Freedom at Midnight (18 page)

Patel had always been profoundly wary of his brother in Congress khadi, Nehru. The two men were natural rivals for control of the independent India that was about to emerge from three centuries of colonialism, and their ideas of what that India should be were markedly different. Patel dismissed Nehru's Utopian dream of building a new society as "this parrot cry of socialism." Capitalist society worked, he maintained; the problem was to Indianize it, to make it work better, not jettison it for an impractical ideal.

"Patel," one of his aides noted, "came from an industrial town, a center of machines, factories and textiles. Nehru came from a place where they grew flowers and fruit."

He derided Nehru's fascination with foreign affairs, the great debates of the world. He knew where power was to be found, and that was where he was, in the Home Ministry, acquiring the loyalty of what would be independent India's police, security and information services, as he had developed the loyalty of the Congress machine. Nehru might wear Gandhi's mantle but he walked with an uneasy tread because he knew the legions behind him longed for another Caesar. Like Jinnah, with whom his relations were cordial, Patel was underestimated by those who saw in Indian politics only Gandhi and Nehru. It was an error. Patel, one of his aides said, "was India's last Mogul."

The Viceroy looked at the note which had offended him, then passed it across his desk to Patel. Quietly he asked him to withdraw it. Patel brusquely refused.

Mountbatten studied the Indian leader. He was going to need the support of this man and the machinery he

represented. But he was sure he would never get it if he did not face him down now.

"Very well," said Mountbatten. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to order my plane."

"Oh," said Patel, "why?"

"Because I'm leaving," Mountbatten replied. "I didn't want this job in the first place. I've just been looking for someone like you to give me an excuse to throw it up and get out of an impossible situation."

"You don't mean it!" exclaimed Patel.

"Mean it?" replied Mountbatten. "You don't think I am going to stay here and be bullied around by a chap like you, do you? If you think you can be rude to me and push me around, you're wrong. You'll either withdraw that minute, or one of us is going to resign. And let me tell you that if I go, I shall first explain to your prime minister, to Mr. Jinnah, to His Majesty's Government, why I am leaving. The breakdown in India which will follow, the blood that will be shed, will be on your shoulders and no one else's."

Patel stared at Mountbatten in disbelief.

Surely, he declared, Mountbatten wasn't going to throw over the viceroyalty after only a month on the job.

"Mr. Patel," Mountbatten answered, "you evidently don't know me. Either you withdraw your minute here and now, or I shall summon the prime minister and announce my resignation."

A long silence followed. "You know," Patel finally sighed, "the awful part is I think you mean it."

"You're damned right I do," answered Mountbatten.

Patel reached out, took the offending minute off Mount-batten's desk, and slowly tore it up.

A lone light bulb, its contours speckled with carbonized insects, hung from the hut's ceiling. In its pale light, Gandhi, naked to the waist, squatted on a straw mattress on the cement floor. The others, talking excitedly, were gathered around him. Dark eyes sparkling with awe and glee, the urchins of the Bangi sweepers colony, the fetid slum of the Untouchables who swept Delhi's streets and cleaned out her toilets, stared through the window at their prophet and his disciples.

The men crowded about Gandhi would be the leaders of a free India. They were there in that blighted slum, its air reeking from the stench of the human excrement rotting in its open sewers, its inhabitants' faces crusted with the sores of a hundred diseases, because Gandhi had decided to pass his Delhi sojourn there. The struggle for the oppressed of Hindu society, its Untouchables, whom he called harijans ("Children of God") had rivaled the struggle for national freedom in Gandhi's heart.

Untouchables constituted a sixth of India's population. Supposedly condemned by their sins in a previous incarnation to a casteless existence, they were readily identifiable by the darkness of their skin, their cringing submissiveness, their ragged dress. Their name expressed the contamination that stained a caste Hindu at the slightest contact with them>-a stain that had to be removed by a ritual, purifying bath.

Even their footprints in the soil could defile some Brahman neighborhoods. An Untouchable was obliged to shrink from the path of an oncoming caste Hindu lest his shadow fall across his route and soil him. In some parts of India, Untouchables were allowed to leave their shacks only at night. There they were known as Invisibles.

No Hindu could eat in the presence of an Untouchable, drink water drawn from a well by his hands, use utensils that had been soiled by his touch. Many Hindu temples were closed to them. Their children were not accepted in schools. Even in death they remained pariahs. Untouchables were not allowed to use the common cremation ground. Invariably too poor to buy logs for their own funeral pyres, their dead were usually consumed by vultures rather than by flames.

In some parts of India they were still serfs, bought and sold along with the estates on which they worked, a young Untouchable being generally assigned the same value as an ox. In a century of social progress, they enjoyed only one privilege, which stemmed from their exemption from Hinduism's vegetarian code. Whenever an epidemic struck down a sacred cow, the Untouchable who carted off the rotten carcass was allowed to sell the meat to his fellow outcastes.

Since his return from South Africa, Gandhi had made their cause his. His first Indian ashram had nearly failed

because he bad welcomed them into its fold. He massaged them, nursed them. He had even insisted on publicly performing the most demeaning act a caste Hindu could accomplish to demonstrate his loathing of Untouchability. He had cleaned out an Untouchable's toilet. In 1922, he had very nearly died for them, fasting to thwart a political reform that he feared would institutionalize their sep-arateness from Indian society. By always moving around India as they did, when they were able to travel, in third-class railroad cars, by living in their slums, Gandhi was trying to force India to remain conscious of their misery.*

In a few months, weeks even, most of the men around Gandhi would be government ministers occupying the enormous offices from which the British had run India, crossing Delhi in chauffeur-driven American cars. He had deliberately obliged them to make this pilgrimage to one of India's worst slums to remind them of the realities in the nation that they would soon govern.

India's political realities occupied those men this evening. It was suffocatingly hot and Gandhi was using his air conditioner—a wet towel wrapped like a turban around his bald head. To his distress, the tempers of his followers in the sweepers' hut were as warm as the night around them.

Gandhi had been wrong when, a few days earlier, he had fervently assured Mountbatten that the Congress Party was prepared to do anything to prevent partition. His error was the measure of the slowly widening gulf between the aging Mahatma and the men around him, the men he had

♦His effort was not without its disadvantages for his Congress colleagues. Shortly after his arrival in Delhi, Lord Mountbatten asked one of Gandhi's closest associates, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, whether, in view of the determined poverty in which Gandhi chose to live, the Congress Party could really protect him. "Ah," she said, laughing, "you and Gandhi may imagine that when he walks down that Calcutta station platform looking for a suitably crowded third-class car that he's alone. Or when he's in his hut in the Untouchables' Colony he's unprotected. What he doesn't know is that there are a dozen of our people dressed as Untouchables walking behind him, crowding into that car." When he moved into the Bangi Colony in Delhi, she explained, a score of Congress workers, again scrupulously clothed as harijans, were sent in to live in the hovels around his. "My dear Lord Louis," she concluded, "you will never know how much it has cost the Congress Party to keep that old man in poverty."

matured and developed as the leaders of the Congress Party.

For a quarter of a century, those men had followed Gandhi. They had thrown off their Western suits for his khadi, moved their fingers to the unfamiliar rhythms of the spinning wheel. In his name they had marched into the flailing lathis of the police and the gates of British jails. Quelling the occasional doubts of their rational spirits, they had followed him on his improbable crusades to the improbable triumph now beckoning: independence wrested from the British by Gandhian nonviolence.

They had followed him for many reasons, but above all because they saw that his unique genius for communicating with the soul of India could draw mass support to their independence banner. The potential differences between them had been submerged in the common struggle with the British. Now, in that hot Delhi night, those differences began to emerge as they discussed Gandhi's plan to make Jinnah prime minister. If they refused to endorse his scheme, Gandhi argued, the new viceroy might find himself driven into a corner from which the only escape was partitioning India. Walking from village to village in Noakhali and later Bihar, applying his "ointment" to India's sore spots, Gandhi had understood infinitely better than those political leaders in Delhi could the tragedy that partition might produce. He had seen in the huts and swamps of Noakhali what havoc communal fury once unleashed could wreak. Partition, he argued, risked unleashing those passions. Desperately he begged his followers to accept his idea as their last chance to keep India united and prevent that tragedy.

He could not budge Nehru and Patel. There was a limit to the price they were prepared to pay to keep India united, and handing over power to their foe Jinnah exceeded it. They did not share Gandhi's conviction that partition would inevitably lead to violence. Brokenhearted, Gandhi would have to report to the Viceroy that he had not been able to carry his colleagues. The real break was still a slight distance ahead, but Gandhi and those men whom he had groomed were fast approaching a parting of the ways. Gandhi's life crusade had begun in the cold solitude of an unlighted South African railroad station. Its culmination was now drawing near, and for

Gandhi it would end as it had begun—in the stillness of his lonesome soul.

There was no need for the air conditioner whirring in the viceregal study that April afternoon. The chill emanating from the austere and distant leader of the Moslem League was quite sufficient to cool its atmosphere. From the instant he arrived, Mountbatten had found Mohammed Ali Jinnah in a "most frigid, haughty and disdainful frame of mind."

The man who would ultimately hold the key to the subcontinent's dilemma in his hands was the last of the Indian leaders to enter the Viceroy's study. A quarter of a century later, an echo of his distant anguish still haunting his voice, Louis Mountbatten would recall, "I did not realize how utterly impossible my task in India was going to be until I met Mohammed Ali Jinnah for the first time."

Their meeting had begun with an unhappy gaffe, a gaffe poignantly revealing of the meticulous, calculating Jinnah, to whom no gesture could be spontaneous. Realizing that he would be photographed with the Mountbattens, Jinnah had carefully memorized a pleasant little line to flatter Ed-wina Mountbatten, who, he was sure, would be posed between the Viceroy and himself.

Alas, poor Jinnah! It was he, not Edwina, who wound up in the middle. But he couldn't help himself. He was programed like a computer, and his carefully rehearsed line just had to come out. "Ah," he said, beaming, "a rose between two thorns."

Inside the study, Jinnah began by informing Mountbatten that he had come to tell him exactly what he was prepared to accept. As he had done with Gandhi, Mountbatten interrupted with a wave of his hand. "Mr. Jinnah," he said, "I am not prepared to discuss conditions at this stage. First, let's make each other's acquaintance."

Then with his legendary charm and verve, Mountbatten turned the focus of Operation Seduction on the Moslem leader. Jinnah froze. To that aloof and reserved man who never unbent, even with his closest associates, the very idea of revealing the details of his life and personality to a perfect stranger must have seemed appalling.

Gamely Mountbatten struggled on, summoning up all the reserves of his gregarious, engaging personality. For

what seemed to him like hours, his only reward was a series of monosyllabic grunts from the man beside him. Finally, after almost two hours, Jinnah began to soften. As the Moslem leader left his study, Mountbatten sighed and said to Alan Campbell-Johnson, his press attach^, "My God, he was cold! It took most of the interview to unfreeze him."

The man who would one day be hailed as the Father of Pakistan had first been exposed to the idea at a black-tie dinner at London's Waldorf Hotel in the spring of 1933. His host was Rahmat Ali, the graduate student who had set the idea to paper. Rahmat Ali had arranged the banquet with its oysters on the half shell and un-Islamic Cha-blis at his own expense, hoping to persuade Jinnah, India's leading Moslem politician, to take over his movement. He received a chilly rebuff. Pakistan, Jinnah told him, was "an impossible dream."

The man whom the unfortunate graduate student had sought to lead a Moslem separatist movement had, in fact, begun his political career by preaching Hindu-Moslem unity. His family came from Gandhi's Kathiawar Peninsula. Indeed, had not Jinnah's grandfather for some obscure reason become a convert to Islam, the two political foes would have been born into the same caste. Like Gandhi, Jinnah had gone to London to dine in the Inns of Court and had been called to the bar. Unlike Gandhi, however, he had come back from London an Englishman.

He wore a monocle, superbly cut linen suits, which he changed three or four times a day to remain cool and unruffled in the soggy Bombay climate. He loved oysters and caviar, champagne, brandy and good Bordeaux. A man of unassailable personal honesty and financial integrity, his canons were sound law and sound procedure. He was, according to one intimate, "the last of the Victorians, a parliamentarian in the mode of Gladstone or Disraeli."