by Nisid Hajari
Exhausted and frazzled, the governor finally lost his temper on 20 March with Raja Ghazanfar Ali, the most pugnacious of the five League members of the interim government. Ghazanfar Ali was a Punjabi himself: Jenkins believed he should have understood better than anyone that Muslims could only rule the Punjab by consensus, not by fiat. “Non-Muslims with some justice now regarded the Muslims as little better than animals,” the governor said bitterly. Yet rather than apologizing, Leaguers continued to give “the impression that the Muslims were a kind of ruling race in the Punjab and would be good enough to treat with generosity their fellow Punjabis, such as the Sikhs, when their rule was established.”38
Jinnah may have feared that accepting anything less than untrammeled power in the Punjab would weaken his claim over other recalcitrant Pakistan provinces. (Up in the NWFP, League leaders including Guards commander Khurshid Anwar had recently helped to launch another disobedience movement against the Congress-led ministry.) Jinnah’s intransigence, though, had made the Punjab literally ungovernable. “I said that the troubles of the Muslim League were due to folly and bad leadership,” Jenkins recalled of his talk with Ghazanfar Ali. In the month since Attlee had announced the end of the Raj, the Quaid had “fooled away a kingdom.”39
Attlee’s 20 February statement had included one more critical piece of information: he was sacking Wavell. The gruff field marshal was exhausted and out of ideas; he hardly seemed the man to break the stalemate in India. In December, the prime minister had offered the job instead to His Excellency Rear Admiral the Right Honorable Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas, Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, KCG, PC, GMSI, GMIE, GCFO, KCB, DSO—cousin to the king, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and most recently supreme Allied commander in Southeast Asia. The announcement had been delayed in part by Wavell’s reluctance to return home to receive the news in person. Britain’s new proconsul—and her last—landed in India on 22 March.
Forty-six-year-old “Dickie” Mountbatten looked like the Hollywood version of a British prince. He was tall and tanned, with broad shoulders and a chest full of medals, ribbons, and honors. The war had quite literally made him a celebrity: his good friend Noël Coward had written and directed a wildly popular movie, In Which We Serve, based on Mountbatten’s exploits as a destroyer commander. Churchill imagined him “more of a swashbuckler than I really am,” Mountbatten admitted, and promoted him rapidly—first to head of Combined Operations and then to chief of the new Southeast Asia Command (SEAC), where he led more than a million troops against the Japanese Imperial Army.40
Mountbatten even fought the war in style, importing his barber from Trumpers, the gentlemen’s shop near Piccadilly Circus, to his headquarters in the misty highlands of Ceylon. From there he zipped out to the front in his specially outfitted, four-engine Dakota, which he had had padded in white leather and equipped with plush armchairs, sofas that turned into beds, and a fully stocked cocktail cabinet.41 Sadly, Dickie’s qualities as a war fighter were less abundant: Earlier he had steered his destroyer HMS Kelly into a British minefield in the Tyne estuary, then lost her entirely in the Mediterranean to a flock of German dive-bombers. At Combined Operations, he ordered the disastrous commando raid on Dieppe that resulted in thousands of Allied casualties. “Endless walla-walla, but damn little fighting,” the curmudgeonly American general Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell grumbled of his playboy commander.42
Still, Mountbatten possessed preternatural charisma—a charm and self-confidence so powerful that tremendously able men were eager to follow where he led. Troops adored him. His capacity for work was endless, and he had an able, quick mind. Even Wavell acknowledged in his diary after learning the name of his replacement, “Dickie’s personality may perhaps accomplish what I have failed to do.”43
Mountbatten was hardly naive about the task ahead of him. “I have never supposed that the Indians could achieve their self-government without the risk of further grave communal disorders,” he told Attlee at their first meeting on 10 December.44 In the weeks between accepting the job and finally embarking from Northolt airfield outside of London, however, the viceroy-designate had concentrated largely on the question of how to forge the ideal strategic relationship between India and Britain. He asked Gen. Hastings Lionel “Pug” Ismay—Churchill’s wartime chief of staff—to come out to India to fill the same role for him. Ismay had more recently been working with the British chiefs of the defense staff on imperial strategy; he argued that “from the military point of view . . . it was nearly as vital as anything could be to ensure that India remained within the Commonwealth” as a self-governing dominion like Canada or Australia, whose troops would be at London’s service.45 Mountbatten urged Attlee to add a line to his formal instructions setting that out as a primary goal.
By contrast, Mountbatten’s last internal security briefing from the mandarins at the India Office was dated 4 March and barely mentioned Khizar’s resignation in the Punjab. “It was, I am sure, not until we got to India that we [realized] . . . how serious the situation was and how different things were from the briefing we had in the India Office,” another of Mountbatten’s aides recalled many years later.46 The threat of a Sikh uprising confronted the new viceroy immediately. At Mountbatten’s very first staff meeting, he was informed of a letter from Giani Kartar Singh vowing to overthrow any League government in Lahore by force.47
Sikh leaders had always imagined that they enjoyed a special relationship with the British, owing to their long loyalty and feats of arms in service of the empire. They hardly troubled to hide their anxieties about Pakistan, or their plotting for revenge. The maharajah of Patiala, a tall, handsome sportsman who was a favorite among Raj officials, told the wife of one at a party that he and his fellow Sikhs knew exactly what to do if the British gave Jinnah his own country. “We won’t leave a Moslem here,” Patiala said matter-of-factly. “Nor in the districts around. Every Sikh will draw his kirpan and it will be, ‘Death to all Moslems.’” The prospect appeared not to depress the jovial maharajah too terribly. He ended the evening leading a conga line through the palace, “over and under the chairs and tables—great fun!” a participant recorded.48
On the evening of 27 March, his fourth official day in office, Mountbatten asked the top commanders of the Indian Army to dinner to discuss the deteriorating security situation. Over cognac and cigars, Lt.-Gen. Sir Reginald Savory, the army’s adjutant-general, recounted a conversation he’d had with the rajah of Faridkot less than a week earlier, in which the headstrong young prince had laid out the Sikhs’ plans for conquering the Punjab. At a follow-up meeting, Faridkot even dropped “strong hints that I should command their armies,” Savory noted in his diary. Faridkot was looking to enlist other British officers as well—“1 Brig; 4 Cols; 8 Majors; plus 1 Wing Comd. and other R.A.F. officers for his air force of 5 Austers!!”49 At the dinner, Northern Command’s Messervy, too, “had a good deal to say about large-scale plots by the Sikhs,” one of Mountbatten’s advisers anxiously recorded.50 There was talk of seizing the Punjab’s main irrigation headworks to gain a choke hold on the rest of the province.
Mountbatten must have felt an unsettling twinge of déjà vu. When his forces reoccupied Southeast Asia after the war, they had faced a rash of desperate insurgencies not unlike the one the Sikhs were now threatening. In Vietnam and Indonesia, independence-minded nationalists had taken up arms to resist the reimposition of French and Dutch control, respectively, over their former colonies. Mountbatten’s troops—many of them Indian—had been caught in the middle.
The fighting had been vicious and indefinite. “One simply could not tell friend from enemy or, more correctly, who had a rifle hidden in the nearest bush and who had not,” one young British officer battling insurgents in the jungles of Sumatra lamented.51 In the eastern Javanese port of Surabaya at the end of October 1945, some 140,000 poorly armed but fanatic guerrillas had scattered a contingent of 6,000 British and Indian SEAC troops. Mountbatten had retaliated with a massive air an
d ground campaign, killing possibly as many as 15,000 Indonesians.52 In March 1947, hostilities continued to wrack both countries.
A full-scale conflict in India would be infinitely bloodier. “In the Punjab all parties are seriously preparing for civil war, and of these by far the most businesslike and serious are the Sikhs,” Mountbatten wrote in the first of his fortnightly reports to his cousin King George VI.53 Two things were immediately obvious to the new viceroy. First, he could not cede the entire Punjab to Jinnah. Second, whatever he decided, he had to decide fast. “Things are electric,” Ismay wrote to his wife the morning after dinner with Savory and the other army commanders. “If we don’t make up our minds on what we are going to do . . . there will be pandemonium.” Of course, Ismay added laconically, “if we do, there may also be pandemonium.”54
That evening, in the sprawling Mughal Gardens behind Viceroy’s House, the Punjab’s chaos seemed worlds away. Fairy lights looped through the trees. A cooling breeze rose off the fountains and rippling waterways that ran between the flower beds, which were in full springtime bloom. Mountbatten’s statuesque, red-liveried bodyguard—half of them Sikhs, the other half Punjabi Muslims—lined the entrance where a strange assortment of guests had begun to arrive. They included Indians in kurtas and saris, many of whom had never set foot on the grounds of Viceroy’s House before, as well as British officers in starched khaki. There were also mandarin-collared Nationalist Chinese, fiery Indonesians, red-cheeked Tibetans, Burmese, Vietnamese, bookish scholars from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, even Jews and Arabs from tense Palestine.
The foreigners were delegates to the impressive-sounding Asian Relations Conference taking place that week on the grounds of the Purana Qila, a ruined Mughal fort in the center of the city. Nehru had personally spent weeks organizing the conclave, forgoing sleep to dash off late-night invitations and soothe diplomatic tensions among delegates. “For too long we of Asia have been petitioners in Western courts and chancellories. That story must now belong to the past,” he declared at the opening plenary.55 Nehru fervently believed that the nations of the East were ready to forge a new world order, with India at their head. Although the confab turned out to be mostly a talk shop, he excitedly described the week of sessions and speeches to a friend as “the beginning of a new era in Asian history.”56
Mountbatten seemed to agree. The garden party was, according to his fawning press attaché Alan Campbell-Johnson, “a clear token of the new Viceroy’s goodwill towards Nehru’s most ambitious move to assert Indian status in Asian affairs.”57 Attlee had chosen Mountbatten in part because of his relatively liberal attitude toward the question of freeing Europe’s colonies. In Southeast Asia, he had irritated his Dutch and French counterparts by pushing them to work with, rather than fight, local nationalists like Sukarno and Ho Chi Minh. Attlee had been particularly struck by Mountbatten’s handling of Burma, where his embrace of charismatic independence leader Aung San had helped to produce an interim government and agreed timetable for the transfer of power.
Mountbatten saw Nehru much in the same light. The two men had met a year earlier, when Nehru had flown out to Singapore to address Indian soldiers and former POWs. Where some British officers had resented the recently jailed Congressman’s tour, Mountbatten had treated Nehru as a leader-in-waiting, giving him an official escort and even riding together with him in an open-topped car, as throngs of enraptured Indian troops and civilians cheered from the canopied sidewalks.58
In Delhi their first meeting had lasted for three hours. Mountbatten found the Congress leader “most sincere”; Nehru was taken by the new viceroy’s energy and decisiveness.59 In truth, they had little to argue about. Mountbatten, too, hoped to transfer power to a strong central government that would oversee a united India. They spent much of their time discussing Jinnah, whom Nehru belittled as a “mediocre lawyer” who had achieved political success only in the last decade of his life by rejecting any and all reasonable compromise. No doubt the fact that Mountbatten seemed to accept this judgment at face value further endeared him to the Congressman.
Nehru quickly developed a rapport with the viceroy’s circle as well, even his family. He spoke to them in terms that they understood, and in a polished Cambridge accent; they enthused about his statesmanship and literary sensibilities. Campbell-Johnson and other aides began attending breakfasts at Nehru’s bungalow at 17 York Road. After the garden party at Viceroy’s House, in fact, several staffers had trooped there to watch a traditional dance performance in a shamiana, or tent, set up on Nehru’s lawn. Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, the svelte and fabulously wealthy granddaughter of King Edward VII’s banker, Sir Ernest Cassel, came along as well. A photograph showed the attractive vicereine seated regally during the recital, her host—the erstwhile leader of Asia—curled at her feet like a cat.60
This growing intimacy had to have alarmed Jinnah. The Quaid had scorned Nehru’s Asian Relations Conference as “entirely a Hindu Congress show” and had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Arab Muslims not to attend.61 Now he stewed in Bombay, ignoring an invitation from the new viceroy to meet in Delhi. Jinnah accepted only after a week had passed, and did so with ill grace—not by letter but “through the newspapers,” an irritated Mountbatten complained to his staff.62 By the time the Quaid arrived in Delhi on 5 April, Mountbatten had just concluded five days of friendly one-on-one meetings with Gandhi. The nationalist press had gushed over the bond apparently struck between the Mountbattens and the Mahatma: a photograph of the elderly Gandhi resting a hand on Edwina’s porcelain shoulder as they ascended the steps to Viceroy’s House was hailed as India’s benediction of the viceregal couple.
Jinnah’s first meeting with Mountbatten was, by contrast, disastrous. When the Quaid strode into the viceroy’s freshly painted, air-cooled office, “he was in a most frigid, haughty and disdainful frame of mind,” Mountbatten recorded. “After having acted for some time in a gracious tea-party hostess manner, he eventually said that he had come to tell me exactly what he was prepared to accept.” When Mountbatten cut Jinnah off, saying that the purpose of this first meeting was purely to make each other’s acquaintance, the League leader sulked. For the next hour he issued monosyllabic replies to Mountbatten’s questions.63 The gregarious viceroy was so put off that he changed his mind about asking the Quaid to dinner that night, unable to stomach the thought of spending another minute with him.
The one moment of levity came when the two men stepped outside with Edwina to pose for the gathered photographers. Jinnah had prepared a canned line of flattery for the vicereine: “Ah, a rose between two thorns.” Unfortunately, as flashbulbs popped and reporters scribbled down his words, the Quaid realized that he had positioned himself between the glamorous British couple. Some good-natured ribbing “unfroze” Jinnah a bit after that, Mountbatten recalled later.64
Still, the next five days of talks proved arduous. Meeting with Jinnah for hours at a time—sometimes alone, sometimes with Ismay and other aides—Mountbatten tried every argument he could muster to undermine the Quaid’s insistence on Partition. The viceroy’s staff had armed him beforehand with a list of “awkward questions” to pose to Jinnah.65 How exactly did Pakistan propose to defend itself? Mountbatten refused to consider splitting up the Indian Army before June 1948, and even after that, any Pakistan Army would depend on its larger Indian counterpart for training, equipment, even officers. How would Pakistan form a functioning bureaucracy and government from scratch, or develop a modern industrial economy? Why would Jinnah want to break up a nation that could help shape the postwar world if united, but “divided, would not even rank as a second-class Power?”66
Mountbatten’s trump was the Punjab. The Sikh threats had convinced him that a League takeover of the province would mean immediate bloodshed. At their contentious third meeting, the viceroy told Jinnah flatly that if Muslims wanted to secede, they had to allow the non-Muslim eastern Punjab to remain with India, just as Nehru had always argued. The same principle held true in
Bengal, which meant that Pakistan would almost certainly lose the economic engine of Calcutta. Jinnah would get an amputated state, one that would be beholden to its much-larger neighbor for its survival. “He would find that he had thrown away the substance for the shadow,” Mountbatten suggested, when instead he could revert to the previous year’s compromise plan and enjoy autonomy for Muslim areas within a federal India.67
Jinnah refused to back down. He “expressed himself most upset at my trying to give him a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan,” Mountbatten recorded. The League leader argued that it made no sense to destroy the unity of the Punjab and Bengal, two provinces “which had national characteristics in common: common history, common ways of life; and where the Hindus have stronger feelings as Bengalis or Punjabis than they have as members of the Congress.” That was true enough, Mountbatten replied, but the exact same point could be made about India as a whole. The two men went round and round. “Mr. Jinnah was a psychopathic case,” Mountbatten told his staff the next morning. The Quaid “had not been able in his presence to adduce one single feasible argument in favour of Pakistan. In fact he had offered no counter-arguments. He gave the impression that he was not listening. He was impossible to argue with.”68
In hindsight, Mountbatten’s aides would say that this was the point at which they admitted to themselves that Britain would have to concede Pakistan in some form: there was no shaking Jinnah. The League leader, however, remained very concerned that the viceroy “make his Pakistan ‘viable,’” citing the example of Poland after World War I to illustrate the dangers of creating a too-weak state.69 In fact, that’s precisely the prospect Mountbatten—like Nehru—wanted to lay before Muslims. As the viceroy told a meeting of governors from the eleven British Indian provinces on 15 April, “The great problem was to reveal the limits of Pakistan so that the Muslim League could revert to a unified India with honour.”70 The more fragile the state offered now, the greater chance Leaguers would change their minds before June 1948 when Mountbatten finally departed.