A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  It was then, on 6 September, that the British Prime Minister deeply offended India, with enduring consequences. No. 10 Downing Street issued a public statement expressing Wilson’s deep concern at ‘the increasingly serious fighting, especially at the news that Indian forces have today attacked Pakistan territory across the international frontier in the Punjab’. The Indian offensive, the press statement went on, was ‘a distressing response to the resolution adopted by the security council calling for a ceasefire’.29 Wilson then asked Shastri to ensure that British weapons sent to India for use against the Chinese were not used against Pakistan.

  Wilson’s accusation caused a furious, self-righteous response. Shastri wrote to Wilson that the culprit was Pakistan, whose regular forces ‘had launched a massive attack across the international boundary between the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and the West Punjab in Pakistan’.30 The Indian High Commissioner in London said that Wilson’s press statement would be received with anger not only in the Indian Parliament but throughout the world. ‘Why was India pilloried without a mention of Pakistan’s similar violations?’31

  Wilson was chastened. He called off any further attempts to broker a ceasefire, leaving it to the United Nations.

  Where did this leave High Commissioner Freeman? He was frustrated and embarrassed. He had reported the true sequence of events punctually. He had warned Wilson on 6 September against calling for a ceasefire: ‘I feel obliged to express my view that any appeal to India to cease fire, which is made by our Prime Minister would be at this stage useless and might even serve to weaken any influence we might be able to start later.’32 He now wrote that Wilson’s call for military equipment to be withheld had caused ‘particular resentment’. ‘Britain’s popularity in India,’ he wrote to the CRO on 13 September, ‘has taken a severe knock as a result of our open criticism of India’s escalation of the conflict.’ Wilson had jumped in ‘with indecent haste’ and scotched the Indian view that a Labour government was much less likely than its Conservative predecessor to display a pro-Pakistan bias. At the same time he thought that India was ‘largely to blame’ for the reaction in Britain because its publicity machine was inert and Pakistan’s much superior. He gave as an example of this Wilson’s criticism made to the Indian High Commissioner on 7 September of ‘India’s bombing of “open cities” including Karachi and Rawalpindi’. This was false information that had certainly not come from Freeman, but nor had it been refuted by the Indian government.33

  He would soon find that Wilson laying the blame on India in September 1965 ‘hung round my neck like an albatross’.34 The following December the Labour MP Francis Noel-Baker returned from Delhi and reported to Wilson that he had received ‘constant reproaches’ about Britain’s ‘pro-Pakistan’ attitude over the war. Wilson replied, partly repeating Freeman in fact, that it was attributable to the ineptness of India’s public relations machinery and that the Indians had ‘undoubtedly’ exaggerated his statement, ‘reading more into it than was intended’.35

  The British press published this exchange and the Indian press was further outraged. ‘Mr Wilson opens old wounds in Delhi controversy’ began the Delhi correspondent of The Times. Freeman despaired. He wrote to the CRO: ‘I must emphasise extreme embarrassment. This is by far the most serious embarrassment of the several we have had recently in the final stage of this tiresome controversy. It has gravely damaged our Prime Minister’s prestige in India and undone careful work.’36

  More would follow. In 1971 the Sunday Times serialised Wilson’s memoir about his years in office, The Labour Government 1964–1970: A Personal Record. In it he admitted his mistake for the 6 September press statement but blamed Whitehall officials: ‘I had been taken for a ride by a pro Pakistani faction in the CRO.’37 This was refuted by the permanent under-secretary at the CRO, Joe Garner, the recipient of many memos from Freeman, who wrote to Wilson demanding that the record should be put straight:

  It is clear that the initiative for an early statement [on 6 September] came from No. 10 and that the CRO was under pressure from your office. A statement was drafted in the CRO and submitted to you with the specific warning that, if issued in this form, it would be likely to have serious repercussions on our relations with India.38

  Significantly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, supported Garner: ‘You were absolutely right to say what you did.’39 The Wilson fib was an unedifying tailpiece to the story. It probably came as no surprise to Freeman who had invented the word ‘aprincipled’ to describe his old colleague.

  Back to the war…

  September 1965: both the United States and the United Kingdom suspended arms supplies, leaving Pakistan in particular very short of weapons power. China trumpeted its support of Pakistan and gave India an ultimatum to withdraw its outposts on the Chinese border. The Soviet Union, keeping the Great Power balance, spoke out against Chinese bellicosity and supported the USA and UN in trying to bring about a ceasefire. With Indian troops having the better of battlefield exchanges and having frustrated Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir, Prime Minister Shastri agreed to a UN ceasefire on 22 September. Ayub Khan had no option but to agree. The Chinese, having made ‘maximum noise with minimum risk’ confirmed that their border dispute with India was at an end. In January 1966 the Soviet Union brokered a peace deal in Tashkent. Both India and Pakistan agreed to withdraw their armed forces to positions held before the start of the war. This was a diplomatic triumph for Russia and Britain was nowhere. John Freeman gloomily made the best of a bad job. He told his opposite number in Karachi, Morrice James, that the UK had little option but to ‘lie low for the time being and leave it to the Russians to make the running, in the hope of gradually recovering our influence and making a comeback later’.40

  Later, Freeman put the furore in context. In his valedictory despatch in 1968 (that is the final despatch by an ambassador in which he is encouraged to air his views), he wrote that British–Indian relations were in a state of ‘post-colonial tension’.41 If the British displayed outdated ‘nostalgia’ then the Indians showed ‘neurosis’ in being hypersensitive and ‘suspicious’. He had told Indira Gandhi in May 1967 that the Indian press and politicians were constantly on the watch for any slighting remark by Britain and then ‘replied in immoderate and occasionally abusive language’.42 Indian political dialectic was more polemical than in Britain but the British public did not understand this.

  While lying low, Freeman wrote a thirteen-page essay for the CRO entitled ‘The Three-Week War’. It was of seminal importance. He challenged the traditional role that Britain played, as former colonial power and convenor of the Commonwealth, first to intervene in disputes and second to try to keep a balance between both sides. This role, said Freeman, was now outmoded. A much more pragmatic role was necessary:

  We are obliged to admit that India will not in any circumstances consent to a settlement in Kashmir that does not leave her in overall control of the Vale as well as Jammu and Ladakh. Moreover, Pakistan cannot mount sufficient military force to make India change her view. There is nothing we or anybody else can do about it. Essentially we have reached the stage where India and Pakistan must settle their own problems. And, since Pakistan has opted for a military solution and demonstrably failed, the settlement is bound to be an Indian one, reflecting the natural realities of military power, population and resources in the sub-continent. If we continue to resist we shall only fail and our breach with India will become final; and then Soviet influence will become the dominant factor in Indian politics.43

  This was a most significant statement and approved of by the professionals in his diplomatic team. Sir Peter Hall was Second Secretary in New Delhi at the time:

  The remarkable thing about John Freeman was that he recognised a basic truth, and got HMG to understand it, which was that although we had colossal ties with India it was literally a foreign country. This may seem blindingly obvious now but then it was not long after independence.

  Whenever London, with
a sort of hankering for the great role, put itself in the middle between Pakistan and India it was extremely uncomfortable and ineffective. I think Freeman made London understand that it was no good viewing India even in post-colonial terms. One had to view India with completely different eyes, which he did.44

  Lord Renwick told me much the same:

  The CRO still felt historical urges of responsibility to try to solve the Kashmir dispute. As John Freeman pointed out, that just got us into trouble with both sides. His message to London was, stop trying to solve the Kashmir dispute; they will either solve it one day, or they won’t. He was fundamentally right that we needed to recalibrate our efforts and concentrate on what we could do properly.45

  Fifty years later India and Pakistan are still in dispute over Kashmir. India administers 43 per cent of the whole area of Jammu and Kashmir with a strong military presence; Pakistan controls 37 per cent and in between are Kashmiri insurgent groups who either want accession to Pakistan or complete independence.

  In July 1966, Lucy Catherine Mekhala Freeman was born in London and taken to Delhi six months later. She and her two brothers were now looked after at the residency by Cynthia Gomes, an Anglo-Indian nursery nurse whom the Freemans recruited when Lucy was on the way:

  I was never treated as a nanny, no. Everywhere they went I would eat at the same table. Except when they had head government people, business people and then they had evening dinners set and I would be up with the children in the nursery. Mr Freeman was a very good father, in my opinion. He made the time. He used to come from his work in the evenings and say, ‘Cynthia, shall I take over?’ He would bath them, play with them, put on the boys’ pyjamas and Lucy’s nightie. Then he would read them a story and say goodnight. Then he would go and dress for the evening. Wherever his children were concerned, they came first, I would say.

  Cynthia was familiar with the large domestic staff, nineteen in all:

  There was the head butler (the khitmatgar) called Gopal; then we had four other bearers who did duties downstairs and upstairs, tidying up the rooms, making up the beds, this and that. Then I had a nursery bearer called Kachero who made up the children’s beds and mine, and maids (ayahs) to help with the children. That’s the life I had. In the kitchen were two cooks (khansalah) and a kitchen staff. Outside there were gardeners (mali) watchmen (chowkidar) drivers and so on.46

  It was not a life of Catherine’s choosing, but she adapted to it cheerfully enough:

  Actually, you get used to it after about twenty-four hours because there is a hierarchy among the staff and an established routine, which works very well, and you would be foolish to interfere with it. It’s not the kind of life one would have chosen for the children either. There’s the danger they could have got spoilt. When Matthew was given a go-kart for his fifth birthday, which could not fit into my car, he said, ‘Can’t the Rolls-Royce bring it behind us?’ I drew a deep breath and said, ‘Now, look here…’47

  Hours after signing the Tashkent Declaration, on 11 January 1966 Lal Bahadur Shastri suddenly died. He was sixty-two and had been in office only eighteen months. His successor was Jawaharlal Nehru’s 48-year-old daughter Indira Gandhi. She was already a widow with two sons, one of whom would eventually succeed her as Prime Minister. From then on and for the rest of his period as High Commissioner, Freeman’s diplomatic work was dominated by his relationship with Mrs Gandhi. He found this relationship difficult. It led him to write a memorable despatch in May the following year. It was not diplomatic but it showed a frustrated man venting his feelings with an almost surgical skill with words:

  Mrs Gandhi does not seek to be disobliging to, e.g. western ambassadors, but she knows she cannot have with such officials the sort of hair-down [uninhibited] and often recklessly self-indulgent exchanges she needs and can enjoy with sympathetic non-official visitors. This is perhaps another way of saying that it is the element of decision and responsibility in politics which she finds so crippling. When this is introduced she freezes up in an iceberg of suspicion, insecurity and indecision. Her relationship with official representatives – at least from the western countries – shows reticence and gaucheness.

  The point can be summed up like this: it is not too difficult for the private citizen to get through to her on an ‘irresponsible’ network. It is not too difficult for intimate colleagues with leftist views to steer her prejudices into attitudes or statements damaging to western interests. Her femininity does, of course, play a considerable role in all this – both in her approach to subjects and in other people’s approach to her. But simple sex is not all. Before one really can get through to her, one has not only, as it were, to squeeze her hand, but to dress up in her political clothes. Since her most deep-seated and darkling neuroses concern Britain, this is not always a course which can be commended to HM High Commissioner.48

  As it happens, Catherine Freeman recalls that particular May confrontation, but her experience of Mrs Gandhi was somewhat different:

  I always found her very friendly and human. She lived at the end of our road and I remember John going off to see her on a rather serious and difficult political matter. He came back very frustrated: ‘God, that bloody woman! She absolutely stonewalled me, completely, on everything I had to say. I was there for at least an hour with no result, and then, as I was taking my leave, she changed her tone completely and asked me most solicitously how you were finding the heat with the new baby. That made him very cross, but I rather appreciated her woman-to-woman concern.49

  The May 1967 meeting did find the Prime Minister and the High Commissioner in agreement on one point. Freeman wrote:

  Mrs Gandhi said: ‘You [the British government] seem to us to be always trying to achieve some sort of balance of power in Asia and this leads you to interfere in matters we think don’t concern you.’ She was referring to Pakistan and felt that we were trying to manipulate Pakistan against India.50

  Freeman did not say that he had recently written a despatch making much the same point. He did, however, make this one of his main conclusions in his valedictory despatch written a year later. Speaking of ‘Indo–Pakistan frictions’ he wrote: ‘We have the capacity to do calamitous damage to our interests in India by ineffectual intervention or conspicuous involvement.’ Nothing could be plainer than that.51

  The High Commissioner’s Second Secretary, Sir Peter Hall, thinks that Freeman’s despatches were one reason why the former journalist was chosen for the post. There was, he said, an art form in Foreign Office telegrams; lengthy, self-serving and downplaying difficulties. Freeman’s despatches were the reverse. He remembered one that followed an unproductive meeting with Indira Gandhi when, on instructions, he argued against nuclear development. ‘He wrote afterwards: “I saw Mrs Gandhi this afternoon and spoke in accordance with instructions. Her manner was frosty and unhelpful throughout and I am convinced my representations will have no effect on Indian policy. Freeman.” Perfect, but how many people do it?’52

  Freeman returned to London for his annual review shortly afterwards. On the previous occasion, in 1966, Wilson had displayed his political antennae, as Freeman remembered: ‘As I went into No. 10 Wilson shook me dramatically by the hand and put an arm around my shoulders, murmuring as he did so “This will be good for forty seconds on TV tonight. Ted Heath is speaking in Gravesend and I don’t have an engagement.”’53 On this occasion, Wilson had a substantial offer to make. He asked Freeman if he was interested in another posting. Freeman had obviously seen this coming because he said he would be interested in only two: the Soviet Union or the United States. They agreed that he would end his term as High Commissioner a year later. Wilson then offered Freeman the customary knighthood and Freeman declined, as ever impervious to flattery or status. He did, however, accept the title of Privy Counsellor with a ‘Rt Hon.’ before his name and ‘PC’ afterwards. Presumably he did so because the Privy Council does have an advisory role to the sovereign that is a little more than just honorary.

  Back in N
ew Delhi he became embroiled in an incident that, like many involving MI5, had its farcical element. The British complained to the Indian government about the Soviet influence on Indira Gandhi, exercised through the Indian Foreign Ministry, so the High Commission must have been just a little smug when in December a Russian defector, Aziz Oulougzade, sought asylum in the American embassy and applied for admission to the United Kingdom. Freeman allowed it, despite the objections of the Indian Foreign Ministry. The Soviet ambassador demanded a protest interview. Freeman asked Robin Renwick to sit in: ‘The Russian ambassador was full of bluster: “This man is misguided. He is ruining his life. All is forgiven”. That sort of thing. Freeman was impassive. He did not give one inch. He just sat there in silence. He was a very tough guy.’54

  With the defector still camped in the American embassy after four days and all the potential publicity of a Cold War incident in the offing, proceedings needed to be communicated to the UK in secret, that is by cypher telegram. Stella Rimington was now working ‘behind the baize door’ in the High Commission where MI5 had its office, but she had not been taught how to use the cypher machine. The girl whose job it was could not be contacted because she was in bed with her Sikh boyfriend. ‘I was aware of earnest and angry consultations in huddled groups outside on the lawn during a High Commission cocktail party,’55 Rimington wrote.

  In May 1968, Wilson’s government passed the Commonwealth Immigration Act. It limited the right of entry to the UK to citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies currently holding a British passport who were born in the UK or had at least one parent or grandparent born in the UK. This was damage limitation to the ‘Africanisation’ policy of Kenya, which could have led to the flight of 200,000 African Asians, many of them Indians with British passports, who did not wish to become Kenyan citizens. Indian politicians were outraged. This was ‘a breach of faith’. Britain had ‘a legal, moral and political responsibility’ to absorb the Kenyan Asians. Mr Om Mechta, deputy Chief Whip of the Congress Parliamentary Party, called for the nationalisation of British assets in India and for India to leave the Commonwealth. Mrs Gandhi ‘made her strong views known’ to the High Commissioner but said that India should ‘not act in a huff’. Freeman probably regarded this as another example of Indian ‘neurosis’. Once again, his advice to HMG was to ‘talk little. It is a waste of time, and probably counter-productive, to attempt a hard sell on the Commonwealth in India. Eventually, it will be a combination of inertia and marginal self-interest that will hold India inside the Commonwealth.’56 And so it came to pass.