In December the British government flew Nehru, Jinnah and Wavell to London to talk to Pethick-Lawrence, Cripps and Attlee.52 On 5 December, the unfortunate King George VI found himself sitting between Nehru and Jinnah at a Buckingham Palace luncheon. The atmosphere was so poisonous that he summoned Attlee three days later to discuss it. ‘The two main political parties in India had no real will to reach agreement among themselves’, he wrote; ‘the situation might so develop as to result in Civil War in India, & there seemed to be little realization among Indian leaders of the risk that ordered govt. might collapse.’ He concluded: ‘The Indian leaders have got to learn that the responsibility is theirs & that they must learn how to govern.’53 Nehru lasted through only three days of squabbling before flying home, seething at the intransigence he perceived in London. On 9 December he convened a constituent assembly, in which the Muslim League refused to participate.
In Britain, Jinnah fared better. At Buckingham Palace, he found that the King was in favour of Pakistan; on talking to the Queen afterwards, he found her even more in favour; and finally he spoke to Queen Mary, who was ‘100% Pakistan!’ He later told this anecdote to the Viceroy’s principal secretary, Sir Eric Miéville. ‘I replied that I was sorry Their Majesties had acted in such an unconstitutional way as to express their opinions on political matters connected with their Indian Empire,’ wrote Miéville, ‘at which he laughed quite a lot.’54 Jinnah spent a Saturday at Churchill’s country house, Chartwell, on 7 December; the meeting was evidently a success, for he afterwards invited Churchill to a luncheon party at Claridge’s on 12 December.55 By this point, their relationship had warmed up. On 11 December 1946, Churchill wrote secretly to ‘My dear Mr Jinnah’:
I should greatly like to accept your kind invitation to luncheon on December 12. I feel, however, that it would perhaps be wiser for us not to be associated publicly at this juncture.
I greatly valued our talk the other day, and I now enclose the address to which any telegrams you may wish to send me can be sent without attracting attention in India. I will always sign myself ‘Gilliatt’. Perhaps you will let me know to what address I should telegraph to you and how you will sign yourself.’56
Jinnah was to write to Churchill in the guise of Miss Elizabeth Gilliatt of 6 Westminster Gardens. (Images of Mr Toad dressed as a washerwoman must be dismissed – Miss Gilliatt was Churchill’s secretary, not an alter ego.) After this letter, the trail goes cold. Hardly any further correspondence between Churchill and Jinnah is to be found among either man’s papers, beyond a few brief notes enclosing press cuttings or speeches. It seems likely that there would have been additional letters of substance after one so cordial as the above. If so, they were probably destroyed. Little may be told from this fragment, though the cloak-and-dagger approach implies that the two men were up to something interesting. Churchill’s behaviour over the next year would be extremely favourable to Pakistan and to Jinnah personally. There can be no doubt that his public championing of the Muslim League’s cause in the House of Commons throughout 1946 and 1947, and of Pakistan’s thereafter, was crucial both to the creation of Pakistan and to the British government’s support for its interests over the years to come. If Jinnah is regarded as the father of Pakistan, Churchill must qualify as its uncle; and, therefore, as a pivotal figure in the resurgence of political Islam.
Across the Atlantic, the United States was also refining its interest in Indian politics. American foreign policy had two main goals. One was the ending of colonialism. The other was that communism must be prevented from spreading. Great empires should retreat, setting up model democracies in their stead – which, it was thought, would naturally tend towards peace, secularism and liberal economics. In the case of India, though, the United States feared that the exit of one ruling foreign power would create a vacuum into which another would be sucked. There were two main contenders on India’s borders – Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia – and the acting Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was openly friendly with both. It did not take a great deal of imagination to construct a ‘domino scenario’ whereby these two communist nations begat communist India, and Washington did not intend to let events slide in that direction.57
Jawaharlal Nehru may have occasioned some suspicion on grounds of his friendships, but his family had used the war to carry out a brilliant public relations campaign in the United States, significantly increasing that nation’s interest in Indian independence. Nehru’s nieces Lekha and Tara Pandit, daughters of his sister Nan, had been sent to Wellesley College during the war. They became popular with nationalist and civil rights organizations, and were introduced to a miscellaneous collection of celebrities, including Danny Kaye, Joan Crawford, and Helen Keller. The girls stayed with their Uncle Jawahar’s old friend, and Edwina Mountbatten’s alleged lover, Paul Robeson.58 Swiftly, it was made clear that official American opinion was keen to associate itself with the cause of Indian independence. A pair of speckled orchids, tied with gold ribbons, was sent to the girls, accompanied by a note saying, ‘Let me know if there is anything I can do for you. I cannot do enough for Nehru’s nieces.’59 They had come from Louis Johnson, President Roosevelt’s personal envoy to India. Johnson had cabled to Roosevelt that Nehru had been ‘magnificent in his cooperation with me. The President would like him and on most things they agree … He is our hope here.’60
The Nehru girls’ mother, Nan Pandit, visited them in December 1944. She also took the opportunity to represent India at the Pacific Relations Conference. Nan lunched with Eleanor Roosevelt in New York, and President Harry S. Truman at the White House. She toured the country speaking in favour of Indian independence, in public and on the radio. Her success was immediate. ‘I didn’t listen much to what you were saying, but your voice is like moonbeams and honey and I love you and am on India’s side!’ said one breathless male caller.61 The presence of this sophisticated Indian woman in their midst only enhanced what the American government already thought. On 29 January 1945, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew told the media that the United States ‘would be happy to contribute in any appropriate manner to a satisfactory settlement. We have close ties of friendship, both with the British and with the people of India.’62
American opinion had added weight, for the British government had no choice but to borrow money from its prosperous ally. The loans Britain took from the United States to finance the Second World War and subsequent reconstruction were so vast that the final payment would not be made until 31 December 2006. Meanwhile, Britain had quietly stopped paying the loans – approaching £1 billion at 1947 rates – that the USA had lent it for the First World War. Being so far in the Americans’ pocket was an invidious situation. Britain was beginning to find out what it was like to be the humbled dependency of a much more powerful state.
Attlee did not like American interference in the India question any more than had Churchill. ‘I do not like the idea of a statement by the USA on India,’ he said. ‘It looks like a pat on the back to us from a rich uncle who sees us turning over a new leaf.’ He noted, furthermore, that any intervention from America ‘would irritate the Moslems’.63 American diplomats leant heavily on Jinnah and Nehru to accept the Cabinet Mission’s plan and get on with their own independence. But the Indian leaders would not be squeezed out of their entrenchments.64
By the end of 1946 the Viceroy, Wavell, had lost the confidence of both sides of the Indian nationalist movement. Gandhi began to canvass for his removal in September.65 By the end of November, Nehru, too, was publicly accusing him of favouring Jinnah.66 Jinnah wrote an impassioned letter to Attlee and a similar one to Churchill, accusing Wavell of being under the thumb of Congress.67 Attlee realized, with his usual brisk unsentimentality, that he was going to have to fire Wavell. ‘A great man in many ways, you know, but a curious silent bird, and I don’t think silent people get on very well with Indians, who are very loquacious.’68 The search began for one who would not mind talking to the Indians. Attlee considered the pro
blem for some time before settling on his candidate, Dickie Mountbatten – who had proven experience with ‘all kinds of people’, and who was ‘blessed with a very unusual wife’.69 Attlee was under no illusions about the anomaly of a semi-royal acting as a figurehead for democracy and freedom. Privately, he confided to friends that Dickie was ‘rather a Ruritanian figure, don’t you think?’70
The description was apt, for since he had returned from South East Asia Mountbatten had engaged himself almost full time in a project worthy of the Order of the Red Rose. In one of the most daring bloodless coups ever attempted, he would install the House of Mountbatten on the British throne – the same throne which, only thirty years before, had ordered his father’s ruin. Mountbatten’s involvement in the marriage between his nephew, Philippos Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, and the King’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, can hardly be overstated. He introduced the couple, engineered meetings between them, and went to great lengths in grooming Philip to become a consort.
Philip’s credentials for marrying the world’s most eligible woman were tenuous. His father was a playboy who had disappeared into the champagne-bars of the Côte d’Azur; his mother, abandoned, had gone mad and become a nun; his sisters had all married Nazis; he himself was only a naval lieutenant, and a penniless one at that. He had been a prince of Greece before a coup ousted his family, but the revolution had left him poor and nameless. He met Princess Elizabeth for the first time on 22 July 1939, when the royal family visited the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth under the proud supervision of Dickie Mountbatten. Philip was eighteen years old; Elizabeth was thirteen, and playing with a clockwork train. Their eyes met over lemonade and ginger biscuits, and Philip was among the cadets invited to lunch on the royal yacht. There he impressed the princesses by being able to jump high and eat an abnormal quantity of shrimp, though not simultaneously. When the time came for the yacht to sail, the cadets followed in rowboats and motorboats for a while; Elizabeth watched the tall, blond, strikingly handsome Philip row his little boat further than anyone else.71
Less than eighteen months after the smitten Princess Elizabeth had watched her handsome quasi-prince rowing after the royal yacht, the Conservative MP Chips Channon spent a few days in Athens. He met Philip at a cocktail party and, during the course of extensive gossiping, established that, ‘He is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy.’72 At this stage the prospect seemed improbable. The Greek royals were impoverished, shabby and foreign. It was Dickie who organized a campaign to fashion young Philip into an eligible naval hero. The most important factor in this transformation would be to secure for him British nationality. For some reason, no one – not even the genealogically preoccupied Mountbatten – remembered the 1705 Act of Naturalization of the Most Excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, and the Issue of Her Body. As a descendant of Sophia, Philip had been British since birth. Unaware of this, Mountbatten embarked upon a frenetic two-and-a-half-year campaign. On 23 August 1944, he flew from South East Asia Command to Cairo, near Philip’s station at Alexandria, to ‘sound out’ Philip and the King of Greece about whether the former could assume British nationality. He told the British High Commissioner, incredibly, that the British King had ordered his secret mission, on the grounds that Philip could ‘be an additional asset to the British Royal Family and a great help to them in carrying out their royal functions’.73 In fact, the King had already warned Mountbatten off: ‘I have been thinking the matter over since our talk and I have come to the conclusion that we are going too fast’, he had written to him two weeks before.74 Soundings were taken; they were, apparently, satisfactory; Mountbatten was on the plane back to Karachi that same afternoon.
In October 1945, the matter of Philip’s naturalization came before the cabinet. Attlee postponed any further discussion owing to the undesirability of aligning the British government with the Greek royalist cause. But by then the teenaged Princess Elizabeth was playing ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ from the musical Oklahoma! non-stop on her gramophone; and Philip had been seen helping her with a fur wrap at the wedding of Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia. Mountbatten moved quickly, making personal appointments with the King, the Prime Minister, and the Foreign Secretary, while expending considerable effort in enlightening his media contacts about Philip’s gallantry.75 ‘Please, I beg of you, not too much advice in an affair of the heart’, Philip wrote to his uncle, ‘or I shall be forced to do the wooing by proxy.’76
Mountbatten was summoned to meet the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, for quite another reason on 18 December 1946. According to Attlee, Dickie was taken aback at the offer of the viceroyalty of India – ‘Bit of a shock for him, you know’ – and initially was reluctant to accept owing to the probable hitch in his naval career.77 But the consent of the Lords of the Admiralty for Mountbatten’s removal was obtained with noteworthy ease.78 Even the King was keen: ‘Rather unexpectedly he warmly approved of the idea right away,’ remembered Attlee. ‘Not everyone would let a member of the royal family go and take a risky job, hit or miss, in India as he did.’79 It is hard not to feel sympathy for a King who had recently endured several years of intense lobbying for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and may well have had enough of Cousin Dickie for the time being.
Aside from his naval career, there was another factor in Mountbatten’s reluctance to accept the viceroyalty: Edwina. Bunny Phillips’s marriage had been hard on her; a giddy romance with the conductor Malcolm Sargent had irritated her husband and daughters; she suffered from arteriosclerosis, and would soon have to undergo a partial hysterectomy. Dickie worried constantly about how hard she worked, her fragile health, and her depression. Since the war ended, they had been presented with all sorts of baubles, including the Freedom of the City of London, the Sword of Honour, and Dickie a viscountcy – ‘though he expected an earldom’, according to one of their friends.80 ‘Dickie got reduced in rank down to rear-admiral and Edwina wasn’t saving people all day and night as she had been. I think, secretly, they were feeling a little low.’81
Despite his need for a new focus, there is plenty of evidence which indicates that Mountbatten’s disinclination to take up the viceroyalty was genuine.82 Letter after letter to Attlee shows Dickie setting up new and imaginative obstacles in his own path. First he said he would only do the job ‘at the open invitation of the Indian parties’,83 which was obviously impossible to obtain as it would have involved them agreeing. Next, he demanded a complete change of policy as regarded viceregal protocol, so that he and Edwina could visit Indians at will and unencumbered by staff.84 This he was unexpectedly granted. Finally, he hit upon the sticking point. On 7 January 1947, he asked Attlee to set an ‘exact date for the termination of the British Raj’.85
The British government, in consultation with Wavell, had long been working to an end-date of 31 March 1948. British troops were already being moved out of India; and, after that time, Wavell considered that their numbers would have dipped below the minimum required to maintain order.86 Attlee remembered in his memoirs: ‘I decided that the only thing to do was to set a time-limit and say: “Whatever happens, our rule is ending on that date.” It was, of course, a somewhat dangerous venture.’87
Even the most cursory glance at the letters between Attlee and Mountbatten reveals this memory to be false. It was Mountbatten who pushed to set a firm date – Attlee resisted. ‘My dear Dickie,’ he wrote on 9 January. ‘As at present advised we think it is inadvisable to be too precise as to an actual day, but I will bear the point in mind.’88 Alarmed, Mountbatten replied: ‘I notice with some concern that it is now considered inadvisable to name a precise and definite day.’89
‘I do not think that you need worry’, Attlee wrote back. ‘We shall get a clear statement of timing, but an exact day of the month so long ahead would not be very wise. There is no intention whatever of having any escape clause or of leaving any doubt that within a definite time the handover will take
place.’90
But Mountbatten would not back down, and refused to be satisfied with Attlee’s suggestion that they agree on ‘the middle of 1948’.91 Still Attlee resisted. The reason for his intransigence was that he was under intense pressure from the British administrators in India not to set a date. A report by Sir Frederick Burrows, Governor of Bengal, advised him that the announcement of a date would precipitate civil war, ‘massacres on shocking scale (with Gandhi one of the first victims) and famine’.92 Attlee received similar notices from the governors of the Punjab and the United Provinces. Wavell sent his personal opinion too, in the strongest terms: ‘I am sure that announcement about the withdrawal in 1948 should not repeat not be made until after my successor has taken office and has had at least a week or two to study situation. I do not think that it is fair on him to have to take over situation which may already have developed unfavourably, nor on me to have to carry out in my last few weeks of office a line of action which I consider miss-timed [sic] and ill-judged.’93
Attlee communicated all this to Mountbatten, but the Viceroy-Designate refused to be intimidated. On this point, the cabinet stood by him. The two arguments that had swayed them in the past still convinced them now. First, that a firm deadline would force the Indian parties to cooperate; second, that without one ‘we should be suspected, as earlier Governments have been, of making communal differences an excuse for continuing British rule in India’.94 Attlee cabled all this to the royal train, then making its way around South Africa. Once he had received the King’s nod, he announced the new plan, the new viceroyalty and a date: 1 June 1948, flexible to within one month.95 Mountbatten’s instructions from Attlee, while vague in their wording, were clear enough in their implication. It was the ‘definite objective’ of His Majesty’s Government to negotiate a plan for the transfer of power, with India or the divided bits of India remaining in the British Commonwealth if possible. Mountbatten was to stop short of compulsion. If his negotiations had reached no conclusion by 1 October 1947, Attlee had mandated him to get Britain out in nine months at most, regardless of whether the Indians were ready or not.96
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