Gandhi & Churchill (100 page)

Churchill’s funeral, January 30, 1965. (Hulton/Getty Archives)

Chapter Thirty

DEATH IN THE GARDEN

1947–1948

Mark my words. I prophesied the present war and [now] I prophesy the bloodbath.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, MAY
1943

Alas, do all living creatures kill one another?

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

I
N FACT
, M
OUNTBATTEN’S ARRIVAL WAS HARDLY
a victory for Gandhi—it spelled the end of his fondest hopes: “From the moment Mountbatten landed in Delhi, partition became inevitable.”
¹
No other solution to a possible Hindu-Muslim civil war seemed possible.

Even as Mountbatten’s plane touched down on the tarmac, disorder and violence were commonplace in every major city. Most provincial governors, finding the police no longer reliable, had to rely on the army to try to keep armed mobs apart and to count the dead. However, Mountbatten stoutly maintained the fiction that everything was going according to plan. The forty-six-year-old new viceroy, resplendent in a gleaming white uniform bedecked with medals and the Order of India, seemed brimming with vitality. He was greeted by maharajas, rows of soldiers, flags, and ceremonial salutes. The last viceroy was also the first viceroy to have the ceremony recorded on camera and broadcast on an international radio hookup.
²

Mountbatten’s message was as upbeat as Neville Chamberlain’s had been when he stepped off the plane at Heston in 1938. “This is not a normal Viceroyalty,” he said to the nation. “I believe that every political leader in India feels as I do the urgency of the task before us.” The task was the full and complete transfer of power by June 1948.
³
“Lord Louis,” as he was called, confidently believed he could succeed where others had failed. He saw opening discussions with the Mahatma at once as a crucial part of his strategy.

That was not going to be easy. Gandhi was many miles away in Bihar, still trying to stop the killing, this time of Muslims by Hindus. Every day he passed through villages where disemboweled corpses lay strewn in dense bamboo thickets, while vultures fed on the remains.
⁴
When the viceroy’s summons came, he reluctantly agreed to take a train to Delhi. But when Mirabehn unthinkingly reserved a double compartment instead of his usual third-class seat, Gandhi’s frustration and anger boiled over. How dare she put the government to this extra expense? His rage left her in tears, as the train slowly wound its way through the angry heat-ridden countryside.

The historic meeting with Mountbatten came on March 31. The photograph of the occasion shows Lord and Lady Mountbatten looking friendly but ill at ease, and the Mahatma detached and distant. Having personally dealt with nearly four decades of viceroys, he had watched them come and go. There had been sympathetic Ampthill; well-meaning Hardinge; helpful Minto; colorless Reading; sanctimonious Irwin; contemptuous Willingdon; unresponsive Linlithgow; sensible but unwavering Wavell.

Now there was Mountbatten: much younger than the others and outspokenly pro-Congress. But he also was impatient and infinitely vain.
^*129
Gandhi had few expectations about what the British could offer for the future, which seemed to grow darker each day, viceroy or no viceroy.

Gandhi talked to Lord Louis for more than two hours, mostly about his life and his endless battle with the Raj. The next day, April Fool’s Day, Gandhi repeated the extraordinary proposal that had so stunned Wavell and the Cabinet Mission. Let Jinnah be India’s prime minister, he urged; let him choose his ministers, whether Hindu or Muslim; and let the viceroy’s veto power be the only restraint. Gandhi was convinced this was the only way to win the Muslim League’s trust and keep India intact. The Congress would complain but would give way if Gandhi got them to see the light.

Mountbatten smiled and said he found the plan attractive. “But I need not say that this solution coming at this time staggered me,” he confessed in his official report.
⁵
He pretended that he would discuss the matter with Nehru. But in fact he had already decided how to proceed.

He and Nehru had spoken on March 24. They knew each other from Singapore after the war, when Nehru had joined the British victory parade and rescued Mountbatten’s wife Edwina from the roaring crowds of overseas Indians anxious to shake the Pandit’s hand. Now that both men were in Delhi, the intimacy between Nehru and Mountbatten increased—as did Nehru’s intimacy with the viceroy’s wife. “When Nehru began to call Edwina and me ‘his dear friends,’” Mountbatten remembered later, “I began to get the feeling that we were halfway home.” From that moment, he became a shameless Nehru partisan, an advantage Nehru did not scruple to exploit.
⁶

It was a natural meeting of minds. The Pandit and Dickie shared the same socialist sympathies and elitist public school attitudes. They also shared a friend, V. P. Menon, who would become Mountbatten’s closest Indian adviser. Working together, Mountbatten, Nehru, and Menon proceeded to work out India’s future and their own. No Muslim was allowed to attend their meetings.
⁷

Their plan was simple and brutal. Jinnah and the Muslims would be forced to accept a truncated Pakistan, shorn of Bengal and the Punjab. Nehru would become prime minister of the rest of India, including the princely states, with Menon as his personal representative in London. Mountbatten would serve as governor-general of both countries. Nehru offered Mountbatten another inducement for agreeing to partition: the newly independent India, he vowed, would join the British Commonwealth, the post-imperial gathering of former colonies that Mountbatten and others hoped would be the future face of the British Empire.
⁸

Mountbatten did not need persuading. His first meeting with Jinnah on April 5 was a disaster. The viceroy found the Quaid-e-Azam “most frigid, haughty, and disdainful”—mild stuff compared to his later descriptions of Jinnah as “a psychopathic case” and “bastard,” once the bitterness of memory settled in.
⁹
Mountbatten dedicated himself to securing the most he could for Nehru and the Congress as future rulers of India and giving as little to Jinnah and the Muslim League as possible.

Since Gandhi (unbeknownst to Jinnah) was the Muslim leader’s strongest ally in Delhi circles, that also meant ignoring Gandhi. “This is no time for idealistic gestures,” Mountbatten would say. “This is the time for action.” Within two weeks of his arrival Mountbatten had eliminated the Mahatma from any significant contribution to designing the new India. Neither Nehru nor Patel nor any of the other leading Congress politicians ever noticed or complained.
¹⁰

Gandhi was crushed but hardly surprised. Once again the British had disappointed him, even as the Congress informed him that it could never endorse his quixotic plan—the last hope for a unified India. So Gandhi informed the Congress that he would take no part in any further negotiations with the viceroy and left again for Bihar. He would accept partition and do his best to keep as much of India intact as possible. But never again woud he see the Indian National Congress or Nehru as his allies, let alone disciples.

“No one listens to me any more,” he sadly confessed. “I am a small man. True there was a time when mine was a big voice…Now neither the Congress nor the Hindus nor the Moslems will listen…I am crying in the wilderness.”
¹¹

Like Churchill, he instinctively understood that the violence was just beginning. In Bihar the killing flared up again, as well as in Noakhali. Violence soon spread to the Punjab, as the reality sank in that either the Muslims
or
the Hindus
or
the Sikhs would rule that province but never all three. The same would happen in Bengal. Those lucky enough not to be murdered set out on the road. At one point five to six million people were in motion across India, the greatest human migration in history.
¹²

In Muslim-majority Kashmir the maharaja arrested the local Muslim leader, which promised trouble there. Meanwhile the date for a final deal on partition arrived. Jinnah has been retrospectively cast as the villain of the piece, but in fact his back was to the wall. It is not entirely clear that he ever wanted full and complete partition.
¹³
Then Gandhi’s old protégé Vallabhbhai Patel put the final seal on the plan by insisting on the division of Bengal and the Punjab. Ostensibly this was to give the future Muslim state more territory. In fact, it was to secure as much of those provinces as possible for India. Jinnah realized that far from having to force the issue of partition, it was being forced on him, with the viceroy applying the maximum pressure.

The final meeting between Mountbatten and Jinnah came on June 2 at midnight. Mountbatten’s military adviser, General Ismay, sat in. Ismay was an old India officer and another Churchill favorite. Unlike Mountbatten, he was deeply dismayed by what he saw happening around him. In typical Indian officer fashion, he summed up the situation in polo terms: “We are in the last chukka, and down twelve goals.” The British could no longer keep order in the subcontinent they had governed for 250 years. “There was slaughter everywhere,” he remembered. “The British had all the responsibility and none of the power.”
¹⁴
Ismay was convinced in spite of himself that partition was the only way out. Mountbatten’s aide had said the task of drawing up the boundaries would take two years, but the viceroy had given him just forty days.

At first the meeting with Jinnah seemed hopeless, as the older man dug in. Jinnah refused to give way on the viceroy’s plan to split the Punjab and Bengal into Indian and Pakistani halves. His anger was understandable. If the issue were left to a referendum, he knew, the vote would be overwhelmingly on his side. A Greater Pakistan would become a reality, not the “moth eaten” one the viceroy was offering. But then Mountbatten played his trump card. He had a secret message from the one man who could sway the Quaid-e-Azam’s mind: Winston Churchill.

Churchill’s contacts with Jinnah had begun before the war, and when Jinnah visited London in 1946, he and the opposition leader had lunch at Chartwell. The issue was the fate of India’s Muslims under a Hindu majority government. To Churchill, the creation of a Muslim Pakistan with ties to the empire seemed the one way to “save a bit of India” for Britain and to snatch a victory from Gandhi, the Congress, and Attlee.

“I greatly valued our talk the other day,” Churchill told Jinnah on December 11. He sent a postal address where Jinnah could send him secret messages “without attracting attention in India. I shall always sign myself ‘Gilliatt’”—the name of Churchill’s secretary. He urged Jinnah to use a similar pseudonym.
¹⁵
In that secret correspondence Churchill assured Jinnah that Pakistan would have a strong protector in the British and would never be expelled from the British commonwealth. “If Jinnah is regarded as the father of Pakistan,” remarks one recent historian, “Churchill must qualify as its uncle.”
¹⁶

Churchill revealed his bond with Jinnah in a crucial meeting with Mountbatten in May 1947.

The opposition leader had been in bed recovering from a hernia operation when Mountbatten stopped by before departing for India. Mountbatten was trying to build political support for his partition plan. He assured Churchill that he had a letter from Nehru stating that if partition took place in 1947 instead of 1948, India would accept full Dominion status and not cut its ties to Britain. On that basis Churchill was reluctantly willing to accept a transfer-of-power bill that summer. “If you can achieve Dominion status for both Hindustan and Pakistan,” he said, “the whole country will be behind you.”

Then, leaning forward from his pillows, he asked, “Do you foresee any difficulties with Mr. Gandhi?”

“Gandhi is unpredictable,” Mountbatten replied, “but I doubt whether he can create any difficulties which Nehru or Patel cannot handle.” The real problem, he said, would be Jinnah.

“By God, he is the one man who cannot do without British help!” the former prime minister exploded. If Jinnah refused to accept Dominion status, Churchill said, “you must threaten [him].” He waved his cigar. “Take away all British officers. Give them military units without British officers. Make it clear to them how impossible it would be to run Pakistan without British help.”

If all else failed, Churchill said, “give Jinnah a personal message from me. Tell him this is a matter of life or death for Pakistan, if he does not accept this offer with both hands!”
¹⁷

That was the message Mountbatten now passed on to the Quaid-e-Azam. Jinnah admired Churchill more than any man alive.
¹⁸
On hearing the message, Jinnah sat stunned and silent. He could not speak, only give a brief nod of assent. Churchill had done what neither Mountbatten or Gandhi in meetings in the spring could do: get the immovable Jinnah to change his mind. Thanks to Churchill, the last barrier to partition was gone.

Only Gandhi could still wreck everything. But he chose not to. The day Mountbatten asked his opinion was his day of silence. On a scrap of paper Gandhi wrote: “You really don’t want to say anything, do you?” But the next day in his bath, he said he felt as if they were not just dividing India but dismembering his own body.
¹⁹