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FIVE
An Old Man and his Shattered Dream
New Delhi, April 1947
There was no one else in the room. Not even a secretary unobtrusively taking notes disturbed the two men. Convinced of the urgency of the situation facing him, Mountbatten had decided to employ a revolutionary tactic for his negotiations with India’s leaders. For the first time in its modern history, India’s destiny was not being decided around a conference table, but in the intimacy of private conversation. The tête-à-tête just beginning in the Viceroy’s freshly painted study was the first in a series. Those conversations would determine whether India would be spared the horror of civil war foreseen in Louis Mountbatten’s first report to London. Five men would participate in them, Louis Mountbatten and four Indian leaders.
Those four Indians had spent the better part of their lives agitating against the British and arguing with each other. All of them were past middle age. All of them were lawyers who had first honed their forensic skills in London’s Inns of Court. For each of them, their coming conversations with India’s new Viceroy would be the greatest argument of their lifetimes, the debate for which each of them had, in a sense, been preparing for a quarter of a century.
In Mountbatten’s mind, there was no question what the outcome of that debate should be. Like many Englishmen, he looked on India’s unity as the greatest single legacy Britain could leave behind. He had a deep, almost evangelical desire to maintain it. To respond to the Moslem appeal to divide the country was, he believed, to sow the seeds of tragedy.
Every effort to get India’s leaders to agree to a solution to their country’s problems in the quasi-public glare of a formal meeting had ended in a hopeless deadlock. But here, in the privacy of his study, reasoning with them one by one, Mountbatten hoped he might bring them to agreement in the brief time at his disposal. Supremely confident of his own powers of persuasion, confident, above all, of the compelling logic of his case, he was going to try to achieve in weeks what his predecessors had been unable to achieve in years; to get India’s leaders to agree on some form of unity.
With his white Congress cap fixed on his balding head, a fresh rose twisted through the third buttonhole of his waistcoat, the man before him was one of the familiar figures on India’s political landscape. In his own slightly feline way, Jawaharlal Nehru was as impressively striking a figure as India’s new Viceroy. The sensual features of a face whose expression could change in an instant from angelic softness to daemonic wrath were often tinged with a glimmer of sadness. While Mountbatten’s features were almost always composed, Nehru’s rarely were. His moods and humours slipped across his face like shadows passing across the waters of a lake.
He was the only one of the Indian leaders that Mountbatten already knew. The two men had met after the war when Nehru was on a visit to Singapore, where Mountbatten had his SEAC headquarters. Ignoring his advisers, who’d counselled him to have nothing to do with a rebel whose shoes still bore the dust of a British prison yard, Mountbatten had met the Indian leader.* The two immediately sympathized with each other. Nehru rediscovered in the company of Mountbatten and his wife an England he had not known for forty years, the England his years in British jail had almost eradicated from his memory, that open and welcoming England he had known as a schoolboy. The Mountbattens delighted in Nehru’s charm, his culture, his quick humour. To the horror of his staff, Mountbatten had even spontaneously decided to ride through Singapore’s streets in his open car with Nehru at his side. His action, his advisers had warned, would only dignify an anti-British rebel.
‘Dignify him?’ Mountbatten had retorted. ‘It’s he who will dignify me. One day this man will be Prime Minister of India.’
Now, his prophecy had been realized. It was to his position as Prime Minister of India’s interim government that Nehru owed the honour of being the first of India’s four leaders to enter Mountbatten’s study.
For Jawaharlal Nehru, the conversation beginning in the Viceroy’s study was just the latest episode in a continuing dialogue with his country’s colonizers that had occupied most of his life. Nehru had been a pampered guest in the best country houses in England. He had dined off the gold service of Buckingham Palace and the tin plates of a British prison. His interlocutors had included Cambridge dons, Prime Ministers, Viceroys, the King Emperor – and jail-keepers.
Born into an eastern aristocracy as old and as proud as any produced by India’s British rulers, that of the Kashmiri Brahmins, Nehru had been sent to England at sixteen to finish his education. He spent seven gloriously happy years there, learning Latin verbs and cricket at Harrow, studying science, Nietzsche and Chaucer at Cambridge, admiring the reasoning of Blackstone at the Inns of Court. With his gentle charm, elegant manners, rapidly expanding culture, he had enjoyed an extraordinary social success wherever he went. He moved easily through the drawing-rooms of English society absorbing with the sponge of his still malleable personality the values and mannerisms he found there. So complete was the transformation wreaked by those seven years in England that, on his return to Allahabad, his family and friends found him completely de-Indianized.
The young Nehru soon discovered, however, the limits of his de-Indianization. He was blackballed when he applied for membership in the local British Club. He might have been a product of Harrow and Cambridge, but to the all white, all British – and devotedly middle-class – membership of the Club, he was still a black Indian.
The bitterness caused by that rejection haunted Nehru for years and hastened him towards the cause which became his life’s work, the struggle for Indian independence. He joined the Congress Party, and his agitation on its behalf soon qualified him for admission to the finest political training school in the British Empire, British jails, where Nehru spent nine years of his life. In the solitude of his cell, in prison courtyards with his fellow Congress leaders, he had shaped his vision of the India of tomorrow. An idealist immersed in the doctrines of social revolution, Nehru dreamed of reconciling on the soil of India his two political passions: the parliamentary democracy of England and the economic socialism of Karl Marx. He dreamed of an India freed alike of the shackles of poverty and of superstition, unburdened of capitalism, an India in which the smoke stacks of factories reached out from her cities, an India enjoying the plenitude of that Industrial Revolution to which her colonizers had denied her access.
No one might have seemed a more unlikely candidate to lead India towards that vision than Jawaharlal Nehru. Under the cotton khadi he wore in deference to the dictates of Congress, he remained the quintessential English gentleman. In a land of mystics, he was a cool rationalist. The mind that had exulted in the discovery of science at Cambridge never ceased to be appalled by his fellow Indians who refused to stir from their homes on days proclaimed inauspicious by their favourite astrologers. He was a publicly declared agnostic in the most intensely spiritual area in the world, and he never ceased to proclaim the horror the word ‘religion’ inspired in him. Nehru despised India’s priests, her sadhus, her chanting monks and pious sheikhs. They had only served, he felt, to impede her progress, deepen her divisions and ease the task of her foreign rulers.
And yet, the India of those sadhus and the superstition-haunted masses had accepted Nehru. For thirty years he had travelled across India haranguing the multitudes. Clinging to the roofs and sides of tramways to escape the slums of India’s cities, on foot and by bullock cart in the countrysides, his countrymen had come by the hundreds of thousands to see and hear him. Many in those crowds could not hear his words nor understand them when they did. For them, it had been enough however just to see, over the ocean of heads around them, his frail and gesticulating silhouette. They had taken darshan, a kind of spiritual communion received from being in the presence of a great man and that had sufficed.
He was a superb orator and writer, a man who treasured words as a courtesan jewels. Anointed early by Gandhi, he had advanced steadily through the ranks of Congress eventually to preside over it three times. The Mahatma had made it clear that it was on his shoulders that he wished his mantle to fall.
For Nehru, Gandhi was a genius. Nehru’s cool, pragmatic mind had rejected almost all of Gandhi’s great moves: civil disobedience, the Salt March, Quit India. But his heart had told him to follow the Mahatma and his heart, he would later admit, had been right.
Gandhi had been, in a sense, Nehru’s guru. It was he who had re-Indianized Nehru, sending him into the villages to find the real face of his homeland, to let the fingers of his soul touch India’s sufferings. Whenever the two men were in the same place, Nehru would spend at least half an hour sitting at ‘Bapuji’s’ feet, sometimes talking, sometimes listening, sometimes just looking and thinking. Those were, for Nehru, moments of intense spiritual satisfaction, perhaps the closest brush his atheist’s heart would ever have with religion.
Yet so much separated them: Nehru, the religion-hating atheist; Gandhi, to whom an unshakeable belief in God was the very essence of being: Nehru, whose hot temper had made him a notably imperfect soldier of non-violence, a man who adored literature and painting, science and technology, the very things Gandhi ignored or detested as being responsible for much of mankind’s misery.
Between them a fascinating father-son relation grew up, animated by all the tensions, affections and repressed guilt such a relationship implied. All his life, Nehru had had an instinctive need for a dominant personality near him, some steadying influence to whom he could turn in the crises engendered by his volatile nature. His father, a bluff, jovial barrister with a penchant for good Scotch and Bordeaux, had first filled that role. Since his death, it had been Gandhi.
Nehru’s devotion to Gandhi remained total, but a subtle change was overtaking their relationship. A phase in Nehru’s life was drawing to a close. The son was ready to leave his father’s house for the new world he saw beyond its gates. In that new world, he would need a new guru, a guru more sensitive to the complex problems that would assail him there. Although he was perhaps unaware of it as he sat in the Viceroy’s study that March afternoon, a vacuum had opened in the psyche of Jawaharlal Nehru.
Much had changed in the world and in their own lives since Nehru and Mountbatten had met for the first time, but the undercurrent of mutual sympathy which had warmed their earlier encounter soon made itself felt in the Viceroy’s study. It was not surprising that it should. Although Mountbatten, of course, did not know it, Nehru was partially responsible for his being there.
Besides, there was a great deal to bind the scion of a 3000-year-old line of Kashmiri Brahmins and the man who claimed descent from the oldest ruling family in Protestantism. They both loved to talk and expanded in each other’s company. Nehru, the abstract thinker, admired Mountbatten’s practical dynamism, the capacity for decisive action that wartime command had given him. Mountbatten was stimulated by Nehru’s culture, the subtlety of his thought. He quickly understood that the only Indian politician who would share and understand his desire to maintain a link between Britain and a new India was Jawaharlal Nehru.
With his usual candour, the Admiral told him that he had been given an appalling responsibility and he intended to approach the Indian problem in a mood of stark realism. As they talked, the two men rapidly agreed on two major points: a quick decision was essential to avoid a bloodbath; the division of India would be a tragedy.
Then Nehru turned to the actions of the next Indian leader who would enter Mountbatten’s study, the penitent marching his lonely path through Noakhali and Bihar. The man to whom he’d been so long devoted was, Nehru said, ‘going around with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India instead of diagnosing the cause of the eruption of the sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole’.
In offering a glimpse into the growing gulf separating the Liberator of India and his closest companions, Nehru’s words provided Mountbatten with a vital insight into the form his actions in Delhi should take. If he could not persuade India’s leaders to keep their country united, he was going to have to persuade them to divide it. Gandhi’s unremitting hostility to partition could place an insurmountable barrier in his path. His only hope in that event would be to persuade the leaders of Congress to break with their leader and agree to divide India as the only solution to their country’s dilemma. Nehru would be the key if that happened. He was the one ally Mountbatten had to have. Only he, Mountbatten thought, might have the authority to stand out against the Mahatma.
Now his words had revealed the discord between Gandhi and his party chiefs. Mountbatten might be forced to widen and exploit that gap. He spared no effort to win Nehru’s support. On none of India’s leaders would Operation Seduction have more impact than the realistic Kashmiri Brahmin. A friendship that would prove decisive in the months to come was beginning that afternoon.
Taking Nehru to the door, Mountbatten told him: ‘Mr Nehru, I want you to regard me not as the last British Viceroy winding up the Raj, but as the first to lead the way to a new India.’ Nehru turned and looked at the man he had wanted to see on the viceregal throne. ‘Ah,’ he said, a faint smile creasing his face, ‘now, I know what they mean when they speak of your charm as being so dangerous.’
Once again, Churchill’s half-naked fakir was sitting in the viceregal study, there ‘to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor’.
‘He’s rather like a little bird,’ Louis Mountbatten thought, as he contemplated that famous figure at his side, ‘a kind of sweet, sad sparrow perched on my armchair.’*
They made an odd couple: the royal sailor who loved to dress up in uniformed splendour and the elderly Indian who refused to cover his nakedness with anything more than a sheet of rough cotton. Mountbatten, handsome, the vitality surging from his muscled athlete’s body; Gandhi, whose little frame almost disappeared into his armchair; the advocate of non-violence and the professional warrior; the aristocrat and the man who had chosen to live his life immersed in the poverty of the most destitute masses on the globe; Mountbatten, the wartime master of the technology of communications, for ever searching for some new electronic gadget to enhance the complex signal net that linked him to the millions of his command; Gandhi, the fragile Messiah who mistrusted all that paraphernalia and yet still communicated with his public as few figures in this century had been able to.
All of those elements, almost everything in their backgrounds, seemed to destine the two men to disagreement. And yet, in the months ahead, Gandhi the pacifist would, according to one of his intimates, find in the soul of the professional warrior ‘the echo of certain of the moral values that stirred in his own soul’. For his part, Mountbatten would become so attached to Gandhi that on his death he would predict that ‘Mahatma Gandhi will go down in history on a par with Christ and Buddha’.
So important had Mountbatten considered this first meeting with Gandhi that he had written to the Mahatma inviting him to Delhi even before the ceremony enthroning him as Viceroy, Gandhi had drafted his reply immediately, then with a chuckle, told an aide, ‘wait a couple of days before putting it in the mail. I don’t want that young man to think I’m dying for his invitation.’
That ‘young man’ had accompanied his invitation with one of those gestures for which he was becoming noted and which sometimes infuriated his fellow Englishmen. He had offered to send his personal aircraft to Bihar to fly Gandhi to Delhi. Gandhi, however, had declined the offer. He had insisted on travelling, as he always did, in a third-class railway carriage.
To underline the importance he attached to their first contact and to give their meeting a special cordiality, Mountbatten had asked his wife to be present. Now, contemplating the famous figure opposite them, worry and concern swept over the viceregal couple. The Mahatma, they both immediately sensed, was profoundly unhappy, trapped in the grip of some mysterious remorse. Had they done something wrong? Neglected some arcane law of protocol?
Mountbatten gave his wife an anxious glance. ‘God,’ he thought, ‘what a terrible way to start things off!’ As politely as he could, he asked Gandhi if something was troubling him.
A slow, sorrowful sigh escaped the Indian leader. ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘all my life, since I was in South Africa, I’ve renounced physical possessions.’ He owned virtually nothing, he explained: his Gita, the tin utensils from which he ate, mementoes of his stay in Yeravda prison, his three ‘gurus’. And his watch, his old eight-shilling Ingersoll he hung from a string around his waist because, if he was going to devote every minute of his day to God’s work, he had to know what time it was.
‘Do you know what?’ he asked sadly. ‘They stole it. Someone in my railway compartment coming down to Delhi stole the watch.’ As the frail figure lost in his armchair spoke those words, Mountbatten saw tears shining in his eyes. In an instant, the Viceroy understood. It was not the loss of his watch that so pained Gandhi. What hurt was that they had not understood. It was not an eight-shilling watch an unknown hand had plucked from him in that congested railway car, but a particle of his faith.*
Finally, after a long silence, Gandhi began to talk of India’s current dilemma. Mountbatten interrupted with a friendly wave of his hand. ‘Mr Gandhi,’ he said, ‘first, I want to know who you are.’
The Viceroy’s words reflected a deliberate tactic. He was determined to get to know those Indian leaders before allowing them to begin assailing him with their minimum demands and final conditions. By putting them at ease, by getting them to confide in him, he hoped to create an atmosphere of mutual confidence and sympathy in which his own dynamic personality could have greater impact.
The Mahatma was delighted by the ploy. He loved to talk about himself and in the Mountbattens he had a pair of people genuinely interested in what he had to say. He rambled on about South Africa, his days as a stretcher-bearer in the Boer War, civil disobedience, the Salt March. Once he said, the West had received its inspiration from the East in the messages of Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Rama. For centuries, however, the East had been conquered culturally by the West. Now the West, haunted by spectres like the atomic bomb, had need to look eastwards once again. There, he hoped, it might find the message of love and fraternal understanding he sought to preach.
Their conversation went on for two hours. It was punctuated by a simple, yet extraordinary gesture, a gesture which provided a clue as to how successful Mountbatten’s overtures had been, how responsive a chord they were striking in Gandhi.
Halfway through their talks, the trio strolled into the Moghul Gardens for photographs. When they finished, they turned to re-enter the house. The 77-year-old leader loved to walk with his hands resting upon the shoulders of two young girls, to whom he fondly referred as his ‘crutches’. Now, the revolutionary who’d spent a lifetime struggling with the British, instinctively laid his hand upon the shoulder of Britain’s last Vicereine and, as tranquilly as if he were strolling off to his evening prayer meeting, re-entered the Viceroy’s study.
By the time Gandhi returned to the Viceroy’s study for their second meeting, Delhi was already gasping in the first searing blast of India’s hot season. Under the sun’s white glare the bright dhak trees in the Moghul Gardens seemed to emit sparks, and an orange rind shrivelled into a crisp parchment minutes after it was peeled. The only fresh glade in the city was Louis Mountbatten’s study. The reverence for detail which had led him to paint the study had also led him to make sure it was equipped with the best air-conditioner in Delhi, a machine that allowed him to work in a refreshing 75 degrees.
Its presence was nearly responsible for a catastrophe. Passing with brutal abruptness from Delhi’s furnace heat into the chilly study, Gandhi, the implacable foe of technology, got an unhappy introduction to the blessings of air-conditioning. Seeing his half-naked guest trembling, Mountbatten rang for his ADC who arrived with his wife.
‘My God,’ exclaimed Edwina Mountbatten, ‘you’ll give the poor man pneumonia!’
She rushed to the machine, snapped it off, threw open the window, then hurried off to get one of her husband’s old Royal Navy sweaters to cover Gandhi’s shaking shoulders.
When Gandhi was finally warm again, Mountbatten took his guest on to the terrace for tea. A brace of servants brought Mountbatten his in a bone white china service stamped with the viceregal crest. Manu, who had accompanied Gandhi, laid out the spare meal she’d brought along for him: lemon soup, goat’s curds and dates. Gandhi ate it with a spoon whose handle had been broken above the ladle and replaced by a piece of bamboo lashed to its stub with a string. The battered tin plates in which it was served, however, were as English as the Sheffield sterling of the viceregal service. They came from Yeravda prison.
Smiling, Gandhi proffered his goat’s curds to Mountbatten. ‘It’s rather good,’ he said, ‘do try this.’
Mountbatten looked at the yellow, porridge-like sludge with something less than unalloyed delight. ‘I don’t think really I ever have,’ he murmured, hoping that those words might somehow discourage his guest’s effort at generosity. Gandhi was not, however, to be so easily dissuaded.
‘Never mind,’ he replied, laughing, ‘there’s always a first time for everything. Try it now.’
Trapped, Mountbatten dutifully accepted a spoonful. It was, he thought, ‘ghastly’.
The preliminaries of their conversations ended there on the lawn and Mountbatten got down to a process that had invariably taxed his predecessors’ patience and good temper, negotiating with Gandhi.
The Mahatma had, indeed, been a difficult person for the British to deal with. Truth, to Gandhi, was the ultimate reality. Gandhi’s truth, however, had two faces, the absolute and the relative. Man, as long as he was in the flesh, had only fleeting intimations of absolute truth. He had to deal with relative truth in his daily existence. Gandhi liked to employ a parable to illustrate the difference between his two truths. Put your left hand in a bowl of ice-cold water, then in a bowl of lukewarm water, he would say. The lukewarm water feels hot. Then put the right hand in a bowl of hot water and into the same bowl of lukewarm water. Now the lukewarm water feels cold; yet its temperature is constant. The absolute truth is the water’s constant temperature, he would observe, but the relative truth, perceived by the human hand, varied. As that parable indicated, Gandhi’s relative truth was not a rigid thing. It could vary as his perceptions of a problem changed. That made him flexible but it also, to his British interlocutors, sometimes made him appear a two-faced, cunning Asiatic. Even one of his disciples once exclaimed to him in exasperation: ‘Gandhiji, I don’t understand you. How can you say one thing last week, and something quite different this week?’
‘Ah’, Gandhi replied, ‘because I have learned something since last week.’
India’s new Viceroy moved, therefore, into serious talk with Gandhi with trepidation. He was not persuaded that the little figure ‘chirping like a sparrow’ at his side could help him elaborate a solution to the Indian crisis, but he knew he could destroy his efforts to find one. The hopes of many another English mediator had foundered on the turns of his unpredictable personality. It was Gandhi who had sent Cripps back to London empty-handed in 1942. His refusal to budge on a principle had helped thwart Wavell’s efforts to untie the Indian knot. His tactics had done much to frustrate the most recent British attempts to solve the problem, that of the Cabinet Mission whose plan was supposed to serve as Mountbatten’s point of departure. Only the evening before, Gandhi had reiterated to his prayer meeting that India would be divided, ‘over my dead body. So long as I am alive, I will never agree to the partition of India.’
If a reluctant Mountbatten was driven to the decision to partition India, he would find himself in the distasteful position of having to impose his will on Gandhi. It was not the elderly Mahatma’s body he would have to break, but his heart.
It had always been British policy not to yield to force, he told Gandhi, to open their talks on the right note, but his non-violent crusade had won and, come what may, Britain was going to leave India. Only one thing mattered in that coming departure, Gandhi replied. ‘Don’t partition India,’ he begged. Don’t divide India, the prophet of non-violence pleaded, even if refusing to do so meant shedding ‘rivers of blood’.
Dividing India, Mountbatten assured Gandhi, was the last solution he wished to adopt. But what alternatives were open to him?
Gandhi had one. So desperate was he to avoid partition that he was prepared for a Solomonic judgment. Give the Moslems the baby instead of cutting it in half. Place three hundred million Hindus under Moslem rule by asking his rival Jinnah and his Moslem League to form a government. Then hand over power to that government. Give Jinnah all India instead of just the part he wanted.
Mountbatten was ready to grasp at any straw to avoid partition. The suggestion had an Alice in Wonderland ring to it, but then so had some of Gandhi’s other ideas and they had worked.
‘Whatever makes you think your own Congress Party will accept?’ he asked Gandhi.
‘Congress,’ Gandhi replied, ‘wants above all else to avoid partition. They will do anything to prevent it.’
What, Mountbatten asked, would Jinnah’s reaction be?
‘If you tell him I am its author his reply will be: “Wily Gandhi”,’ the Mahatma said, laughing.
Mountbatten was silent for a moment. There was much in Gandhi’s proposal that seemed unworkable. He was not prepared to commit his own prestige to it at this early juncture. But neither was he going lightly to dismiss any idea that might hold India together.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you can bring me formal assurance that Congress will accept your scheme, that they’ll try sincerely to make it work, then I’m prepared to entertain the idea.’
Gandhi fairly flew out of his chair at his words. ‘I am entirely sincere,’ he assured Mountbatten. ‘I will tour the length and breadth of India to get the people to accept if that is your decision.’
A few hours later, an Indian journalist spoke to Gandhi as he walked towards his evening prayer meeting. The Mahatma, he thought, seemed ‘to bubble with happiness’. As they approached the prayer ground, he suddenly turned to the newsman. With a gleeful smile, he whispered: ‘I think I’ve turned the tide.’
‘Why, this man is trying to bully me!’ an unbelieving Louis Mountbatten thought. Operation Seduction had come to a sudden halt at the rock-like figure planted opposite him. With his khadi dhoti whirled about his shoulders like a toga, his bald head glowing, his scowling demeanour, the man jammed into that chair looked to the Viceroy more like a Roman senator than an Indian politician.
Vallabhbhai Patel, however, was India’s quintessential politician. He was an Oriental Tammany Hall boss who ran the machinery of the Congress Party with a firm and ruthless hand. He should have been the easiest member of the Indian quartet for Mountbatten to deal with. Like the Viceroy, he was a practical, pragmatic man, a hard but realistic bargainer. Yet the tension between them was so real, so palpable, that it seemed to Mountbatten he could reach out and touch it.
Its cause was in no way related to the great issues facing India. It was a slip of paper, a routine government minute issued by Patel’s Home Ministry, dealing with an appointment. Mountbatten, however, had read in its tone, in the way Patel had put it out, a calculated challenge to his authority.
Patel had a well-earned reputation for toughness. He had an instinctive need to take the measure of a new interlocutor, to see how far he could push him. That piece of paper on his desk, Mountbatten was convinced, was a test, a little examination he had to go through with Patel before he could get down to serious matters.
Vallabhbhai Patel was passed a cable announcing his wife’s death as he was pacing the floor of a Bombay court-room summing up his case for the jury. He glanced at it, thrust it into his pocket, and continued his peroration without breaking off his sentence.
That incident formed part of the legend of Vallabhbhai Patel and was a measure of the man. Emotion, one of his associates once observed, formed no part of his character. The remark was not wholly exact. Patel was an emotional man, but he never let those emotions break through the composed façade he turned to the world. If he gave off one salient impression, it was that of a man wholly in control of himself.
