Meanwhile Congress itself was being split again. Jawaharlal Nehru had been President since 1935, and had spent most of 1936 travelling around India and meeting the people he hoped to represent. He was received with a series of darshans almost Gandhian in their fervour. Songs were composed in his honour; fantastic stories were told of his valour and bravery. A woman in Madras created a line of toiletries called the ‘Nehru Specialities’, and sent samples to him. His vanity was slightly offended by the ‘most disagreeable picture of mine’ branded on all the bottles, but otherwise he found them amusing and distributed the samples of Nehru Brilliantine, Nehru Pomade, and Nehru Lime Juice & Glycerine among his friends.99 Pamphleteers and orators called him ‘Bharat Bhushan’ (‘Jewel of India’) and ‘Tyagamurti’ (‘O, Embodiment of Sacrifice’) – nicknames which were gleefully picked up by his family. ‘When Bhai [Brother] came down to breakfast we bowed deeply and asked how the Jewel of India had slept, or if the Embodiment of Sacrifice would like some bacon and eggs,’ remembered Betty.100 The reaction of the chosen one to all this acclaim was characteristically self-deprecating. ‘It went to my head, intoxicated me a little, and gave me confidence and strength. I became (I imagine so, for it is a difficult task to look at oneself from outside) just a little bit autocratic in my ways, just a shade dictatorial.’101
By the time that the question of his potential re-election came up in 1937, there were serious rumblings about where exactly Nehru was leading Congress. The most persuasive of these was an extraordinary piece published in the Modern Review at the time, entitled ‘The Rashtrapati’ (President). It described Nehru as a godlike figure, moving through multitudes as their serene and natural leader; then turned to criticism of how this adoration had spoiled the man. ‘What lies behind that mask of his, what desires, what will to power, what insatiate longings?’ it asked.
Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in democracy. He calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person. A little twist and Jawahar might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy … His conceit is already formidable. It must be checked. We want no Caesars.102
This powerful vilification was published under the pseudonym ‘Chanakya’, after an ancient political philosopher, and caused great outrage among Nehru’s loyal followers. What they did not realize was that ‘Chanakya’ was actually Jawaharlal Nehru himself. To ensure secrecy, he had submitted the piece via Padmaja Naidu, who had become his lover and confidante after Kamala’s death. In Nehru’s writing, there is no piece more telling of his personality than ‘The Rashtrapati’. Introspection, honesty, wit and mischief: few other politicians in history could have written such a lucid essay in self-deconstruction.
But the opposition to Nehru in Congress consisted of more than himself. While he was touring India, the party had been reshaped by the ascendancy of the extreme right-wing Subhas Chandra Bose, and the return of the increasingly erratic Gandhi. Gandhi disliked Bose, but, with Nehru again in Europe, had accepted him as the President of Congress for 1938. Bose soon made an unambiguous statement that he meant to impose a deadline for the British to leave India – after which, if they were still there, he would abandon the principles of non-violence. A horrified Gandhi tried to persuade Nehru to return, oust Bose and take over, but Nehru refused to interfere. Bose stood firm, and won a shock victory against Gandhi’s candidate, the little-known provincial politician Pattabhi Sitaramayya.
Bose was carried away with his own remarkable triumph over the Mahatma. He started calling himself Netaji – ‘dear leader’ – in a deliberate imitation of Adolf Hitler’s title, ‘Führer’. In February 1939, twelve members of the Congress Working Committee resigned and Bose was left politically adrift. He was effectively beaten into resignation by May. With his brother Sarat he retreated to Bengal, where they formed their own party, the Forward Bloc. Though banned from leaving the country by the British authorities, he escaped Calcutta in January 1941 disguised as a Pathan. Via a daring dash through Afghanistan and Moscow, he found his way to Germany under an Italian passport in the name of Orlando Mazzotta.103 And Germany, in 1941, was where the attention of the whole world was focused.
CHAPTER 7
POWER WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY
ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1939, HITLER’S ARMIES INVADED POLAND. Three days later, the Viceroy, by then Lord Linlithgow, summoned Gandhi and Jinnah. The Indian leaders demonstrated how seriously they took this faraway war by bickering over whether they should go in Gandhi’s or Jinnah’s car to the meeting, a scrap which Jinnah, for what it was worth, won.1 The Viceroy did not take their contribution seriously, either. He informed them that India had already declared war on Germany – without their approval.2
Gandhi’s position on non-violence was absolute. Aggression could never be returned. He did not believe that women should resist rape, but preferred that they should ‘defeat’ their assailants by remaining passive and silent.3 Correspondingly, he did not believe that the victims of war should resist attackers by physical force, but rather ought to offer satyagraha – that is, non-compliance with the invaders. ‘If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified,’ he wrote. ‘But I do not believe in any war.’ He advised the British to give up the fight against Hitler and Mussolini: ‘Let them take possession of your beautiful island … allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.’4 Furthermore, in one of his most controversial arguments, Gandhi advised the Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime – and to give up their own lives as sacrifices.5 He told the Jews to pray for Adolf Hitler. ‘If even one Jew acted thus,’ he wrote, ‘he would salve his self respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry and leave a rich heritage to mankind besides.’6
Gandhi compounded this error of judgement by offering praise to Hitler. ‘I do not consider Herr Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted’, he wrote in May 1940. ‘He is showing an ability that is amazing and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed’.7 Apparently, he saw some parallel between his own efforts to return India to the Indians, and Hitler’s invasion of French territory to reclaim that lost to Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. He regretted that Hitler had employed war rather than non-violence to achieve his aims, but nonetheless averred that the Germans of the future ‘will honour Herr Hitler as a genius, a brave man, a matchless organizer and much more.’8
Louis Fischer brought up this subject with Gandhi in 1946. By that time, the concentration camps had been discovered, and the true, awful extent of the Holocaust revealed. It might have been expected that the benefit of hindsight would have tempered the old man’s views. It had not. ‘Hitler killed five million Jews,’ Gandhi told Fischer. ‘It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs … As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.’9
Gandhi’s ambivalence towards the Nazis was matched by his feelings about the Japanese. Roosevelt’s personal envoy to India, Louis Johnson, was dismayed. ‘Gandhi appeared to him to favour Japan,’ a British diplomat reported to London, ‘under the impression that if the English were out of the way, India could make an agreement with Japan.’10 Gandhi may have favoured Japan; certainly Bose did; but there was one man at the centre of Congress politics who consistently opposed the Axis powers. Nehru’s steadfast opposition to fascism marked him out from his comrades. He was advised by them to tone it down, for in the event of a Japanese conquest of India he would undoubtedly suffer for his forthrightness: his r
esponse was to speak out louder. ‘Hitler and Japan must go to hell,’ he declared. ‘I shall fight them to the end and this is my policy. I shall also fight Mr Subhas Bose and his party along with Japan if he comes to India.’11
On 14 September Congress issued a demand for total independence, which was ignored. A month later, Linlithgow announced that it was ‘unthinkable’ to proceed without consulting the Muslims, and reiterated the offer of dominion status for India somewhere in the unspecified future.12 Some said that the Viceroy had deliberately insulted Congress in order to force its ministers to resign from the government.13 If so, it worked. On 10 November, they all left office. Jinnah declared a ‘Deliverance Day’ from the ‘tyranny, oppression, and injustice’ of Congress, provoking an outburst from Nehru – which mattered very little, for he had resigned. Gandhi mourned the loss of Hindu–Muslim cooperation, without which he saw ‘no real freedom for India’.14
If the Viceroy was out to sabotage Congress, he would have pleased the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who took office on 10 May 1940. Churchill’s reactionary stance on India was so extreme that it depressed even committed imperialists like his India Secretary, Leo Amery. Had Nehru been privy to Churchill’s cabinet orations, all his worst fears about the British policy of divide and rule would have been confirmed. Churchill described Hindu–Muslim antagonism as ‘a bulwark of British rule in India’, and noted that, were it to be resolved, their concord would result in ‘the united communities joining in showing us the door’.15
Divide and rule had worked exceptionally well. Both sides now hated each other even more than they hated the British. But perhaps it had worked too well: the last thing the British wanted on their hands was a civil war. Shortly before Churchill came to office, the Muslim League had, for the first time, voted in favour of a separate state of Pakistan. Jinnah was acclaimed as the ‘Quaid-e-Azam’, or ‘great leader’, for his championing of this policy. It was said that he had told a few close associates that the demand for Pakistan was a ‘tactical move’, rather than a serious aim.16 Either way, it served to stir up trouble. Tara Singh, a Sikh radical, immediately declared that ‘If the Muslim League wants to establish Pakistan they will have to pass through an ocean of Sikh blood.’17
Nehru, meanwhile, was in prison again at Dehra Dun at the foot of the Himalayas. He spent his time planting an English country garden of sweet peas and nasturtiums, and over the course of nine months spun 112,500 yards of yarn – some of which Indira would wear as her wedding sari, in place of the usual silk.18 He had nightmares about being cornered by an oppressive force. In his dreams, he tried to cry out, but could not; in reality, the sleeping Jawahar howled, terrifying his fellow inmates.19 Congress’s campaign for a free India was going nowhere.
Dickie Mountbatten’s war was going better than Jawaharlal Nehru’s, although only on the surface. ‘Thank God I’m not a German’, he had written in 1937 to his cousin Prince Louis of Hesse, who was.20 He was put in charge of a destroyer, HMS Kelly. It was, according to his valet, ‘a moment he treasured almost as much as the birth of his two daughters’ – but in the case of the ship there ensued a catalogue of misadventures.21 Returning from a botched expedition to rescue another British ship, Mountbatten was thrashing the Kelly through a turbulent North Sea at twice the usual speed when he ordered a swift change of direction. The Kelly rolled fifty degrees, losing all the boats, davits and rails on the starboard side, as well as an unfortunate stoker.22 A few weeks later, the Kelly was in the Tyne estuary, when Mountbatten – obeying orders – sailed it into the middle of a minefield. It was a British one, but no less explosive for that; Mountbatten promptly smacked into a mine, and his ship went into port for one of its regular repair-jobs.23 During a blizzard on 9 March 1940, a fearful grating was heard aboard as something tore through the Kelly‘s bows. Mountbatten, perhaps with some self-knowledge, had primed his radio operators to send the immediate signal ‘Have been hit by mine or torpedo. Am uncertain which’ in such an eventuality. HMS Gurkha sent back the laconic ‘That was not mine but me’ – the Kelly had, in fact, struck another British ship.24 Exactly two months later, Mountbatten found himself off the coast of Holland, after getting distracted in pursuit of a U-boat. It was not long before the Germans found him there, too, owing to his overzealous use of signalling lights. He stopped when he saw the wake of a torpedo streaking through the water towards his ship. ‘That’s going to kill an awful lot of chaps,’ he remembered thinking; twenty-seven, in fact, though the ship was prevented from sinking.25 During the six months it took to repair the Kelly after this incident, Mountbatten was put in charge of HMS Javelin, which had its bow and stern blown off and forty-six of its crew killed when he sped past a German flotilla too noisily, attracting torpedo fire; and then compounded the error by swinging round to port, presenting the largest possible target.26
The Kelly was constantly in and out of the dockyards. Soon after one of these patch-ups, a young naval officer called Terry Healey watched Mountbatten ram the newly restored Kelly straight into the bows of another British ship. Terry’s brother, Denis, would end up being Mountbatten’s senior at the Ministry of Defence two decades later, where he would often recall the story. ‘He had to have his own bows repaired all over again,’ Denis Healey remembered; ‘but his birth saved him from the court martial any other officer would have faced.’27
It was not only Mountbatten’s birth that was on his side, but a tremendous amount of luck. In 1941, the Kelly – along with HMS Kashmir – was sent to attack Crete, where the Germans had acquired a British airfield. The ships did so in the early hours of 23 May, allowing British troops to retake the airfield, but attracting a swarm of twenty-four Junkers dive-bombers. ‘Christ, look at that lot,’ Mountbatten was heard to remark.28 It took just two minutes for the bombers to sink the Kashmir, and only a couple more for the Kelly to follow it. Mountbatten, who had vowed never to abandon ship, remained on the bridge. The ship abandoned him – plunging Mountbatten violently into the brine. He dragged himself under the bridge screen by using his tin hat as a weight.
‘I started swallowing water,’ he remembered later. ‘I knew I’d be finished if I couldn’t stop this so I put my left hand over my mouth and nose and held them shut. Then I thought my lungs would burst. Finally I began to see daylight and suddenly shot out of the water like a cork released.’29 Mountbatten and his fellow survivors swam around in the churning waters, slicked with fuel oil and strafed with machine-gun fire from the bombers above, dragging their injured comrades aboard rafts. The captain led three cheers for the Kelly as its hull finally sank beneath the surface. HMS Kipling, another British ship from Mountbatten’s flotilla, appeared at this opportune moment. One hundred and thirty-six souls had been lost, but 128 survived. The next day, an oil-soaked Mountbatten came ashore in Egypt, to be greeted by his nephew Philip with the characteristically distasteful exclamation: ‘You look like a nigger minstrel!’30
Back at home in London, Mountbatten’s celebrity friends were on tenterhooks – or, at least, one of them was. ‘Very worried on reading in paper that HMS Kelly sunk off Crete’, wrote Noël Coward in his diary. ‘Feared Dickie Mountbatten lost. Rang up Ministry of Information. Found that he had been saved. Very relieved.’31 A little over five weeks later, Coward went to a screening of Down Argentine Way with Dickie and Edwina. Afterwards, they dined at the Mountbattens’ house in Chester Street, and Coward was treated to the full story of the Kelly‘s sinking. If Dickie was anything, he was a world-class yarn-spinner – and Coward was smitten. ‘Absolutely heart-breaking and so magnificent,’ he gushed. ‘He [Dickie] told the whole saga without frills and with a sincerity that was very moving. He is a pretty wonderful man, I think.’32 Less than three weeks later, he told Dickie of his idea to make a film based on the sinking of the Kelly. Mountbatten was delighted, and immediately promised the support of the Admiralty.33 And that was how the British government ended up financing a very odd movie indeed – one of the few propaganda films in history to s
how the heroes suffering a disastrous routing by a stronger and more competent enemy.
Coward and Mountbatten got together at Broadlands to work on the script, and both men were in their element: Coward pretending to be a naval officer, and Mountbatten pretending to be a showman. ‘I am purposely making it as little like you as possible’, wrote Coward to Mountbatten. ‘My Captain (D) is quite ordinary with an income of about £800 a year, a small country house in Plymouth, a reasonably nice looking wife (Mrs. not Lady), two children and a cocker spaniel.’34 The cocker spaniel was neither here nor there, for ‘Captain Edward Kinross’ was to be given Mountbatten’s character intact and his speeches verbatim, and would even wear Mountbatten’s own cap at the correct jaunty angle.35
The Ministry of Information soon decided that a film about a British ship being sunk would be bad publicity. It withdrew its support. Coward rang up Mountbatten; Mountbatten took the script directly to the King and Queen; something unknown occurred; the Ministry’s support was mysteriously reinstated.36 All the opposition that came up during filming was dealt with according to a similar protocol. Making his debut as a sailor was actor Richard Attenborough. ‘He was a showman,’ Attenborough later said of Mountbatten. ‘He had a wonderful sense of the theatrical drama, and of course he was incredibly good looking, and in his naval uniform, I mean, he was everybody’s idea of a major movie star.’37 But Mountbatten was not the movie star: that was the shorter and stouter Coward, and consequently In Which We Serve is one of the few films in which an actor playing a real-life character is less good-looking than the genuine article. Even so, Coward did his best to act up to his subject’s reputation. His Kinross, like Mountbatten, ingratiates himself with his men by demonstrating a crystal-clear memory for their names and achievements. Celia Johnson, as his wife, shared with Lady Louis a witty and opinionated character as well as a striking physical resemblance. A lengthy and emotional speech about competing with a ship for her husband’s affections would have been familiar to the real Edwina. Meanwhile, the real Dickie ensured that real sailors on leave played all the extras.38
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