Freedom at Midnight (22 page)

Gandhi did not oppose partition simply out of some mystical devotion to Indian unity. His years in the villages of India had given him an intuitive feeling for the soul of his country. Partition, that intuition told him, was not going to be the "surgical operation" Jinnah had promised Mountbatten it would be. It would be a sickening slaughter that would turn friend on friend, neighbor on neighbor, stranger on stranger in thousands of those villages he knew so well. Their blood would be shed to achieve an abhorrent, useless end, the division of the subcontinent into two antagonistic parts condemned to gnaw at each other's entrails. Generations of Indians for decades to come, Gandhi believed, would pay the price of the error they were preparing to commit.

Gandhi's tragedy was that he had that evening no real alternative to propose beyond his instincts, the instincts those men had so often followed before. This night, however, he was no longer a prophet. "They call me a Mahatma," he bitterly told a friend later, "but I tell you I am not even treated by them as a sweeper."

Like Mountbatten, Nehru, Patel and the others all felt a catastrophe menaced India, and partition, however painful it might be, was the only way to save the country. Gandhi believed with all his heart and soul that they were wrong.

Even if they were right, he would have preferred chaos to partition.

Jinnah, he told his followers, will never get Pakistan unless the British give it to him. The British would never do that in the face of the Congress majority's unyielding opposition. They had a veto over any action Mountbatten proposed. Tell the British to go, he begged, no matter what the consequences of their departure might be. Tell them to leave India "to God, to chaos, to anarchy, if you wish, but leave."

We will go through fire, he believed, but the fire will purify us.

He was a voice crying in the wilderness. Even his two hand-picked deputies were not ready to heed one last time the voice that had so often given utterance to their joint aspirations.

Patel had been prepared to concede partition even before Mountbatten's arrival. He was aging, he had suffered two heart attacks, and he wanted to get on with it, to end these ceaseless debates and get down to the task of building an independent India. Give Jinnah his state, he argued; it wouldn't survive anyway; in five years, the Moslem League would be knocking at their door begging for India's reunification.

Nehru was a torn and anguished man, caught between his deep love for Gandhi and his new admiration and friendship for the Mountbattens. Gandhi spoke to his heart, Mountbatten to his mind. Instinctively, Nehru detested partition; yet his rationalist spirit told him it was the only answer. Since reaching his own conclusion that there was no other choice, Mountbatten and his wife had been employing all the charm and persuasiveness of Operation Seduction to bring Nehru to their viewpoint. One argument was vital. With Jinnah gone, Hindu India could have the strong central government that Nehru would need if he was going to build the socialist state of his dreams. Ultimately, he too stood out against the man he had followed so long.

With their two vital voices in favor, the rest of the high command quickly fell in line. Nehru was authorized to inform the Viceroy that while Congress remained "passionately attached to the idea of a united India," it would accept partition, provided that the two great provinces of Punjab and Bengal were divided. The man who had led

them to their triumph was left alone with his tarnished victory and his broken dream.

At 6 p.m. the following day, May 2, exactly forty days after it had landed in New Delhi, the viceregal York MW-102 took off from Palam Airport for London. This time, its most important passenger was Mountbatten's chief of staff, Lord Ismay, and he carried with him for submission to His Majesty's government a plan for the division of India.

All Mountbatten's hopes had foundered, finally, on the rock of Jinnah's determined, intransigent person. The one factor that might have changed things, Jinnah's illness, he ignored. For the rest of his life, Mountbatten would look back on that failure to move Jinnah as the single great disappointment of his career. His personal anguish at the prospect of going down in history as the man who had divided India could be measured by a document flying back to London with Ismay in Mountbatten's viceregal York, his fifth personal report to the Attlee government.

Partition, Mountbatten wrote, "is sheer madness," and "no one would ever induce me to agree to it were it not for this fantastic communal madness that has seized everybody and leaves no other course open. ... The responsibility for this mad decision," he wrote, must be placed "squarely on Indian shoulders in the eyes of the world, for one day they will bitterly regret the decision they are about to make."

A PRECIOUS LITTLE PLACE

Simla, May 1947

Louis Mountbatten had no need for air-conditioning now. The view from his study's window alone was enough to cool him: the snow-tipped crests of the world's highest mountain chain, the Himalayas, the glacial wall dividing India from Tibet and China. No longer did his eyes recoil at bleak landscapes withering in India's remorseless heat. The vision before him now was one of unremitting green: emerald lawns, soaring stands of fir, delicate clumps of mountain fern. Exhausted by weeks of unceasing strain, Mountbatten had followed a tradition laid down by his predecessors. On Ismay's departure for London, Mountbatten had abandoned Delhi for the most bizarre product of the British raj, a strangely anomalous, consummately English creation planted in the Himalayan foothills, the little town of Simla.

Five months out of every year, for over a century, that miniature Sussex hamlet, 7,300 feet high, tucked just below the roof of the world, had become a great imperial capital, the site from which the British ruled their Indian Empire and its associated satellites from the Red Sea to Burma. It was a precious little place, with its octagonal bandstand rimmed with blue-and-white-striped pillars, its broad esplanades, immaculate gardens, the Tudor belfry of Christ Church Cathedral, its bells cast, in the muscular tradition of Victorian Christianity, from the brass of cannons captured during the Sikh wars. A thousand miles

from the sea, served by one narrow-gauge railway, virtually inaccessible by car, Simla poised disdainfully above the scorched and overpopulated plains of India, cool, green and unmistakably English.

Each year in mid-April, when the warm weather arrived, the viceroy's departure for Simla in his white-and-gold viceregal train signaled that the mountain capital's season had begun. The raj followed: bodyguards, secretaries, A.D.C.'s. generals, ambassadors and their staffs, every major I.C.S. functionary of India's central administration. Behind came a cohort of tailors, hairdressers, boot and saddle makers, silversmiths by appointment to His Excellency the Viceroy, wine and spirit merchants, memsa-hibs with their mounds of luggage, their flocks of domestics and their turbulent progeny. Until 1903, the railroad line ended forty-two miles away, at Kalka, and there that whole incredible cohort transferred to two-horse tongas for the eight-hour trip up the hills to Simla. Baggage followed by bullock cart and on the backs of men. Long lines of coolies bore upon their work-bent spines an interminable flow of cases full of potted shrimp, foie gras, sausages, Bordeaux, champagne to supply the banquets that gave Simla's season an elegance unparalleled in India.

The coolies were necessary, because in Simla the clap of hoofs and the bark of the internal-combustion engine were replaced by the soft pit-pat of human feet. An old tradition insisted that only three carriages, and later cars, were allowed in Simla, those of the viceroy, the commander in chief of the Indian Army and the governor of the Punjab. God, went a local story, had applied for permission to have a car in Simla but was refused. Simla's standard conveyance until the British left India was the rickshaw. They were good-sized, recalled one owner—"not those wretched little things that stick in your ribs"—and four men were required to pull each one up and down Simla's precipitous slopes. A fifth man ran alongside to relieve the others.

By tradition coolies did not wear shoes. Their employers compensated them, however, by the sumptuousness of their uniforms. Families competed in Simla to have its most elegantly turned-out coolies. The viceroys had the exclusive right to scarlet One Scot put his in kilts. Another resident had two sets of uniforms for his—one for daytime, one for evening. All usually wore on the breast

of their uniforms the ciphers or the coat of arms of the family in whose service they were expending the lungs beneath. Almost without exception those coolies of Simla suffered from tuberculosis.

The feasts toward which they bore their employers were brilliant, and the most brilliant of all took place in Viceregal Lodge. The rickshaws of the town's aristocracy bore red rosettes, which entitled them to use the viceroy's private entry for grand balls and garden parties. The others bore white rosettes and used the public entrance. Whatever the color of their rosettes, the rickshaw's occupants could feel sure of one thing: once inside, with the exception of a maharaja or two, they would not have to rub shoulders with any citizens of the country they governed.

"You simply cannot imagine the brilliance of a ball at Viceregal Lodge in the old days," mused one woman, "the long lines of the rickshaws in the night moving slowly up the hill, each with its little oil lamp glittering in the darkness and the only sound the soft patter of hundreds of bare feet."

Simla's heart was the Mall, a broad avenue running from one end of the ridge in which the town was set to the other, an exclusively English presence of teashops, banks and stores, its surface as cleanly scrubbed as the viceroy's porcelain. At one end stood Christ Church Cathedral into which the commander in chief, in full uniform, led the colony every Sunday, there to listen to "a proper choir—all English voices." Until World War I, Indians were not allowed to walk on the Mall.

That prohibition had represented the essence of Simla. The annual move to its heights was more than just a seasonal escape from the heat. It was a subtle reaffirmation of Britain's racial superiority, of the solidity of those virtues that set the British apart from the pullulating brown millions sweltering at their feet on the parched reaches of India.

Much of that old Simla was already gone by the time Louis Mountbatten arrived in early May 1947. Now an Indian could even walk down the Mall—provided that he was not wearing the national dress of his country.*

* Simla changed with an easily foreseen rapidity after independence. The Indians, because of its connotations, abandoned it as their summer capital. "The only thing which remains of the old Simla," M. S. Oberoi, owner of Cecil's Hotel and chairman of

Mountbatten may have been exhausted by his intensive negotiations, but he was also in an exuberant, confident mood. He had, after all, achieved in six weeks what his predecessors had failed to accomplish in years. He had delivered to 10 Downing Street a plan that offered Britain an honorable exit from India and to the Indians a solution, however painful, to their impasse.

Because he had been able to wring plenipotentiary powers out of Attlee before leaving London, he had not been obliged to obtain the formal agreement of the Indian leaders to his plan before sending it back to England. He had only to assure the Attlee government that they would accept it when it was put before them.

Mountbatten's plan was a distillation of what he had learned in the privacy of his study. It represented his careful evaluation, based on his knowledge of each leader's intimate sentiments and convictions, of what they would accept when the chips were down. So confident was he of his judgment that just before leaving for Simla he had formally announced his intention to present it to them on his return May 17.

Simla's brisk climate, its Olympian calm, however, inspired reflection, and as it did, uncharacteristic doubts began to gnaw at the Viceroy. Since the plan had reached London, he had been inundated by a stream of cables from the Attlee government proposing textual modifications which, while they would not alter its substance, would change its tone.

More serious, however, was the real concern which underlay his growing apprehension. If the implications in the plan that he had sent to London were fully realized, the great Indian subcontinent would be divided into three in-

Oberofs Hotels Ltd., lamented in 1973, "is the climate." One English survivor of Simla's grand days still lives in the town, an eighty-seven-year-old widow named Mrs. Henry Penn Montague. She lives alone now in the dark and melancholy Victorian mansion of her maternal uncle, the Finance Member of Lord Curzon's Viceregal Council, surrounded by six dogs, five cats, four servants and a house full of memorabilia. Mrs. Penn Montague, who speaks six languages, rises every day at four in the afternoon. Breakfast is followed by high tea at sunset, after which Mrs. Montague retires to a room that she has equipped with a Zenith Transoceanic radio. There, while Simla sleeps, Mrs. Penn Montague listens to her radio until dawn, eavesdropping on the world. At 4 a.m., hers is perhaps the only light burning between Simla and Tibet.

dependent nations, not two. Mountbatten had inserted in his plan a clause that would allow the sixty-five million Hindus and Moslems of Bengal to join into one viable country, with the great seaport of Calcutta as their capital.

Contrasted to Jinnah's aberrant, two-headed state, that seemed an entity likely to endure, and Mountbatten had quietly encouraged Bengal's politicians, Hindu and Moslem alike, to support it. He had even discovered that Jinnah would not oppose the idea. He had not, however, exposed it to Nehru and Patel, and it was this oversight that disturbed him now. Would they accept a plan that might cost them the great port of Calcutta with its belt of textile mills owned by the industrialists who were their party's principal financial support? If they didn't, Mountbatten, after all the assurances he had given London, was going to look a bloody fool in the eyes of India, Britain and the world.