Читать книгу Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House - Dominique Lapierre, Larry Collins - Страница 14

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.

In a land in which men threw their words around like sailors their money after three months at sea, Patel hoarded his phrases the way a miser hoards coins. His daughter, who had been his constant companion since his wife’s death, rarely exchanged ten sentences with him a day. When Patel did talk, however, people listened.

Patel was Indian from the uppermost lump of his bald head to the calluses on the soles of his feet. His Delhi home was filled with books but every one of them was written by an Indian author about India. He was the only Indian leader who sprang from the soil of India. His father had been a peasant farmer in Gujerat province near Bombay and Patel still lived his life at a peasant’s rhythm. He rose faithfully at 4 a.m. and was in bed just as regularly each night at 9.30. The first waking hours of each day Patel spent on his toilet, doing the bulk of his reading, 30 newspapers sent to him daily from every part of India. His life was watched over with jealous vigilance by his daughter and only child, Maniben. For two decades, she had been his secretary, his ADC, his confidante, the mistress of his household. So close was their relationship they even shared the same bedroom.

Patel’s vocation for Indian nationalism had come from his father who’d gone off to fight the British at the side of a local warlord in the 1857 Mutiny. He’d spent the winter nights of his boyhood around the dung fire of their peasants’ hut, listening to his old soldier’s tales. Soon after, he left the land for good to work in the great textile mills of Ahmedabad where Gandhi was to found his first Indian ashram. He studied at night, saved almost every rupee he earned until, at 33, he was able to send himself to London to study the law.

He never saw the London of the Mayfair drawing-rooms where Nehru had been an admired guest. The London he knew best was the library of the Inns of Court. He walked twice a day the ten miles separating the courts from his lodging to save the bus fare. The day he was called to the bar, he took another walk, to the docks, to book a passage home. Once he returned, he never left India again.

He settled in Ahmedabad, practising law with brilliant effect for the mill owners whose wage slave he’d once been. Patel had not even looked up from his nightly bridge game the first time he’d heard Gandhi speak in the Ahmedabad Club. Someone, however, brought him a text of the Mahatma’s speech and as he read its lines a vision rose from its pages: the vision his father had inspired around a dung fire in the winter nights of his boyhood.

He sought Gandhi out and offered him his services. In 1922 Gandhi, anxious to see what civil disobedience might achieve, asked Patel to organize an experimental campaign among 87,000 people in 137 villages in the county of Bardoli outside Bombay. His organization was so comprehensive, so complete, that the campaign succeeded beyond even Gandhi’s hopes. From that moment on, Patel had shared with Nehru the place just below Gandhi’s in the independence movement. Employing his special genius he had assembled the Congress Party’s machine, thrusting its tentacles into the remotest corners of India.

Patel had always been profoundly wary of his brother in Congress khadi, Nehru. The two men were natural rivals and their ideas of what independent India should be were markedly different. Patel had no use for Nehru’s Utopian dream of building a new society. He dismissed his visions of a brave new Socialist world 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 impracticable ideal.

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

He scorned 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, developing 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, his importance undervalued by a world whose regards were riveted on Gandhi and Nehru. It was an error. Patel, one of his aides said, ‘was India’s last Moghul’.

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 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 and to Mr Jinnah 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.

Come, come, 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 Mountbatten’s desk and slowly tore it up.

A lone light bulb, its contours speckled with carbonized insects, hung from the hut’s ceiling. Naked to the waist, Gandhi 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 Bhangi sweepers’ colony, the foetid slum of the Untouchables who swept Delhi’s streets and cleaned out her toilets, stared through the window at their prophet.

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 rivalled 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 which stained a caste Hindu at the slightest contact with them, a stain which had to be removed by a ritual, purifying bath. Even their footprints in the soil could defile some Brahmim neighbourhoods. An Untouchable was obliged to shrink from the path of an approaching 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 he’d 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 corpses were usually consumed by vultures rather than flames.

In some parts of India they were still bought and sold like serfs along with the estates they worked. A young Untouchable was generally assigned the same value as an ox. In a country of social progress, they enjoyed only one privilege. 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 outcasts.

Since his return from South Africa, Gandhi had made their cause his. His first Indian ashram had nearly failed, because he had welcomed them into its folds. 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 1932, he had nearly died for them, fasting to thwart a political reform which he feared would institutionalize their separation from Indian society. By always moving around India as they did, when they were able to travel, in third-class railway carriages, by living in their slums, Gandhi was trying to force them 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 give them a Gandhian reminder of the realities of the nation they would soon govern.

It was India’s political realities, however, that occupied those men this evening. It was suffocatingly hot and to ease its miseries 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 were as warm as the night around them.

When, a few days earlier, Gandhi had fervently assured Mountbatten that the Congress Party was prepared to do anything to prevent partition, he had been wrong. His error was the measure of the slowly widening gulf between the ageing Mahatma and the men around him, the men he had 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 occasional doubts, they had followed him on his improbable crusades to the improbable triumph now beckoning: independence wrested from the British by Gandhian non-violence.

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 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 debated 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 would be partition. 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 the tragedy 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, not dampening them. Desperately he begged his followers to accept his idea as perhaps their last chance to keep India united and to 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, transgressed it. They did not share Gandhi’s conviction that partition would inevitably lead to terrible violence. Broken-hearted, Gandhi would have to report to the Viceroy that he had not been able to carry his colleagues with him. The real break was still some distance ahead, but Gandhi and those men he’d so patiently groomed were fast approaching a parting of the ways. The culmination of Gandhi’s crusade was now drawing near, and it would end as it had begun, in the stillness of his 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’d arrived, Mountbatten had found Mohammed Ali Jinnah in a most frigid, haughty and disdainful frame of mind.

The key member of the Indian quartet, the man who would ultimately hold the solution to the sub-continent’s dilemma in his hands, had been 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 he would be photographed with the Mountbattens, Jinnah had carefully memorized a pleasant little line to flatter Edwina Mountbatten, who he was sure would be posed between the Viceroy and himself.

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

Inside the study, he began by informing Mountbatten he had come to tell him exactly what he was prepared to accept. As he had 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 with even 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 to Alan Campbell-Johnson, his press attaché: ‘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 on paper. Rahmat Ali had arranged the banquet with its oysters and un-Islamic Chablis 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 make into the leader of 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 be called to the bar. Unlike Gandhi however, he had come back from London an Englishman.

He wore a monocle and superbly cut linen suits which he changed three or four times a day so as to remain cool and unruffled in the soggy Bombay climate. He loved oysters and caviare, champagne, brandy and good claret. 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.’

A brilliantly successful lawyer, Jinnah moved naturally to politics and for a decade worked to keep the Hindus and Moslems of Congress united in a common front against the British. His disenchantment with Congress dated from Gandhi’s accession to power. The impeccably dressed Jinnah was not going to be bundled off to some squalid British jail half naked in a dhoti wearing a silly little white cap. Civil disobedience, he told Gandhi, was for ‘the ignorant and the illiterate’.

The turning point in Jinnah’s career came after the 1937 elections when Congress refused to share with him and his Moslem League the spoils of office in those Indian provinces where there was a substantial Moslem minority. Jinnah was a man of towering vanity and he took Congress’s action as a personal rebuke. It convinced him he and the Moslem League would never get a fair deal from a Congress-run India. The former apostle of Hindu-Moslem unity became the unyielding advocate of Pakistan, the project he had labelled an ‘impossible dream’ barely four years earlier.

A more improbable leader of India’s Moslem masses could hardly be imagined. The only thing Moslem about Mohammed Ali Jinnah was his parents’ religion. He drank, ate pork, religiously shaved his beard each morning and just as religiously avoided the mosque each Friday. God and the Koran had no place in Jinnah’s vision of the world. His political foe, Gandhi, knew more verses of the Moslem Holy Book than he did. He had been able to achieve the remarkable feat of securing the allegiance of the vast majority of India’s Moslems without being able to articulate more than a few sentences in their traditional tongue, Urdu.

Jinnah despised India’s masses. He detested the dirt, the heat, the crowds of India. Gandhi travelled India in filthy third-class railway carriages to be with the people. Jinnah rode first-class to avoid them.

Where his rival made a fetish of simplicity, Jinnah revelled in pomp. He delighted in touring India’s Moslem cities in princely processions, riding under victory arches on a kind of Rosebowl style float, preceded by silver-harnessed elephants and a band booming out ‘God Save The King’ because, Jinnah observed, it was the only tune the crowd knew.

His life was a model of order and discipline. Even the phlox and petunias of his gardens marched out from his mansion in straight, disciplined lines, and when the master of the house paused there it was not to contemplate the beauty of his plants but to verify the precision of their alignment. Law books and newspapers were his only reading. Indeed, newspapers seemed to be this strange man’s passion. He had them mailed to him from all over the world. He cut them up, scrawled notes in their margins, meticulously pasted them into scrapbooks that grew in dusty piles in his office cupboards.

Jinnah had only scorn for his Hindu rivals. He labelled Nehru ‘a Peter Pan’, a ‘literary figure’ who ‘should have been an English professor, not a politician’, ‘an arrogant Brahmin who covers his Hindu trickiness under a veneer of Western education’. Gandhi, to Jinnah, was ‘a cunning fox’, ‘a Hindu revivalist.’

The sight of the Mahatma, during an interval in a conversation in Jinnah’s mansion, stretched out on one of his priceless Persian carpets, his mudpack on his belly, was something Jinnah had never forgotten – or forgiven.

Among his Moslems Jinnah had no friends, only followers. He had associates, not disciples and, with the exception of his sister, ignored his family. He lived alone with his dream of Pakistan. He was almost six feet tall but weighed barely one hundred and twenty pounds. The skin on his face was stretched so fine that his prominent cheekbones below seemed to emit a translucent glow. He had thick, silver-grey hair, and – curiously enough for a man whose sole companion for seventeen years had been a dentist, his sister – a mouthful of rotting yellow teeth. So stern, so rigorously composed was Jinnah’s appearance he gave off an aura of steely, spartan strength. It was an illusion. He was a frail, sick man who already, in the words of his physician, had been living for three years on ‘will-power, whisky and cigarettes’.

It was the first of those that was the key to the character and achievements of Jinnah. His rivals accused him of many a sin, his friends of many a slight. But no one, friend or foe, would ever accuse Mohammed Ali Jinnah of a lack of will-power.

Mountbatten and Jinnah held six critical meetings during the first fortnight of April 1947. They were the vital conversations – not quite ten hours in length – which ultimately determined the resolution of the Indian dilemma. Mountbatten went into them armed with ‘the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right thing, not because I am persuasive so much as because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favourable light’. As he would later recall, he ‘tried every trick I could play, used every appeal I could imagine’, to shake Jinnah’s resolve to have partition. Nothing would. There was no argument that could move him from his consuming determination to realize the impossible dream of Pakistan.

Jinnah owed his commanding position to two things. He had made himself absolute dictator of the Moslem League. There were men below him who might have been prepared to negotiate a compromise but, so long as Mohammed Ali Jinnah was alive, they would hold their silence. Second, more important, was the memory of the blood spilled in the streets of Calcutta a year before.

Mountbatten and Jinnah did agree on one point at the outset – the need for speed. India, Jinnah declared, had gone beyond the stage at which a compromise solution was possible. There was only one solution, a speedy ‘surgical operation’. Otherwise, he warned, India would perish.

When Mountbatten expressed concern lest partition might produce bloodshed and violence, Jinnah reassured him. Once his ‘surgical operation’ had taken place, all troubles would cease and India’s two halves would live in harmony and happiness. It was, Jinnah told Mountbatten, like a court case he’d handled between two brothers embittered by the shares assigned them under their father’s will. Yet, two years after the court had adjudicated their dispute, they were the greatest friends. That, he promised the Viceroy, would be the case in India.

The Moslems of India, Jinnah insisted, were a nation with a ‘distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions’.

‘India has never been a true nation,’ Jinnah asserted. ‘It only looks that way on the map. The cows I want to eat, the Hindu stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me he has to wash his hands. The only thing the Moslem has in common with the Hindu is his slavery to the British.’

Their arguments became, the Viceroy would later recall, an ‘amusing and rather tragic game of round and round the mulberry bush‘; Jinnah, the March Hare of Alice in Wonderland, never conceding a point; Mountbatten, the determined advocate of unity, driving at Jinnah from every angle, until he was afraid lest, as he noted at the time, ‘I drove the old gentleman quite mad.’

For Jinnah, the division he proposed was the natural course. That division, however, would have to produce a viable state and that, Jinnah argued, meant that two of India’s great provinces, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to go into his Pakistan, despite the fact that each contained enormous Hindu populations.

Mountbatten could not agree. The basis of Jinnah’s argument for Pakistan was that India’s Moslem minority should not be ruled by its Hindu majority. How then justify taking the Hindu minorities of Bengal and the Punjab into a Moslem state? If Jinnah insisted on dividing India to get his Islamic state, then the very logic he’d used to get it would compel Mountbatten to divide the Punjab and Bengal as part of the bargain.

Jinnah protested. That would give him an economically unviable, ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’. Mountbatten, who didn’t want to give him any Pakistan at all, told the Moslem leader, that if he felt the nation he was to receive was as ‘moth-eaten’ as all that, he’d prefer he didn’t take it.

‘Ah,’ Jinnah would counter, ‘Your Excellency doesn’t understand. A man is a Punjabi or a Bengali before he is Hindu or Moslem. They share a common history, language, culture and economy. You must not divide them. You will cause endless bloodshed and trouble.’

‘Mr Jinnah, I entirely agree.’

‘You do?’

‘Of course,’ Mountbatten would continue. ‘A man is not only a Punjabi or Bengali before he is a Hindu or a Moslem, he is an Indian before all else. You have presented the unanswerable argument for Indian unity.’

‘But you don’t understand at all,’ Jinnah would counter, and the discussions would start around the mulberry bush again.

Mountbatten was stunned by the rigidity of Jinnah’s position. ‘I never would have believed,’ he later recalled, ‘that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in the Inns of Court, was capable of simply closing his mind as Jinnah did. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the point. He did, but a kind of shutter came down. He was the evil genius in the whole thing. The others could be persuaded, but not Jinnah. While he was alive nothing could be done.’

The climax to their talks came on 10 April, less than three weeks after Mountbatten’s arrival in India. For two hours he begged, cajoled, argued, and pleaded with Jinnah to keep India united. With all the eloquence he could command, he painted a picture of the greatness India could achieve, 400 million people of different races and creeds, bound together by a Central Union Government, with all the economic strength that would accrue to them from increased industrialization, playing a great part in world affairs as the most progressive, single entity in the Far East. Surely, Mr Jinnah did not want to destroy all that, to condemn the sub-continent to the existence of a third-rate power?

Jinnah remained unmoved. He was, Mountbatten sadly concluded, ‘a psychopathic case, hell bent on this Pakistan.’

Meditating alone in his study after Jinnah’s departure, Mountbatten realized he was probably going to have to give him what he wanted. His first obligation in New Delhi was to the nation that had sent him there, Britain. He longed to preserve India’s unity, but not at the expense of his country becoming hopelessly entrapped in an India collapsing in chaos and violence.

He had to have a solution, he had to have it fast, and he could not impose it by force. Military command had given Mountbatten a penchant for rapid, decisive actions, such as the one he now took. In future years, his critics would assail him for having reached it too quickly, for acting like an impetuous sailor and not a statesman. Mountbatten, however, was not going to waste any more time on what he was certain would be futile arguments. He could argue with Jinnah, he concluded, until hell froze over, and hell in India would be the only consequence.

He was prepared to acknowledge with blunt realism that Operation Seduction had failed to make an impact on the Moslem leader. The partition of India seemed increasingly the only escape. It now remained for Mountbatten to get Nehru and Patel to accept the principle and to find a plan for it which could win their support.

The following morning he reviewed his talk with Jinnah for his staff. Then, sadly, he turned to his Chief of Staff, Lord Ismay. The time had come, he said, to begin drawing up a plan for the partition of India.

Inevitably, Mountbatten’s decision would lead to one of the great dramas of modern history. Whatever the manner in which it was executed, it was bound to end in the mutilation of a great nation whose unity was the most imposing result of three and a half centuries of British colonization. To satisfy the exigent demands of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, two of India’s most distinctive entities, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to be carved up. The result would make Pakistan a geographic aberration, a nation of two heads separated by 970 miles of Himalayan peaks and Indian territory. Twenty days, more time than was required to sail from Karachi to Marseilles, would be needed to make the sea trip around the sub-continent from one half of Pakistan to the other. A non-stop flight between its two parts would require a four-engined aircraft, machines which would prove expensive luxuries for the new state.

If the geographical distance dividing the two halves of Pakistan would be great, however, the psychological distance between the two peoples inhabiting them would be staggering. Apart from a common faith in Allah the One, the Merciful, Punjabis and Bengalis shared nothing. They were as different as Finns and Greeks. The Bengalis were short, dark and agile, racially a part of the masses of Asia. The Punjabis, in whose veins flowed the blood of thirty centuries of conquerors, were scions of the steppes of Central Asia, and their Aryan features bore the traces of Turkestan, Russia, Persia, the deserts of Arabia. Neither history nor language nor culture offered a bridge by which those two peoples might communicate. Their marriage in the common state of Pakistan would be a union created against all the dictates of logic.

The Punjab was the crown jewel of India. Half the size of France, it ran from the Indus River in the north-west all the way to the outskirts of Delhi. It was a land of sparkling rivers and golden fields of wheat, great rich fields rolling down to a distant blue horizon, an oasis blessed by the Gods in the midst of India’s arid face. Its name meant ‘Country of Five Rivers’, after the five torrents to whose waters the Punjab owed its natural fertility. The most famous of them was one of the great rivers of the globe, the Indus, which had given its name to the Indian sub-continent.

Five thousand years of tumultuous history had fashioned the Punjab’s character and given it its identity. Its plains had resounded to the galloping hooves of Asia’s conquering hordes. It was in the Punjab that the celestial song of Hinduism’s sacred book, the Bhagavad Gita, had been inspired by a mystic dialogue between Lord Krishna and the warrior king Arjuna. The Persian legions of Darius and Cyrus, the Macedonians of Alexander the Great had camped on its plains. Mauryas, Scythians, Parthians had occupied them before being dispersed by waves of Huns and the Caliphs of Islam bringing their monotheistic faith to India’s polytheistic Hindu millions. Three centuries of Moghul domination brought India to the apogee of its power and, sprinkled it with its priceless heritage of monuments. Finally the Punjab’s indigenous Sikhs, with their rolled beards and their uncut hair packed in their multicoloured turbans, conquered the province in their turn before succumbing to its latest occupants, the British.

The Punjab was a blend as subtle and complex as the mosaics decorating the monuments of its glorious Moghul past. To divide it would force an irreparable wound upon its population. Fifteen million Hindus, sixteen million Moslems and five million Sikhs shared its 17,932 towns and villages. Although divided by religion, they spoke a common language, clung to common traditions and an equal pride in their distinctive Punjabi personality. Their economic co-existence was fashioned even more intricately. The area’s prosperity rested upon a man-made miracle which, by its very nature, could not be divided, the immense network of irrigation canals built by the British which had made the Punjab the granary of India. Running from east to west across the entire province, their nourishing fingers had brought vast stretches of arid desert under cultivation and enriched the existence of millions of Punjabis. The province’s proud network of railways and roads designed to deliver the Punjab’s products to the rest of India, followed the same pattern. Wherever it went, the frontier of a partitioned Punjab would have to run from north to south, slicing the province’s vascular system in two. Nor could any frontier be drawn that would not cut the proud and bellicose Sikh community in half, leaving at least two million Sikhs, with the rich lands they had reclaimed from the desert and some of their most sacred sites, inside a Moslem state.

Indeed, wherever the boundary line went, the result was certain to be nightmare for millions of human beings. Only an interchange of populations on a scale never realized before in history could sort out the havoc it would wreak. From the Indus to the bridges of Delhi, for over 500 miles, there was not a single town, not a single village, cotton grove or wheat field which would not somehow be threatened if the partition plan Lord Ismay had been ordered to prepare were carried out.

The division of Bengal at the other end of the sub-continent held out the possibilities of another tragedy. Harbouring more people than Great Britain and Ireland combined, Bengal contained 35 million Moslems and 30 million Hindus in an expanse of land running from tiger-stalked jungles at the foot of the Himalayas to the steaming marshes through which the thousand fingers of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers drained into the Bay of Bengal. Despite its division into two religious communities, Bengal, even more than the Punjab, was a distinct entity. Whether Hindus or Moslems, Bengalis sprang from the same racial stock, spoke the same language, shared the same culture. They sat on the floor in a certain Bengali manner, ordered the sentences they spoke in a peculiar Bengali cadence, each rising to a final crescendo, celebrated their own Bengali New Year on 15 April. Its poets, like Tagore, were regarded with pride by all Bengalis.

They were the descendants of a culture whose roots went back in time to the pre-Christian era when a Buddhist civilization flourished in Bengal. Obliged to renounce their Buddhist faith by a Hindu dynasty in the first centuries after Christ, the Bengalis of the east greeted the arrival of Mohummed’s warriors along their frontier as a release from Hindu oppression and eagerly embraced Islam. Since then, Bengal had been divided into religious halves, Moslems to the east, Hindus to the west.

In 1905, Lord Curzon, one of the most able Viceroys to rule India, tried to take advantage of that religious split to divide Bengal into two administratively more manageable halves. His efforts ended in failure six years later when a bloody revolt proved the Bengalis more prone to nationalist sentiments than religious passions.

If the Punjab seemed singled out for the blessings of the Divine, Bengal appeared the object of its malediction. A land seared by droughts alternating with frightening typhoon floods, Bengal was a kind of immense, steaming swamp in whose humid atmosphere flourished the two crops to which it owed a precarious prosperity, rice and jute. The cultivation of those two crops followed the province’s religious frontiers, rice to the Hindu west, jute to the Moslem east.

The key to Bengal’s existence, however, lay not in its crops. It was a city, the city which had been the springboard for Britain’s conquest of India, the second city, after London, of the Empire, and first port of Asia, Calcutta, site of the terrible killings of August 1946.

Everything in Bengal, roads, railways, raw materials, industry, funnelled into Calcutta. If Bengal were split into its eastern and western halves, Calcutta, because of its physical location, seemed certain to wind up in the Hindu west, which would condemn the Moslem east to slow but inexorable asphyxiation. If almost all of the world’s jute grew in East Bengal, all the factories which transformed it into rope, sacks, and cloth were clustered around Calcutta in West Bengal. The Moslem east which produced the jute grew almost no food at all, and its millions survived on the rice grown in the Hindu west.

In April 1947, Bengal’s last British Governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, an ex-sergeant in the Grenadier Guards and railways trade union leader, predicted that East Bengal, destined one day to become Bangladesh, was condemned, in the event of India’s partition, to turn into ‘the greatest rural slum in history’.

No aspect of partition, however, was more illogical than the fact that, even if Jinnah’s Pakistan were fully realized, it would still deliver barely half of India’s Moslems from the alleged inequities of Hindu majority rule which justified the state in the first place. The remaining Moslems were so scattered throughout the rest of India that it was humanly impossible to separate them. Islands in a Hindu sea, they would be the first victims of a conflict between the countries, India’s Moslem hostages to Pakistan’s good behaviour. Indeed, even after the amputation, India would still harbour almost 50 million Moslems, a figure which would make her the third largest Moslem nation in the world, after Indonesia and the new state drawn from her own womb.

If Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru, or Mahatma Gandhi had been aware in April 1947 of one extraordinary secret, the division threatening India might have been avoided. That secret was frozen on to the grey surface of a piece of film, a film which could have upset the Indian political equation and would almost certainly have changed the course of Asian history. Yet so precious was the secret that even the British CID, one of the most effective investigative agencies in the world, was ignorant of its existence.

The heart of the film was two dark circles no bigger than a pair of ping-pong balls. Each was ringed by an irregular white border like the corona of the sun eclipsed by the moon. Above them, a galaxy of little white spots stretched up the film’s grey surface towards the top of the thoracic cage. That film was an X-ray, the X-ray of a pair of human lungs. The black circles were pulmonary cavities, gaping holes in which the lung’s vital tissues no longer existed. The little chain of white dots indicated areas where more pulmonary or pleural tissue was already hardening and confirmed the diagnosis: tuberculosis was devouring the lungs. The damage was already so extensive that the human being whose lungs were on that film could have barely two or three years to live.

Sealed in an unmarked envelope, those X-rays were locked in the office safe of Dr J. A. L. Patel, a Bombay physician. The lungs depicted on them belonged to the rigid and inflexible man who had frustrated Louis Mountbatten’s efforts to preserve India’s unity. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the one unmovable obstacle between the Viceroy and Indian unity, was living under a sentence of death.

In June 1946, nine months before Mountbatten’s arrival, Dr Patel had lifted those X-rays from their developing bath and discovered the terrible disease that threatened to put a rapid end to Jinnah’s life. Tuberculosis, the cruel scourge which annually took the lives of millions of undernourished Indians, had invaded the lungs of the prophet of Pakistan at the age of seventy.

All his life, Jinnah had suffered from delicate health due to his weak pulmonary system. Long before the war, he’d been treated in Berlin for complications arising out of an attack of pleurisy. Frequent bronchitis since then had diminished his strength and weakened his respiratory system to the point at which the effort demanded by a major speech would leave him panting for hours.

In Simla in late May 1946, bronchitis had again struck the Moslem League leader. Jinnah’s devoted sister Fatima got him on a train to Bombay, but en route his condition worsened. So alarming did his state become that she sent an urgent call to Dr Patel. Patel boarded his train outside Bombay. His distinguished patient’s condition, he quickly discovered, was ‘desperately bad’. Warning Jinnah he would collapse if he tried to get through the reception waiting for him at Bombay’s Grand Railroad Station, Patel bundled him off the train at a suburban station and into a hospital. It was while he was there, slowly regaining his strength, that Patel discovered what would become the most closely guarded secret in India.

If Jinnah had been just any unfortunate victim of tuberculosis, he would have been confined in a sanatorium for the rest of his life. Jinnah, however, was not a normal patient. When he was discharged from hospital, Patel brought him to his office. Sadly, he revealed to his friend and patient the fatal illness which was stalking him. He was, he told Jinnah, reaching the end of his physical resources. Unless he severely reduced his work load, rested much more frequently, gave up cigarettes and alcohol, and eased the pressures on his system, he did not have more than one or two years to live.

Jinnah received that harsh news impassively. Not the slightest expression crossed his pale face. There was no question, he told Dr Patel, of abandoning his life’s crusade for a sanatorium bed. Nothing except the grave was going to turn him from the task to which he’d appointed himself of leading India’s Moslems at this critical juncture in their history. He would follow the doctor’s advice and reduce his work load only in so far as it was compatible with that great duty. Jinnah knew that if his Hindu enemies learned he was dying, their whole political outlook could change. They might wait until he was in his grave, then unravel his dream with the more malleable men underneath him in the hierarchy of the Moslem League.^*

Fortified every two weeks by injections given him in secret by Dr Patel, Jinnah returned to work. He made no effort whatsoever to follow his doctor’s advice. He was not going to let his rendezvous with death cheat him of his other rendezvous with history. With extraordinary courage, with an intense and consuming zeal that sent his life’s candle guttering out in a last harsh burst of flame, Jinnah lunged for his lifetime’s goal. ‘Speed,’ Jinnah had told Mountbatten in their first discussions of India’s future, was ‘the essence of the contract’. And so, too, had it become the essence of Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s own contract with destiny.

The eleven men seated around the oval table in the conference chamber solemnly waited for Lord Mountbatten to begin their proceedings. They were, in a sense, the descendants of the 24 founding fathers of the East India Company, the men whose mercantile appetites had sent Britain along the sea-lanes to India three and a half centuries earlier. They were the pillars of the empire born of their avarice, the governors of the eleven provinces of British India. They stood at the pinnacle of careers of service to the Indian Empire, savouring that high authority of which they might have dreamed as young men in the remote and lonely postings of their youth. Only two of them were Indians.

Capable and dedicated men, they offered India the responsible exercise of authority acquired by a lifetime of service. India, in its turn, offered them an opportunity to live in a splendour almost regal in its dimension. The official residences in which they dwelled were palaces staffed by scores of retainers. Their writ ran over territories as vast and as populous as the largest nations of Europe. They crossed their territories in the comfort of their private railway cars, their cities in Rolls-Royces with turbaned escorts, their jungles on elephant back.