Freedom at Midnight (54 page)

From his carriage, Mountbatten instantly realized that there wasn't the vaguest chance of carrying out the elaborately planned ritual he had prepared to accompany the flag-raising. He himself couldn't even get out of the carriage.

"Let's just hoist the flag," he shouted to Nehru. "The band is swamped. They can't play. The guards can't move."

Over the crowd's happy din, the men on the platform heard his call. The saffron-white-and-green banner of a free India climbed up the flagpole while, tautly erect in his carriage, Queen Victoria's great-grandson marked its progress with a formal salute.

A roar of untrammeled happiness burst from half a million throats as the folds of the flag rose above the heads of the crowd. Even the heavens seemed ready to brighten the historic impact of the moment. As India's new flag neared the peak of its flagstaff, a rainbow suddenly flashed across the sky. To a people to whom the occult was an obsession and the celestial bodies the pre-ordainers of man's destiny, its appearance could only be interpreted as a manifestation of the divinity. Most extraordinary of all, its green, yellow and indigo bands were eerily similar to the colors of the flag framed in its perfect arc. As it glittered there a voice quivering with wonder rose from the faceless horde around the platform.

"When God himself gives us a sign such as this," it called out in Hindi, "who can stand against us?"

The most extraordinary experience of their lives now awaited Louis and Edwina Mountbatten—their ride back to Lutyens's Palace. Their gilded carriage became a sort of life raft tossed amidst the most hysterical, happy, exuberant throng of human beings either of them had ever seen. Nehru himself was passed up into the carriage to ride with them, quite literally thrust aboard by his countrymen. The whole journey, Mountbatten thought, was "a

kind of enormous picnic of almost a million people, all of them having more fun than they'd ever had in their lives." He immediately understood that this spontaneous, utterly uncontrollable, but utterly happy, outburst was a far truer reflection of the meaning of this day than all the pomp and pageantry he had planned for it.

Standing up in the middle of a forest of waving hands thrust frantically toward his, Mountbatten scanned the crowd trying to find an outer limit to that field of human heads. He could see none.

Three times, Mountbatten and his wife leaned out of the carriage and personally hauled aboard an exhausted woman about to tumble under its wheels. The trio took their places on the black leather seats designed to cushion the king and queen of England. They sat there, dark eyes wide with wonder, the edges of their saris pulled across their giggling mouths, jouncing along with India's last viceroy and vicereine laughing happily at their sides.

Above all, for Louis and Edwina Mountbatten the memory of this glorious day would always be associated with a cry, a vibrant, interminably repeated cry. No Englishman in Indian history had been privileged to hear it shouted with the emotion and sincerity that went with it that afternoon in New Delhi. Like a series of thunderclaps it burst over and over again from the crowd, the popular sanction of Mountbatten's achievement. Standing there in his shaking carriage, they received something that neither his great-grandmother nor any of her progeny had received, the homage, the real homage, of the people of India. "Mountbatten Ki Jai!" the crowd yelled again and again, "Mountbatten Ki Jail" ("Long live Mountbatten!")

Balmoral, Scotland, August IS, 1947

Six thousand miles from the exulting crowds of New Delhi, in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, an official car entered the courtyard of the baronial castle of Balmoral. Its sole occupant was immediately shown to the study in which George VI awaited. Bowing stiffly, the Earl of Listowel, the last Secretary of State for India, solemnly informed the king that the transfer of power to Indian hands had been accomplished. The nature of the monarch's reign was irrevocably altered; he was no longer George VI, Rex Imperator. He had now, Listowel ex-

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plained, to return to George VTs custody those ancient seals which had been the badge of the Secretary of State's office, the symbol of the links binding the Indian Empire to the British Crown. Unhappily, he continued, there were no seals. Someone years before had mislaid them. The only souvenir his last Secretary of State for India could propose to the sovereign of the Indian empire that he'd never seen was a ritualistic nod of his head and the symbolic extension of an empty palm.

Dusk, and the dust raised by a million feet, settled over the capital of India. Thousands continued to throng its streets, singing, cheering, embracing. In Old Delhi, by the walls of the great Red Fort, thousands of celebrating people swarmed through a gigantic outdoor carnival of snake charmers, jugglers, fortunetellers, dancing bears, wrestlers, sword swallowers, fakirs piercing their cheeks with silver spikes, flutists. Other thousands trudged out of the city toward the endless plains from which they had come. Ranjit Lai, the Brahman peasant from Chatharpur, was among them. To Lai's distress, the tonga driver who had asked four annas to bring him to Delhi now wanted two rupees to take him home. Vowing that that was too high a price to pay for freedom, he and his family set out to walk the twenty miles back to their village.

Alone at last in the private chamber of their palace, the Mountbattens fell into each other's arms. Tears of sheer happiness poured down their faces. The wheel of their lives had come full circle. In the streets of the city in which a quarter of a century before they had fallen in love, they had shared a triumph, felt an exhilaration such as is given to few people to know. For the admiral who had tasted the exalting pleasure of accepting the surrender of three quarters of a million Japanese, his life would never produce another experience to rival it. It had been, Louis Moimtbatten thought, like the hysterical celebration at the end of a war—only, this had been "a war both sides had won, a war without losers."

London, August 16,1947

The following morning, a visitor from New Delhi rang the bell of Number Ten Downing Street. Its

occupant, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, had every reason to feel satisfied that August day. India's independence had been accompanied by an outpouring of good will and friendship toward Britain such as no one had thought possible six months before. Comparing her actions to those of Holland in Indonesia and France in Indochina, one distinguished Indian had declared, "We cannot but admire the courage and political capacity of the British people."

Mountbatten, however, had sent his former secretary, George Abell, to London to caution Attlee against any excessive jubilation at such declarations. The manner in which independence had been achieved, Abell told Attlee, in the garden of his residence, was a great triumph both for his government and for the man he had chosen as his last viceroy. But he warned Attlee against celebrating the triumph too soon or too publicly, because the inevitable consequence of partition was going to be "the most appalling bloodshed and confusion."

Attlee puffed his pipe and sadly shook his head. There would be no boastful trumpetings, no self-satisfied proclamations coming from Downing Street, he agreed. He was "under no illusion." What they had accomplished was important, he said, but he well knew that there was now a price to be paid and that price was going to be "terrible bloodshed in the India we have left."

The time had come to open Pandora's box. For just a second Mountbatten paused, his gaze upon the two manila envelopes in his hand. Each contained a set of the new maps of the subcontinent and fewer than a dozen typewritten pages of paper. They were the last official documents Britain would bequeath India, the final links in a chain that had begun with Elizabeth I's Royal Charter to the East India Company in 1599 and continued down to that act over which, barely a month before, a clerk had muttered "Le Roi le Veult." None of the documents that had preceded them, however, had produced a reaction as immediate or as brutal as these were going to stir. They were, inevitably, the catalysts of the tragedy predicted by Britain's Prime Minister in his Downing Street garden.

Mountbatten passed them to Nehru and Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, suggesting that they study them in two different rooms, then return for a joint meeting in two hours' time. The fury contorting their

faces on their return reassured Mountbatten on at least one point: Cyril Radcliffe had performed his thankless task with true impartiality. The two men seemed equally furious. As soon as they sat down, they both exploded in a rush of angry protests. India's independence celebrations were over.

Cyril Radcliffe had rigorously followed his instructions in applying his scalpel to the map of India. With a few minor exceptions, the lines he had traced in the Punjab and Bengal were those imposed by the religious persuasion of the majority populations. The result was exactly what everyone had predicted: technically feasible, in practical application a disaster.

The line in Bengal condemned both parties to economic ruin unless they could get together. Eighty-five percent of the world's jute was grown in the area that had gone to Pakistan, but there was not a single mill for processing it in the new state's territory. India wound up with over a hundred jute mills and the port of Calcutta from which it was shipped to the world—but no jute.

The Punjab boundary over which Radcliffe had agonized so much began in a trackless woods on the edge of Kashmir, where the western branch of a river called the Ujh entered the Punjab. Following where possible the Ravi or Sutlej rivers, it ran 200 miles southward to the northernmost edge of the Great Indian Desert. Lahore went to Pakistan, Amritsar with its Golden Temple to India. Rad-cliffe's line sliced into two parts the lands and peoples of India's most closely knit, militant community, the Sikhs. Vengeful and embittered, they were now to become the principal actors in the tragedy of the Punjab.

The major controversy produced by Radcliffe's award would come over one of his rare exceptions to the major-population principle. It involved a squalid little city called Gurdaspur near the northern extremity of the Punjab There, Radcliffe had elected to follow the natural boundary line of the Ravi river, leaving the city and the Moslem villages around it inside India, instead of creating a Pakistani enclave protruding into Indian territory.

It was a decision for which Pakistan would never pardon him. For, had Radcliffe awarded Gurdaspur to Pakistan, it would not have been just that dirty, inconsequential city that Jinnah's state would have won. With it, inevitably,

would have come that enchanted vale for which the dying Mogul Emperor Jehangir had cried in despair, "Kashmir, only Kashmir."

Without Gurdaspur, India would have had no practical land access to Kashmir, and its vacillating Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh would have had no choice but to link Kashmir's destiny to Pakistan. Unintentionally, almost inadvertently, Radcliffe's line offered India the hope of claiming Kashmir.

The man who had been asked to serve as the artisan of India's vivisection because he knew so little about the country, contemplated for the last time in his life the mournful landscapes of the land he had divided. Cyril Radcliffe, under close security guard, was going home. The last task accomplished by the I.C.S. officer delegated to assist him had been to comb his plane for a possible bomb. Lost in his thoughts, the British jurist watched from his aircraft window as the Punjab's endless fields of wheat and sugar cane slipped past, their furrows indelibly altered now by the tracings of his pencil on a map.

Radcliffe knew better than anyone the grief and consternation the lines that he had produced were going to cause. There had been, alas, no lines he could have drawn that would not have brought forth their harvest of anguish and suffering. The elements inexorably propelling the Punjab to a tragedy had been inherent in the situation long before Cyril Radcliffe had been summoned to India from the Dickensian gloom of his London law chambers. As certain as the eternal cycle of the Punjab's seasons, the consequences of his award would, he knew, be terrible bloodshed, violence and destruction. And, just as certainly, he knew that it was he who would be blamed for it all.

Packed away in his luggage were Radcliffe's physical souvenirs of his stay in India, a pair of Oriental carpets that he had bought in Delhi's bazaar. His real souvenirs would always be mental. On his appointment both Nehru and Jinnah had agreed to be bound by his decision and use all their authority to implement it. Now, in unseemly haste, both men rushed to condemn it.

In a few days' time, in those law chambers from which he had set out for India, a thoroughly disenchanted Radcliffe reacted to their outburst with the one gesture available to him. He disdainfully refused the 2,000 pounds

sterling he was to have received as his fee for preparing the most complex boundary award of modern times.

On the plains below, invisible to Radcliffe, the greatest migration in human history was already beginning. Precursors of the storm to come, a first trickle of helpless people staggered along the Punjab's canal banks, down her dirt paths and unmarked tracks, over her great Trunk Highway, across her unharvested fields. In a few hours, the publication of Radcliffe's report would add still another dimension to the horrors enfolding that province that had been the arena of so many of mankind's dramas. Villages whose Moslem inhabitants had exulted at the birth of Pakistan would find themselves in India; in others, Sikhs barely finished celebrating what they had mistakenly thought was their hamlets' attachment to India, before they had to flee for their lives toward Radcliffe's border across the fields they had cultivated for years.

Soon the anomalies that, as Radcliffe had warned, haste would produce in his boundary became manifest. In places, the headworks of a canal system wound up in one country, the embankments which protected them in another. Sometimes the line ran down the heart of a village, leaving a dozen huts in India, a dozen more in Pakistan. Occasionally it even bisected a home, leaving a front door opening onto India and a rear window looking into Pakistan. All the Punjab's jails wound up in Pakistan. So, too, did its unique insane asylum.