroy-Designate, forty-six years old, handsome and gleaming in his full dress uniform, with rows of medals stretching from breastbone to armpit. (He had originally been advised to turn up in plain clothes. Disappointed, he referred the matter to the Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, who reassured him that the government would send a band and a delegation, and that he could therefore appear in full fig.1) Following the Viceroy-Designate was Viscountess Mountbatten, in a chocolate brown suit.
In her husband’s words, Lady Mountbatten was ‘looking absolutely terrific, absolutely knock-down charm, marvellous figure’.2 She had recovered physically from her illness that spring, but had no desire to be in India – describing the posting as a ‘horror job’.3 There had been a hint of sullenness on the flight, when Edwina had shocked her staff by stuffing the diamond tiara her husband had specially designed and bought for her into an old shoebox and chucking it carelessly into an overhead rack.4 But her knock-down charm was back on as she lingered on the red carpet, chatting to Liaquat and Nehru.
The Mountbattens drove to the Viceroy’s House, where they were greeted by the Royal Scots Fusiliers and Lord and Lady Wavell. A lone British officer in the crowd attempted a cheer, which petered out in the gloomy silence. ‘Is nobody happy here?’ he asked, but those nearby pretended not to have heard.5
Lords Mountbatten and Wavell withdrew to the latter’s study for a manly word, while Edwina retired to her new apartments. She had brought a Sealyham terrier, Mizzen, with her, and asked for something to feed it. Half an hour later, two servants turned up, bearing roast chicken on a silver salver. Edwina froze at the sight. Seizing the plate over Mizzen’s barking head, she ran into the bathroom, locked herself in and ate the lot.6 This incident has usually been omitted by biographers, perhaps because to modern eyes a story about an extremely thin woman who locks herself in a bathroom to eat looks uncomfortably like evidence of an eating disorder. It originally appeared in a Mountbatten-sanctioned version of events, interpreted as a response to rationing back in Britain. But Dickie and Edwina had just flown to India in considerable luxury, breaking their journey at the British High Commands in Malta and Suez, and it is unlikely they were starved on the way. Under the circumstances, it is hard not to see the incident as a demonstration of Edwina’s unhappiness.
Meanwhile, her husband was being briefed by his predecessor on the situation he was about to inherit. Mountbatten’s memory of his meeting with Wavell, recounted much later in life to his pet historians Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, has the spin of an old sea-yarn to it. According to Dickie, Wavell escorted him into the study, shut the heavy teak doors behind them, and opened with: ‘I am sorry indeed that you’ve been sent out here in my place.’
‘Well, that’s being candid,’ Mountbatten shot back. ‘Why? Don’t you think I’m up to it?’
‘No,’ Wavell is supposed to have replied, ‘indeed, I’m very fond of you, but you’ve been given an impossible task. I’ve tried everything I know to solve this problem and I can see no light.’ He gloomily opened his safe, and removed from it the diamond badge of the Grand Master of the Order of the Star of India, along with a plain manila file entitled ‘Operation Madhouse’. ‘Alas,’ the departing Viceroy lamented, handing over the badge and file, ‘I can see no other way out.’7
The words Mountbatten attributes to Wavell do not recall that officer’s usual brusque tone.8 Nor does the supposed affection of Wavell for his successor ring true. And no manila file called ‘Operation Madhouse’ has found its way into the British or Indian National Archives, though Wavell does refer to a similar plan called the ‘Breakdown Plan’ in his diary.9 ‘Wavell was frankly pretty defeatist by then,’ Attlee recalled. ‘He produced a plan worked out by his ICS advisers for the evacuation of India with everybody moving from where they were by stages right up through the Ganges valley till eventually, apparently, they would be collected at Karachi and Bombay and sail away. Well, I thought that was what Winston would certainly quite properly describe as an ignoble and sordid scuttle and I wouldn’t look at it.’10 This description is unfair, for the plan was less about panic than pragmatism. Wavell believed that the great achievement of the raj was the unification of India. He also knew that the partition of the same would be incendiary. It was, he thought, in Britain’s best interests to stand well back before lighting the touch-paper. He wanted to hand over power gradually to democratic provinces and Indian princedoms, in localized groups, while retaining British jurisdiction at the centre. When all the bits and pieces were under Indian control, the British could bow out discreetly – leaving the Indians to deal with the civil war that would almost certainly be left behind.
The Breakdown Plan was far from perfect, and made no attempt to save the Indian people from disaster. But the point was that the disaster would not be occurring on Britain’s watch. Moreover, it was what Congress had been demanding for years: that Britain simply quit India. Yet it had not been thought acceptable in Whitehall – partly because the resulting civil war would reflect badly on Britain, but also because it would not work quickly enough. According to the Indian government’s political adviser, Sir Conrad Corfield, the American government was now leaning on London ‘to confer on India the advantages of undiluted democracy as soon as possible’.11 The Americans were ever more concerned about the outward creep of communism from Russia and China, and cannot have been reassured by the fact that, a week before Mountbatten’s viceroyalty began, British intelligence services reported the first clear case of direct financial aid passing from the Soviets to the Communist Party in India.12 That same week, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had been in Moscow: Stalin told him that Russia would not interfere in Indian independence, but noted that it was a time of grave dangers. This did not placate the British. ‘It would clearly be imprudent to take Stalin’s profession of non-interference at its face value, particularly having regard to certain recent signs to the contrary’, wrote the India Secretary, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, to Mountbatten.13 Suddenly, the focus of President Truman’s campaign against communism shifted from Greece and Turkey – which had been worrying the United States for some weeks – abruptly eastwards.
The morning after the Mountbattens’ arrival, the Wavells departed with dignity and cordial handshakes, their plane taking off promptly at ten. Most of Delhi’s white population was dismayed to see them go. Wavell’s directness and unemotional approach had made him popular; the manner of his sacking had predisposed many to dislike his successor. Mountbatten’s press attaché, Alan Campbell-Johnson, had already discovered that the consensus in Delhi was against his master.14 The Europeans felt that he knew nothing about India and was little more than a playboy. The fact that Mountbatten spent his first day arranging press and photography for his grand swearing-in did little to contradict their view.
On the bright Monday morning of 24 March, the dignitaries of British India congregated at the Viceroy’s House, under the massive gold dome and ornate chandeliers of the Durbar Hall. English gentlemen in tailcoats and pith helmets strode up the steps alongside turbaned Sikhs; Indian ladies in silk saris chatted to Congressmen in homespun kurtas; princes glittered in their ancient jewels. The crowd hushed as a fanfare of trumpets heralded Dickie and Edwina’s appearance through the back doors: he a handsome prince in shining regalia with a sword clasped by his side, she a beautiful princess in a flowing gown of ivory brocade, with that carelessly treated diamond tiara flashing brilliant sparkles of light back at the photographers.
The Mountbattens marched sedately and in perfect synchrony up the aisle, an ethereal and slender pair of white-clad and gold-strewn presences, shimmering in the crowded hall. They came to a halt in front of two enormous thrones under a towering scarlet-draped canopy, and turned towards each other, then around to face their audience and a salvo of exploding flashbulbs.15 Surrounded as he was by all these new and exciting outfits, the Viceroy puffed up with delight. ‘What a ceremony!’ Mountbatten remembered later in life. ‘I put on everything. My white full dress uniform. Orders, decorations, medals, the whole lot … Obviously, I wore the Garter. Then I wore the Star of India, I was the Grand Master of the Order, I wore the Star of the Indian Empire, and then I wore the Victorian Order and that made the four; that’s all you’re allowed to wear. And I wore the aiguillettes as personal ADC to the King Emperor.’16
It is easy to laugh at Mountbatten’s obsession with decorating himself, and with his fussing over protocol. But these trivialities were prerequisites for the job. A large portion of the Viceroy’s responsibilities had to do with awarding honours, remembering faces, seating people appropriately at parties, writing correct letters and invitations, remembering how to address the divorced wife of the second son of an earl after she had remarried a sea captain, and so on. In all of these matters, Mountbatten’s skills were peerless. But the key to perfect protocol is knowing when to break it, and Mountbatten had reserved a surprise for his audience. ‘This is not a normal viceroyalty on which I am embarking,’ he admitted, in a forthright address which newspapers back in London reported with some shock. ‘Every one of us must do what he can to avoid any word or action which might lead to further bitterness or add to the toll of innocent victims,’ he said. ‘I am under no illusion about the difficulty of my task. I shall need the greatest good will of the greatest possible number and I am asking India today for that good will.’17 This was the sound of the British Empire owning up to its limitations, and the old guard of the raj might have been outraged. Fortunately, the acoustics in the hall were so bad that few could hear. Nevertheless, both Nehru and Liaquat were observed to be paying very close attention and, during the last sentence, even the poised Lady Mountbatten could be seen to turn her head slightly to look at her husband.18 Mountbatten had established his style with immediate effect. The new regime was to be frank, inclusive and open-minded. It was now full steam ahead to the transfer of power, and the old guard could come on board or stay on shore as they pleased.
During the week that followed, Mountbatten’s vision of sophisticated imperial elegance rapidly deteriorated. His wife was miserable; the parade of Indian leaders through his study conjured up a portent of insoluble quarrels; and, above all, the full horror of India’s communal violence would set in. Tension in the Punjab had been tightening for years, owing to the visible economic difference between wealthy caste-Hindus and Sikhs, and relatively impoverished, labouring Muslims. That March, it had finally snapped. The worst riots in a century had left thousands dead, mostly Sikhs massacred by Muslims in Rawalpindi and Multan.19 On the very day after Mountbatten arrived, rioting broke out in Delhi itself. Chandni Chowk is the main street of Old Delhi, running from the Lahore Gate to the Red Fort. Its wide avenue was lined with stalls selling the requisites of Delhi life: fine woven dupattas, sweet lassi, festive tinsel. Amid the labyrinth of alleyways and bazaars running off the Chowk are diverse shrines, including one of the Sikhs’ most important temples, the Sisganj Gurdwara, and India’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid. The district was a tinderbox for trouble, loaded that day by a Muslim meeting at the mosque in support of Pakistan, and ignited, according to eyewitnesses, by the ‘recklessly provocative behaviour’ of Sikh protesters. The Sikhs arrived at the busy marketplace in two lorries and assorted jeeps, and ‘careered about’, brandishing swords. (The Chief Commissioner of Delhi noted rather flippantly that this had the effect of ‘accidentally injuring some Muslims’.20) At least two people were killed and six seriously injured.21 It was not much of a welcome party for the new Viceroy.
Perhaps with the safety of the Mountbattens in mind, the district magistrate imposed draconian edicts. For seven days, a curfew would run from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. For a fortnight, no group of more than five individuals would be permitted to assemble for any purpose. For a week, all newspapers, commentary, photographs and even cartoons would be subject to official censorship. These measures did not make much difference. On 25 March, the Chief Commissioner, apparently long past the point of taking his reports seriously, wrote that ‘the night passed peacefully except for a certain amount of shouting’, and noted that there had been seven stabbing and brickbatting incidents on the previous day, in which eleven people had been injured. A police picket had opened fire when it was set upon by a mob armed with stones, a number of arrests had been made and ‘some bad characters have also been rounded up’. He concluded that, ‘All is quiet today up to the time of writing (10.30 A.M.),’ which was not much of a boast. Indeed, another hand added below that, ‘After lunch some stabbings and a clash by the Jumna [sic] Masjid.’22
If the local situation seemed bad, the national was far worse. On the Wednesday after Dickie and Edwina’s arrival, riots broke out in Calcutta, killing 8 and injuring 111 Patna, the police went on strike and occupied the arms depot at Gaya; the Prime Minister of Bihar blamed communists. By Thursday, casualties in Calcutta had risen to fourteen, and fires ripped through the east of the city. The police were rapidly losing control. First they attempted to subdue the mob with tear gas; when that did not work, they resorted to bullets, and fired eighteen rounds into the crowd.
By Friday, the Punjab was incongruously quiet – but only, said The Times, because ‘all the members of one community or the other either [had been] slaughtered or [had] fled’.23 In Amritsar, 160 lay dead in the streets after rioting. Fourteen policemen were injured at riots in Mardan, in the North-West Frontier Province. Back in Calcutta, a further eight were killed and thirty-two injured when bombs were thrown. The police gave up, and called in the Army.
The next Sunday, 30 March, was the god-king Rama’s birthday, a day of celebrations for Hindus. In Calcutta, it was celebrated with even greater rioting, which spread across the Hooghly River to the industrial city of Howrah. The death toll rose again, amid stabbings, bombings and the throwing of acid: 46 dead, 400 injured. In Bombay, a deceptive peace was broken in the evening when three separate riots broke out. Bombs were thrown, and temples set ablaze. Muslims and Hindus pitched battles in the city, fighting with clubs, knives, iron bars and whatever weapons they could improvise. The police were attacked, and responded with gunfire. Hundreds were injured, and dozens killed: the bodies lay uncounted in the streets. A car was ambushed and its four passengers imprisoned inside by the mob while they set it alight. The passengers burned alive, screaming for mercy. The next day, all that remained was four human skeletons within the burnt-out metal skeleton of their car.
While all this was going on, Mountbatten had to meet the Indian leaders. For that first week, the two least compromising and highestprofile among them declined his invitation – though he had been so anxious to meet these two in particular that he had written to each of them before his viceroyalty had begun.24 Mohammad Ali Jinnah, representing the Muslim League, remained in Bombay, making inflammatory speeches. Mohandas Gandhi, representing Mohandas Gandhi, was living among the outcastes in distant Bihar, and refused to take advantage of the viceregal aircraft. Among those Mountbatten did meet, the impression was already less than encouraging. Many of the princes seemed determined to press for the independence of their states, rather than transferring their allegiance to an independent India – a plan which would fragment the subcontinent into dozens, perhaps hundreds, of private kingdoms. The Maharaja of Bikaner blamed the Nawab of Bhopal for dividing the princes along communal lines. The Nawab of Bhopal said the Maharaja of Bikaner was nothing more than a patsy of Congress. Both begged Mountbatten not to let the British leave India at all.25 This opinion was not confined to the princes. John Matthai, the Minister for Transport, told him that, ‘But for Congress, there was no body in India which would not move Heaven and Earth to keep the British.’26 Other politicians presented further unexpected difficulties. Liaquat Ali Khan subtly suggested that Mountbatten must have made his controversial swearing-in address at the behest of Congress. Mountbatten vehemently denied it, but Liaquat said that three highly placed sources had told him it was so.27 Vallabhbhai Patel of Congress, ominously nicknamed ‘the Iron Man’, was a forceful Hindu-nationalist lawyer, clever and cool. He was impervious to Mountbatten’s famous charm, describing the new Viceroy as ‘a toy for Jawaharlalji to play with – while we arrange the revolution’.28
Only one man seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. ‘Pandit Nehru struck me as most sincere,’ Dickie wrote after their first meeting on 24 March, and praised his ‘fairness of mind’. But even this interview promised greater problems yet to come. Nehru spoke at length about Jinnah, but was too astute to impugn his nemesis openly. Instead, he managed with great subtlety to sow in Mountbatten’s mind the seeds of ill favour, perhaps realizing – either consciously or unconsciously – that criticism always bites harder when it comes dressed up as praise. Thus Jinnah, he said, was ‘one of the most extraordinary men in history’, and a ‘financially successful though mediocre lawyer’, who avoided taking any action that might split his party, such as holding debates or answering questions. The assessment had the taint of sour grapes to it, but Mountbatten did not seem to notice.29 Three days later, Jinnah made a speech in Bombay that confirmed Nehru’s picture of him as a thorn in everyone’s side. He alleged that the British had deliberately conspired against the Muslims: trying to force them into staying in India rather than creating their own state of Pakistan, in order to produce greater bloodshed and destruction after the raj’s departure.30 He was in a better position than anyone else in India to know that the opposite was true, for the person who had been attempting to conspire with the British to create Pakistan for more than seven years was Jinnah himself.
While the Viceroy struggled to generate a rapport with the Indians, his Vicereine was doing far better. Edwina began by entertaining the wives of her husband’s guests but, within a couple of days of arriving, she established her own political network. In the first few days, she sought out and befriended Gandhi’s right-hand woman, Amrit Kaur, who was to become one of her greatest friends and the new government’s Minister for Health; Vallabhbhai Patel’s influential daughter, Maniben; Liaquat’s wife, the Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, who like Edwina herself was deeply involved in health and welfare work; the Untouchable leader, B.R. Ambedkar; the radical feminist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya; and the poet and politician Sarojini Naidu, who coincidentally had been a childhood friend of her mother’s.31 Very few of the women or, indeed, the men she met had ever been allowed into the Viceroy’s House before.
Women were prominent in Indian politics, a trend which Edwina Mountbatten, along with many Indian women, attributed to Gandhism. Non-violence, passive resistance and boycotts were all tactics which could be practised by women without breaking social conventions; and Nehru had insisted as early as 1937 that the Congress manifesto pledge to remove all social, economic and political discrimination against women. As a result, there were more powerful women in India’s Congress than there were in Britain’s Labour Party or in America’s Democratic Party at the time. The Muslim League, too, had Fatima Jinnah and the Begum Liaquat, unofficial but significant and visible figures, at the highest level. As Edwina would later tell an audience in London, ‘We shall have to wake up in this country when we see how the women of India have achieved emancipation to such a remarkable degree in spite of the backwardness of the country, the illiteracy of the people, the low standard of life, and all kinds of disadvantages from the point of view of religious feeling and other obstacles.’32
For years Edwina had been looking for a role in which she could actually do something and, to her surprise, it would be in India that she found it. One of her most important friendships was quickly established with the sharp and personable Congress politician Vijaya Lakshmi ‘Nan’ Pandit. ‘Edwina plunged headlong into informality,’ remembered Nan. ‘Politics were forgotten and women discussed women’s problems.’33 But it was with Nan’s brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, that she formed the most important connection of all.
Jawahar and Edwina became close almost immediately on her arrival. Shahid Hamid, the private secretary to Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, alleged that Edwina’s relationship with Jawahar was ‘sufficiently close to have raised many eyebrows’ by 31 March 1947 – and claimed to have heard the gossip from Nehru’s confidant, Krishna Menon.34 At first glance this seems implausible, not least because Hamid’s memoirs have been widely disputed. By 31 March, the Mountbattens had been in India for only a week. Yet even so quickly it is possible to be attracted to a person, to feel a sympathy with them and even to develop the beginnings of a romantic attachment. They were together remarkably often during that first week, and the informality of their friendship was obvious. He addressed a meeting of the Red Cross; she accompanied him, and photographs show her looking up at him, enraptured. At the reception for delegates of the Asian Relations Conference on 28 March, the pair drew their armchairs together for an involved conversation. In one photograph, Nehru is being interrupted, and looks startled. Lady Mountbatten, elegant in a long floral-print dress, has her attention focused entirely on the Congress leader. That same evening, at the Mountbattens’ first garden party, there was a shortage of chairs during a dance recital. The yogic Jawahar forsook his, and instead sat cross-legged on the floor at Edwina’s feet. After the party, Edwina accompanied Jawahar back to his house on York Road for a nightcap – with her daughter, but without her husband.35
In March 1957, Edwina would write to Jawahar that it was the anniversary of ‘Ten years … monumental in their history and so powerful in the effects on our personal lives.’ Simultaneously, he wrote to her that March 1957 marked ‘Ten years!’36 Even if their close friendship had not yet developed a romantic aspect, it is obvious that it had been firmly established.
To Lord Mountbatten, this first week of Indian reality had come as a nasty shock. While Edwina began to find her footing, Dickie rapidly lost his. When he wrote the first of his personal reports to London on 31 March, India – with its impossible politicians, its religious combustions, its villages laid to waste by bloodthirsty mobs, its corpses in burnt-out cars, its tangled, ghastly web of tensions, histories and grievances, and the enormous weight of expectation to fix all of this laid heavily upon his shoulders – had already reduced the beaming new Viceroy of 24 March to jelly. Aghast, he wrote to Attlee:
The scene here is one of unrelieved gloom … At this early stage I can see little ground on which to build any agreed solution for the future of India. The Cabinet is fiercely divided on communal lines; each party has its own solution and does not at present show any sign of being prepared to consider another.
In addition, the whole country is in a most unsettled state … The only conclusion that I have been able to come to is that unless I act quickly I may well find the real beginnings of a civil war on my hands.37
If anything, Mountbatten was understating the case. The real beginnings of civil war were already on his hands, and he was in no position to deal with them. Britain had only 11,400 soldiers in India (a number which would fall to 4000 over the course of the twelve months from April 1947), and the country had been in a state of unrest for at least a year.38 Only one man had ever seemed capable of holding back this swelling tide – and he was the elderly Gujarati who would meet the new Viceroy for the first time that afternoon.
Mohandas Gandhi arrived at five o’clock, a tiny, flyweight figure leaning on Maniben Patel for support. He posed for photographs in the afternoon sun with the Mountbattens, and formed an instant bond with Edwina. As they went back into the house, Gandhi rested his hand on the Vicereine’s shoulder – a gesture of fellowship, acceptance and trust which he habitually reserved for his ashramites. Most of the photographers were already packing up their equipment, but one shutter in the garden clicked. The next morning, the image it captured was on front pages across the world.
Whether Gandhi formed so immediate a connection with Lord Mountbatten is uncertain. Back inside the Viceroy’s House, Edwina made an excuse to leave, so that her husband and the Mahatma could get down to business. They did not. Gandhi first assured Mountbatten that he would come back for two hours every day that week; then started to tell his life story. ‘I felt there was no hurry and deemed it advisable to let him talk along any lines that entered his head,’ noted Mountbatten cautiously. Two hours later, having spoken at great length of his legal training in England, his life in South Africa, and his travels in India, and not at all about a settlement for independence, the Mahatma got up and left. The Viceroy was slightly bemused, but determined to remain upbeat. ‘We parted at 7.15, both of us, I am sure, feeling that we had progressed along the path of friendship.’39
The next day Gandhi returned, bringing an ascetic meal of curds to take under a tree in the garden while the Viceroy pointlessly offered him tea and scones. The Mahatma launched upon an unsuspecting Mountbatten his plan to quell the bubbling discontent between Hindu and Muslim. It was an extraordinary suggestion. Jinnah was to be made Prime Minister, and could form a cabinet entirely composed of Muslims if he wished. Congress would agree to cooperate freely and sincerely. This would, Gandhi believed, satisfy the Muslims that the new India was not to be a ‘Hindustan’, and that their rights and freedoms would be represented.
That day was April Fool’s Day, but Gandhi’s scheme was not a joke. He intended that Jinnah should be offered a chance to form an exclusively Islamic cabinet, despite the fact that the Muslim population of India was only around 25 per cent, with the majority Congress Party meekly serving beneath them, and apparently did not foresee any potential upset in the already inflamed Hindu and Sikh communities as a consequence of this. Nor did he acknowledge that an artificially constructed and undemocratic minority government would represent a continuation of what India had most loathed about the British raj: it would mean the rule of a very vast number of people by the unelected elite of a culture radically different from their own. Such a government would have had no real chance of success, and must quickly have fallen or been toppled after the British had left. At that point, it could only have been replaced by a predominantly Hindu administration. Moreover, in case Jinnah were wise enough to refuse the leadership, Gandhi proposed a codicil. If Jinnah would not form a cabinet, the same offer was to be made to Congress, with the Muslim League acting as obedient handmaidens to a purely Congress rule. Either way, it was virtually guaranteed to result in disaster for India’s 100 million Muslims, the sidelining of the Muslim League, and the ultimate domination of Congress. The scheme was so risky, and the probable result so obvious, that many Muslims thought Gandhi was conspiring to discredit Jinnah and ensure the long-term goal of a Hindu nationalist state.40
Gandhi had put forward the same idea several times in the past, and it had been dismissed by previous viceroys as impossible.41 By 1947, even Gandhi’s colleagues in Congress were beginning to suspect that he had gone ‘a bit senile’.42 Mountbatten described himself as ‘staggered’ by Gandhi’s suggestion, but was not yet sure enough of his balance to dismiss the plan outright.43 Nehru was more realistic, and told him it would not work. A note of frustration had become discernible lately in Nehru’s tone when he spoke of the Mahatma. He described the old man as ‘going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India, instead of diagnosing the cause of this eruption of sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole’.44 A couple of weeks later, Gandhi was forced to drop the plan on the grounds that Congress was not prepared to accept it. The rejection prompted his withdrawal from formal involvement in negotiations for the transfer of power, though he would continue to contribute from the sidelines.45
Mountbatten’s initial meetings with Gandhi had been bad. His meetings with Jinnah would be worse. The Viceroy decided that he would open with the same gambit that Gandhi had used on him: to leave politics aside in the first instance, and instead chat about himself. And so he launched cheerfully into the story of his Indian tour with the Prince of Wales in the twenties, his engagement to Edwina in Delhi, his exploits as Supremo and so forth, to the bewilderment of his guest. ‘He could not see why we should not talk business at once,’ Mountbatten remembered, ‘but finally resigned himself to listen to my Indian reminiscences.’46 Fortunately, Mountbatten was interrupted by the arrival of some press photographers. With Lady Mountbatten joining them, Mountbatten and Jinnah went into the gardens to have their pictures taken. ‘A rose between two thorns,’ quipped Jinnah – slightly too late, for Edwina had just moved around from between them to Jinnah’s left-hand side, casting her in the role of a thorn, and him in the role of the rose. Some historians have hinted that Jinnah’s faux pas may not have been entirely unintentional.47 Mountbatten assumed it was, and roared with laughter. Either way, the joke thawed the atmosphere. After they returned to the study, Mountbatten reported that Jinnah relaxed considerably and even started talking about his own background and life in London. ‘In fact we ended on a surprisingly friendly note. He had come in haughty and frigid but the joke at the photograph had suddenly unfrozen him and I felt we had begun to make friends and would be able to do business together.’48
It is safe to say that Mountbatten and Jinnah never ended up making friends. Much has been made of the former calling the latter various unpleasant names in his notes – including ‘psychopathic case’, ‘bastard’ and ‘evil genius’.49 The remarks presented in context appear less offensive, for Mountbatten was in the habit of writing very lively notes. It is easy enough to find him calling Nehru ‘a demagogue’ and ‘reprehensible’, Patel ‘hysterical’, and Gandhi ‘an inveterate and dangerous Trotskyist’.50 At first, both Mountbattens tried hard with the Jinnahs. When Jinnah returned the evening after their first meeting to dine at the Viceroy’s House with his sister Fatima, they stayed until well after midnight, and according to Mountbatten ‘the ice was really broken’.51 He was adamant that Jinnah should be brought into the government to work alongside Nehru. When he suggested this to Jinnah, it did not go down well. ‘If I had invited the Pope to take part in the Black Mass,’ Mountbatten reported to London, ‘he could not have been more horrified.’52
‘Dickie and I have of course found the Jinnahs the most difficult,’ Edwina admitted to Isobel Cripps. They were personally charming, she said, and remarkably intelligent: ‘I cannot help but liking [sic] them both very much indeed.’ But she and Dickie despaired of getting them to compromise. ‘Yet one sympathises so much with their fears and apprehensions and wants to do everything one can to give the necessary safeguards and as fair a deal as is humanly possible.’53 Edwina had Fatima to tea that week, and struck up a conversation about how encouraging it had been to see Muslim and Hindu students integrating happily at Lady Irwin College. ‘Don’t be misled by the apparent contentment of the Muslim girls there,’ Fatima told her, bleakly; ‘we haven’t been able to start our propaganda in that college yet.’54
It is impossible to dismiss the notion that Fatima Jinnah’s coolness to Edwina Mountbatten may have been informed by the latter’s close and obvious friendships with Gandhi and Nehru. Previous vicereines had not gone visiting Gandhi’s hut in the sweeper colony; they had certainly not gone alone to dine with the handsome widower Nehru. Edwina did both, and regularly. Fatima Jinnah was a perceptive woman, well-connected in political circles, and can hardly have been unaware of Edwina’s friendship with her brother’s rival. Whether or not she believed the more scandalous gossip, it is only logical that the connection with Jawahar would have raised suspicions that Edwina had a leaning towards Congress. Any further suspicion that Mountbatten might be influenced by his wife would have been well founded. Dickie’s interest in Asian politics had, by his own admission, followed Edwina’s.
As April began, the situation in the country at large was getting worse, and little was being done about it. On 6 April, it was reported that riots had left 350 dead and 4000 homeless in the town of Gurgaon, around 20 miles from Delhi on the road to Jaipur; from Noakhali came reports of people being roasted alive.55 Gandhi went on a twenty-four-hour fast ‘to vindicate swaraj through Hindu–Muslim unity, hand spinning, and the like.’56 It did not achieve much, but it was more than the Viceroy could do. Just four days later, on 11 April, five major cities – Calcutta, Delhi, Amritsar, Agra and Peshawar – were placed under curfew following riots. In Calcutta, a food shortage was beginning to hit. The market and most of the shops were closed. Great heaps of rubbish had been piling up in the streets for a fortnight, for the Untouchable sweepers were too scared to perform their normal function.57 The simultaneous collapse of public hygiene and public nutrition had predictable consequences in the form of a cholera epidemic. Three hundred and fifty people had been admitted to hospital already, the numbers increasing exponentially.
On 15 April, something hopeful happened at last, when Gandhi and Jinnah issued a joint proclamation against violence. It was not a sign of any softening in their personal relationship. The two men had not seen each other for two and a half years, and did not even meet to discuss their joint declaration. Mountbatten had asked Jinnah to appeal for a truce in the communal disturbances in conjunction with Congress.58 Jinnah had agreed, but only on the grounds that the ‘unknown nobody’ of a Congress President, J.B. Kripalani, should not be invited to sign.59 Gandhi agreed to sign it in Kripalani’s place, telling Mountbatten that it was a great political step and that he was pleased to have given him the idea in the first place. ‘Although I have absolutely no recollection of Mr Gandhi making any such suggestion,’ Mountbatten noted, ‘I felt it would be politic not to point this out. For although I believed it to have been my own idea I am only too delighted that he should take the credit.’ He was not, however, convinced by Gandhi’s motives. At the same meeting, Gandhi asked Mountbatten to hand over full control of unpartitioned India to the interim government. Mountbatten answered that he could not, for it would mean handing over the reins to Congress and ignoring the Muslim League, which would precipitate civil war. Gandhi replied with a smile that, by signing the declaration, Jinnah had forsworn violence in perpetuity: he could not start a civil war now, even if he wanted to. Mountbatten was deeply shocked. It seemed to him that Gandhi was proposing to take advantage of Jinnah’s good intentions to crush Muslim dissent. ‘I find it hard to believe that I correctly understood Mr Gandhi’, he wrote.60
Whatever its motives, the joint declaration was a significant diplomatic achievement. But it proved only that Jinnah had as little control over Muslim India as Gandhi had over the Hindus. Communal violence continued across the entire subcontinent, increasing in Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Peshawar and Cawnpore. Within days of the proclamation, newspapers were reporting that the North-West Frontier Province had descended into chaos, with widespread arson attacks and brutal violence against the Hindu minority. The situation became so awful that Mountbatten was obliged to take action. He did so, as usual, by calling a meeting in Delhi. Mountbatten, Nehru and Sir Olaf Caroe, Governor of the North-West Frontier Province, congregated at the Viceroy’s House on 18 April. Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, Prime Minister of the North-West Frontier Province, was summoned away from his erupting province and flown by RAF special aircraft from Peshawar to join in. It was agreed that all non-violent political prisoners in NWFP jails would be released, which seemed like a step forward; but most of the 5000 prisoners refused to leave their prisons.61
The North-West Frontier was far from the only problem on the Viceroy’s plate. Mountbatten went straight from that meeting into another with the Sikh leaders Tara, Kartar and Baldev Singh, who demanded partition of the Punjab, and hinted that they aimed at an independent state or province of their own. Khalistan, or ‘Sikhistan’ as it was nicknamed, was to include Simla and perhaps even Lahore.62 ‘Any hopes that I still entertained of being able to avoid the partition of the Punjab if Pakistan is forced on us were shattered at this meeting,’ Mountbatten reported to London; ‘all three Sikhs made it quite clear that they would fight to the last man if put under Muslim domination.’63
On 24 April, Mountbatten had another meeting with Patel. It was to prove one of his trickiest. ‘Since you have come out here,’ Patel accused him, ‘things have got much worse. There is a civil war on and you are doing nothing to stop it. You won’t govern yourself and you won’t let the Central Government govern. You cannot escape responsibility for this bloodshed.’64 Patel demanded that he turn over full authority to the government to allow it to fight what he considered to be the insurgents: Muslim League armies in the Punjab, the North-West Frontier and Assam.
‘Like you and Stafford, both Dickie and I like Vallabhai [sic] Patel very much indeed’, wrote Edwina to Isobel Cripps, ‘although we quite realise the dominant attitude he adopts and his rather dictatorial manner. He and Dickie, however, are getting on very well indeed and when he behaves like a bit of a gangster, Dickie, as you well [sic] imagine, does not lag behind!’65 Patel had described one of Mountbatten’s actions in a written minute as ‘pointless and inappropriate’, sparking a massive argument between the two men. Mountbatten demanded that he tear the minute up and withdraw it; Patel refused, and Mountbatten said he would proceed directly to Nehru, resign the viceroyalty, and fly home immediately unless Patel left the government instead. ‘He questioned whether I would throw up the viceroyalty after only a month in the job,’ he remembered. ‘I replied that he evidently did not know me. I could be tougher than him and unless he withdrew his minute then and there I would send for his Prime Minister and announce my resignation to him.’ To Mountbatten’s immense satisfaction, Patel gave in.66
By the end of April, Mountbatten’s situation seemed bleak. His relationships with Gandhi, Jinnah and Patel were all in troublesome states; the princes presented a range of awkward grievances that he had not yet even begun to address; the Sikhs were threatening civil war; and violence continued to flare up across the country. A malaise began to spread among the Viceroy’s staff. Alan Campbell-Johnson confided his misgivings to the Chief of Staff, Lord Ismay. Ismay was a good deal older than Campbell-Johnson, and had spent much more time in sticky diplomatic corners. He shrugged off Campbell-Johnson’s concerns, saying, ‘I like working for lucky men.’67 Campbell-Johnson cheered up immediately. Mountbatten was nothing if not lucky.
That luck came to his aid almost immediately. On 28 April, Dickie and Edwina flew to Peshawar, an ancient Pathan town near the border with Afghanistan in the North-West Frontier Province. Like many frontiers, the north-west was a wild and tribal place. Muslim Leaguers wore green; Congress-aligned unionists (also mostly Muslim) wore red. Friction between the two was common, and often violent. This was the territory of the Pir of Manki Sharif, a fearsome Islamic fundamentalist nicknamed the ‘Manki Mullah’. Still only in his mid-twenties, the Manki Mullah excited the interest of the press with his burning eyes and flowing black beard, preached an extreme interpretation of sharia law, and commanded a following of some 200,000 devotees.68 Only a month before, on 28 March, the Manki Mullah had been captured in the Muslim League office in Peshawar. Since then he had languished in prison, to the enormous benefit of his reputation; and his Greenshirts, enraged, had been rioting. The Redshirts had rioted back, and the city had been placed under stringent curfews while the police struggled to cope.
Fearing the worst, Caroe and Jabbar Khan had persuaded the Redshirts not to demonstrate during Mountbatten’s visit, and had effectively cordoned off the centre of Peshawar. As a result, on the morning of the Viceroy’s arrival, at least 50,000 Greenshirts assembled on the outskirts of the town at Cunningham Park, shouting political slogans and stamping their feet.69
The scene was too great a temptation for Mountbatten’s brazen self-confidence. He insisted on driving right to the centre of Cunningham Park, where he seized Edwina’s hand and climbed gamely to the top of an embankment. The sight of an enormous sea of coloured turbans and green flags gave the Mountbattens temporary pause. For the first time, they were facing a hostile crowd. It was a very large one, and potentially deadly – Caroe later estimated that there would have been between 20,000 and 40,000 rifles in the crowd, many of which were being jabbed threateningly into the air.70
Edwina quickly came to her senses, and simply smiled and waved. Dickie did likewise and, to the great surprise of everyone except himself, did not get shot. Instead, the crowd gave him a ten-minute ovation, and some even chorused a previously unimaginable phrase: ‘Viceroy zindabad!’(‘Long live the Viceroy!’).71 In all probability, the warmth of the reception had little to do with Dickie’s charm, and much more to do with the fact that he had chosen that day to wear a military uniform of the same Islamic green hue as the flags, banners and shirts of the Muslim League that fluttered in the breeze for miles across the park.72 His decision may have been sartorial rather than political, but the effect was not lessened. Sometimes, Lord Mountbatten’s love of dressing up paid off.