Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (61 page)

The knot was worse than the Gordian, and everyone was tightening it. ‘
Beware
the
Gandhiji
’, wrote Wavell one evening at the end of a long day:

The year was 1946, and he had been grappling with a Cabinet mission sent out by the new Labour Government to make yet another fresh start. By then the prospect of a peaceable transfer of power to a united independent India seemed remote, for every Indian aspiration was subdivided into lesser hopes, and complicated by deceptions, illusions and contradictions—as Gandhi said, every case had seven points of view, ‘all correct by themselves, but not correct at the same time and in the same circumstances’.

All the parties were at odds. Congress claimed to be the natural successor Government still, but the Muslim League, under the inflexible M. A. Jinnah, was now demanding a separate State for the country’s 90 million Muslims—Pakistan, ‘Land of the Pure’.
1
But there were many lesser disputes and anomalies. The Sikhs wanted a Sikhistan, the 584 Indian States mostly wanted to remain within the Empire, the Kashmiris were a Muslim community under a Hindu prince, the Hyderabadis a Hindu community under a Muslim prince. Even the British themselves pursued varying interests. The Indian Political Service was deeply committed to the cause of the Princely States, the British commercial community was anxious about its future profits, the Indian Civil Service was planning another competitive examination for British entrants, and an Indian Army Commission, comprising three British officers and one Indian, had lately recommended that half the Indian Army’s officers should continue to be British.

And gradually, as they argued, the Raj was cracking. Government was running down, the ICS was now half Indian, and Wavell himself admitted that the British had lost nearly all power to control events. Riots and strikes swept the country. Illegal organizations proliferated. The Indian Navy mutinied. There were rumours that the Afghans were about to invade the North-West Frontier Province, that the Sikhs were about to rebel in the Punjab. The integrity of the police became ever more suspect, and even the civil service became for the first time politically tainted, as some of its Indian officers tacked understandably to the wind. Above all the
spectre of communal war, Muslim versus Hindu, now stalked the country. In August 1946 the two religions clashed so violently in Calcutta that in a single day 5,000 people were said to have died. Demagogues of both sides gained eager audiences everywhere, and from Dacca to Peshawar people prepared to kill or be killed, in the cause of Kali or at the bidding of Allah. ‘We shall have India divided,’ wrote Jinnah, ‘or we shall have India destroyed!’ ‘I tell the British,’ cried Gandhi, ‘give us chaos!’

Still Wavell laboured on, studying his interminable instructions from London, cabling endless memoranda, reasoning with Jinnah, debating with Nehru, hammering away at constitutional niceties or communal discrepancies. He blamed it mostly on Churchill’s Government. ‘What I want’, he wrote, ‘is some definite policy, and not to go on making promises to India with no really sincere intention of trying to fulfil them.’ Once he seemed almost to succeed, when the Indian leaders, assembled in conference at Simla, appeared ready to accept a constitutional settlement: but when that hope collapsed too, the exhausted, dispirited and now embittered Viceroy gave up. Perhaps the only way, he thought, was simply to leave, without devising a solution at all—giving them chaos, if that was what they wanted. Perhaps they should withdraw province by province, women and children first, then civilians, then the army, leaving India to murder, burn and loot itself as it wished. He sent the plan home to London, and called it ‘Operation Ebb-Tide’.

Presently he was sacked. Attlee, the Prime Minister of the new Labour Government, had firm views about India. He had gone there on a Parliamentary mission as long before as 1928, and had concerned
himself with the subject ever since. He had long ago reached the conclusion that only the Indians themselves could solve their own problems, freed of all British constitutional restraints, and even before the war he had argued that India should be given Dominion status within a fixed period of years. By 1946 he was sure that the transfer of power must be made as soon as possible—peaceably if possible, with the rights of minorities protected if they could be, but above all quickly, and absolutely. The first necessity, he thought, was to be rid of poor Wavell, whom he considered defeatist and ineffectual, ‘a curious silent bird’. It did not take him long to find a successor. ‘I thought very hard,’ he wrote, ‘and looked all around. And suddenly I had what I now think was an inspiration. I thought of Mountbatten.’

Mountbatten! The perfect, the allegorical last Viceroy! Royal himself, great-grandson of the original Queen-Empress, second cousin of George VI, though by blood he was almost as German as he was English he seemed nevertheless the last epitome of the English aristocrat. He was a world figure in his own right, too, for as Supreme Commander in South-East Asia he had commanded forces of all the allied nations—one of the four supremos who, in the last year of the war, had disposed the vast fleets and armies of the western alliance. Moreover he was a recognized progressive, sympathetic to the ideals of Labour, anything but a reactionary on the meaning of Empire, and with a cosmopolitan contempt for the petty prejudices of race and class.

‘What is different about you from your predecessors?’ Nehru asked Mountbatten soon after his arrival in India. ‘Can it be that you have been given plenipotentiary powers? In that case you will succeed where all others have failed.’ The Viceroy had in fact
demanded
such powers, enabling him to reach swift decisions on the spot. He had also committed Attlee to a date for the end of British rule in India, with no escape clauses. The Raj was to end not later than June, 1948, when complete power would be handed to Indian successors.

This renunciation meant that Britain had no bargaining power any more: she was genuinely disinterested at last, and was concerned only to see that India was left a workable State, preferably a
member of the Commonwealth, at least friendly to Great Britain. She had nothing much to offer in return, now that liberty was so firmly pledged, but nevertheless Mountbatten was marvellously, some thought overweeningly, self-confident. As he said himself, he thought he could do anything, and sure enough the combination of prestige, assurance and clear intention made him a much more formidable negotiator than the aloof Linlithgow or the despondent Wavell. It meant that he was arguing, if not from strength, at least from style.

The Mountbattens brought to the viceregal office an element of
brio
absent since the days of Curzon. They sustained the swagger of it all, the thousands of servants, the white viceregal train, the bodyguards, the curtseying and the royal emblems, but they made it contemporary. Gone were the ancient shibboleths of the court. The only royal Viceroy was the least grandiose of them all. At viceregal dinners now half the guests were always Indian, and earlier incumbents might have been horrified to observe how frankly the Mountbattens talked to natives of all ranks. It was an abdication in itself, for it was the very negation of imperial technique, but it was proper for the times and the purpose.

Mountbatten hoped to leave behind a federal united India, Hindus, Muslims and Princely States constitutionally linked. As second-best, he aimed at a peacefully divided one. He was adamant from the start that there would be no reservations or hidden clauses. ‘All this is yours’, he said to Gandhi one day, when the Mahatma asked if he might walk around the viceregal gardens. ‘We are only trustees. We have come to make it over to you.’ No Viceroy had ever talked like that before, and no Viceroy had ever ventured into such intimate political relationships. During his first two months in India Mountbatten had 133 recorded interviews with Indian political leaders, conducted always in an atmosphere of candid urgency—if the Indians wished to inherit a peaceful India, they must decide fast how to arrange it. He talked to scores of politicians, but the fate of the country was really decided by four men: the Viceroy himself, Gandhi, Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

Mountbatten recognized the force of these men. Day after day he received them, usually together, sometimes separately, in the
sunny and fresh-painted study at his palace. Times had greatly changed, since the half-naked fakir had first penetrated this imperial sanctum to negotiate with the austere Lord Irwin, while the palace servants gaped to see a political agitator exchanging badinage with the Viceroy. Now the negotiators met on an equal footing, like distant relatives assembling to divide an inheritance. The talks were seldom easy, for the issues were colossal and Indian passions ran high, but they were not generally rancorous, for at last it was patent that the British interest was not in keeping India, but in honourably getting rid of it.

Mountbatten’s relations with the three leaders greatly differed. Gandhi, past the peak of his career, he recognized as a kind of constitutional monarch: he was baffled by him, charmed by him, often, like all Englishmen, irritated by him—‘judge of my delight’, he reported once, ‘when Gandhi arrived for a crucial meeting holding his finger to his lips—it was his day of silence!’ Alone among the senior British officials of India, though, he became a friend of the Mahatma, and Gandhi in return gave him his affection. He was, as always, free with his advice—‘Have the courage to see the truth, and act by it!’—but he was attracted by the soigné youthfulness of the Mountbattens, their combination of the simple and the very urbane. Though he was never reconciled to the idea of a divided India, still by making his friendship publicly clear, by appearing often in happy companionship with the Viceroy and his wife, Gandhi gave his
imprimatur
to the course of events.

Jinnah was a very different negotiator. He was dying of cancer, but nobody knew it: he was as decisive as Mountbatten himself, and as confident too—since the date of independence had already been decreed, he knew that he had only to keep arguing to ensure that Pakistan came into being. His lawyer’s brain was sharper than the Viceroy’s, his purpose more dogmatic, and as the months passed towards independence day he became ever more adamant that the only solution was the partition of India and the establishment of Pakistan under the government of the Muslim League. Though a Muslim only in theory—he was the grandson of converts, and could speak no Urdu, the language of Islam in India—rather than submit to Hindu rule, he said, he would have a Pakistan consisting only of the
Sind desert. A gaunt, wintry, rather alarming-looking man, wearing a monocle said to have been inspired by Joe Chamberlain’s, and suits of irreproachable cut, Jinnah was very Anglicized: he had a house in London, and had spent much of his life in England. He was, though, impervious to the Mountbatten charm, and noticeably resistant to logic or sweet reason. Mountbatten thought him the evil genius of the drama, the wrecker, and called him a haughty megalomaniac.

It was Nehru who became closest to the Mountbattens, and this was not surprising. Nehru was an agnostic intellectual, but of a sensual, emotional kind, a patrician like Mountbatten himself, a charmer and a lover of women—the Nehrus were famous philanderers. He was a Kashmiri Brahmin, with much of the Kashmiri melancholy and introspection, and though he had spent his life fighting in the patriotic cause, he was highly susceptible to personal magnetisms. He needed a cause, a love, a leader. He was the devoted subject of Gandhi, and in a subtle, tacit way he was the passive collaborator of Mountbatten. The two men were of an age and of a taste, in many ways complementary to one another: through all their tortuous talks an understanding ran, an acceptance perhaps that they had more in common as men than they were at variance as statesmen.

Getting to know these three men, consulting many others, weighing the opinions of his administrators, nevertheless Mountbatten soon made up his mind about the fate of India—too soon, his critics were to say, and there was something impetuous to his solution, something inherited perhaps from his experiences of war. As the months passed so the British grip on security weakened, until the army could no longer guarantee order, the police were helplessly over-strained, the intelligence services had disastrously decayed and even the last Britons of the administration were demoralized. The conviction had gone, and as the country slid towards anarchy few Britons in India would now argue the case for Empire—Field Marshal Claude Auchlinleck, the Commander-in-Chief, said of his own army that any Indian officer worth his salt was now a nationalist, ‘and so he should be’.

Mountbatten’s press attaché, Alan Campbell-Johnson, likened
India in 1947 to a ship on fire in mid-ocean with a hold full of ammunition. The Viceroy himself, finding the parties irreconcilable, decided that partition was inevitable, and the sooner the better. ‘There was in fact no option’, Campbell-Johnson thought. Two Dominions would be created at once, with immediate independence. There would be no interim Government of any kind, no gradual transfer of power. Punjab and Bengal, with almost equal numbers of Muslims and Hindus, would be bisected. The Princely States would be urged to join one Dominion or the other. Everything would be partitioned, the Indian Army, the National Debt, the railway system, down to the stocks of stationery at the New Delhi secretariat, and the staff cars of GHQ.