Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  Mountbatten’s appointment was widely greeted with a cheer. Congratulatory letters poured into Broadlands, from friends, colleagues, journalists, ambassadors, members of the public, the Hampshire Cricket Club, the Central Chancery of the Order of Knighthood, David Joel Ltd (Manufacturers of Joinery and Furniture), and the entire company of the London Ballet.97 Most were positive, though one of the bluntest exceptions came from Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax. ‘Some people, I gather, expect that, when we move out, Indian unrest will develop to a state bordering on civil war’, he wrote. ‘Then Muslim & Hindu in India, like Jews & Arab in Palestine, will continue to quarrel until one of the contending parties invites the Russians to come in & help them. After that, the date of World War no. 3 is anybody’s guess. However, I am v. ignorant of these problems & I trust that the pessimists are wrong. Every good wish to you in your difficult task.’98

  ‘Thank you very much for your very kind letter of congratulation,’ replied Mountbatten. ‘I appreciate all the kind things you say.’99

  With immense dignity, Wavell refrained from criticizing his successor, though privately he was furious at the abrupt manner of his dismissal. He busied himself by filling the incinerators in the Viceroy’s House with stacks of documents that might have caused embarrassment to the British – either by revealing their attitudes to Indian political figures, or by detailing British mismanagement of India.100 The choice of Mountbatten did attract some public criticism. Conservative MP Brendan Bracken deplored Mountbatten’s closeness to Nehru, and described the former as ‘a miserable creature, power-mad, publicity-mad’.101 Bracken was not the only one to notice the Mountbatten–Nehru connection, and to draw the conclusion that there must be something fishy about it.102 The Associated Press of America reported that Mountbatten’s appointment had been made to appease Nehru. Nehru denied this in a terse statement, pointing out that he had met Mountbatten on just two previous occasions: in Singapore in 1946, and once afterwards as Mountbatten was passing through Delhi, when they discussed nothing more exciting than the transport of paddy.103

  Bracken and the AP had seized the wrong end of the stick. Nehru was suspicious about Mountbatten’s appointment, and mistrustful of the man himself. Attlee’s announcement, Nehru wrote to his London-based friend Krishna Menon, ‘has shaken people up here and forced them to think furiously’.104 He went on: ‘The two men that Mountbatten is bringing with him, Miéville and General Ismay, are not the type which inspires confidence regarding Mountbatten’s outlook.’ He asked Menon to try to see Mountbatten and get an impression of him. ‘Much will depend on what kind of a directive Mountbatten is bringing with him, and how he intends to function here. He can obviously make things easier or more difficult.’105

  Poor, accident-prone Dickie, long known in the Admiralty as the ‘Master of Disaster’106, had been given more power over 400 million subjects of the British King-Emperor than any preceding Viceroy.107 The task of reconciling the Indian politicians, re-establishing public order and finding a formula for an independent India was awesome, and quite beyond Mountbatten’s experience. India would have been within its rights to panic but, from the British government’s point of view, Dickie’s appointment had been a clever move. He was a gung-ho sort, and could be relied upon to remove himself, and his nation, by any means necessary. And, by this stage, the British government did not care much what means were necessary. The end was its only concern.

  On the evening of 18 March 1947, Dickie and Edwina held a farewell reception at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall. It was a double celebration for them. That very morning, Mountbatten had secured a great victory, signalled by an announcement of the superfluous naturalization of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN, in the London Gazette.108 He had planned to call his nephew ‘HRH Prince Philip’. Philip preferred to start again as a commoner, but it is hard to imagine that Dickie had nothing to do with his choice of surname. ‘Most people think that Dickie’s my father anyway,’ Philip later acknowledged.109 With Philip’s engagement to the heiress presumptive soon to be announced, the House of Mountbatten was now right at the front of the line for the British throne.

  At the reception that night, the Mountbattens stood for two hours to meet their 700 guests, including a smattering of royals, the Prime Minister, various India-related politicians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and copious servicemen. Also in attendance, as usual, was Noël Coward. Dickie and Edwina’s cocktail party put him in a pensive mood. ‘I wonder if they will come back alive’, he wrote in his diary that evening. ‘I think that if it is possible to make a go of it in the circumstances they will, but I have some forebodings.’110 He was not the only one. As Mountbatten climbed aboard his aeroplane at Northolt the next day, he said to his aide-de-camp: ‘I don’t want to go. They don’t want me out there. We’ll probably come home with bullets in our backs.’111

  A sense of foreboding was justified. The next fifteen months were to be the most dangerous, the most triumphant, the most terrifying, the most passionate, and the most controversial of the Mountbattens’ lives.

  PART II

  THE END

  CHAPTER 10

  OPERATION MADHOUSE

  A RELATIVELY SMALL GATHERING AWAITED THE DESCENT OF A plane to Palam Airfield, south-west of New Delhi, in the early afternoon of 22 March 1947. In it were representatives of the Muslim League and Congress, whose appearances a well-informed bystander would have had no trouble decoding. Liaquat Ali Khan, General Secretary of the Muslim League, wore a European suit with an astrakhan Jinnah cap. Jawaharlal Nehru, effective leader of Congress, wore a Gandhi cap and Indian sherwani suit. The 14th Punjab Regiment, the Royal Air Force and the Royal Indian Air Force had mounted guards of honour for the occasion. A collection of photographers waited in the heat, polishing the dust from their lenses.

  The York transporter plane made its lazy approach to the runway. The wheels came down, the back end sank to meet the tarmac, the nose levelled, and the aircraft juddered to a halt. As the four engines whirred down into silence, the door opened and a group of people emerged into the Delhi haze. Foremost among these was Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the new Viceroy-Designate, forty-six years old, handsome and gleaming in his full dress uniform, with rows of medals stretching from breastbone to armpit. (He had originally been advised to turn up in plain clothes. Disappointed, he referred the matter to the Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, who reassured him that the government would send a band and a delegation, and that he could therefore appear in full fig.1) Following the Viceroy-Designate was Viscountess Mountbatten, in a chocolate brown suit.

  In her husband’s words, Lady Mountbatten was ‘looking absolutely terrific, absolutely knock-down charm, marvellous figure’.2 She had recovered physically from her illness that spring, but had no desire to be in India – describing the posting as a ‘horror job’.3 There had been a hint of sullenness on the flight, when Edwina had shocked her staff by stuffing the diamond tiara her husband had specially designed and bought for her into an old shoebox and chucking it carelessly into an overhead rack.4 But her knock-down charm was back on as she lingered on the red carpet, chatting to Liaquat and Nehru.

  The Mountbattens drove to the Viceroy’s House, where they were greeted by the Royal Scots Fusiliers and Lord and Lady Wavell. A lone British officer in the crowd attempted a cheer, which petered out in the gloomy silence. ‘Is nobody happy here?’ he asked, but those nearby pretended not to have heard.5

  Lords Mountbatten and Wavell withdrew to the latter’s study for a manly word, while Edwina retired to her new apartments. She had brought a Sealyham terrier, Mizzen, with her, and asked for something to feed it. Half an hour later, two servants turned up, bearing roast chicken on a silver salver. Edwina froze at the sight. Seizing the plate over Mizzen’s barking head, she ran into the bathroom, locked herself in and ate the lot.6 This incident has usually been omitted by biographers, perhaps because to modern eyes a story about an extremely thin woman who locks herself in a bathroom to eat
looks uncomfortably like evidence of an eating disorder. It originally appeared in a Mountbatten-sanctioned version of events, interpreted as a response to rationing back in Britain. But Dickie and Edwina had just flown to India in considerable luxury, breaking their journey at the British High Commands in Malta and Suez, and it is unlikely they were starved on the way. Under the circumstances, it is hard not to see the incident as a demonstration of Edwina’s unhappiness.

  Meanwhile, her husband was being briefed by his predecessor on the situation he was about to inherit. Mountbatten’s memory of his meeting with Wavell, recounted much later in life to his pet historians Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, has the spin of an old sea-yarn to it. According to Dickie, Wavell escorted him into the study, shut the heavy teak doors behind them, and opened with: ‘I am sorry indeed that you’ve been sent out here in my place.’

  ‘Well, that’s being candid,’ Mountbatten shot back. ‘Why? Don’t you think I’m up to it?’

  ‘No,’ Wavell is supposed to have replied, ‘indeed, I’m very fond of you, but you’ve been given an impossible task. I’ve tried everything I know to solve this problem and I can see no light.’ He gloomily opened his safe, and removed from it the diamond badge of the Grand Master of the Order of the Star of India, along with a plain manila file entitled ‘Operation Madhouse’. ‘Alas,’ the departing Viceroy lamented, handing over the badge and file, ‘I can see no other way out.’7

  The words Mountbatten attributes to Wavell do not recall that officer’s usual brusque tone.8 Nor does the supposed affection of Wavell for his successor ring true. And no manila file called ‘Operation Madhouse’ has found its way into the British or Indian National Archives, though Wavell does refer to a similar plan called the ‘Breakdown Plan’ in his diary.9 ‘Wavell was frankly pretty defeatist by then,’ Attlee recalled. ‘He produced a plan worked out by his ICS advisers for the evacuation of India with everybody moving from where they were by stages right up through the Ganges valley till eventually, apparently, they would be collected at Karachi and Bombay and sail away. Well, I thought that was what Winston would certainly quite properly describe as an ignoble and sordid scuttle and I wouldn’t look at it.’10 This description is unfair, for the plan was less about panic than pragmatism. Wavell believed that the great achievement of the raj was the unification of India. He also knew that the partition of the same would be incendiary. It was, he thought, in Britain’s best interests to stand well back before lighting the touch-paper. He wanted to hand over power gradually to democratic provinces and Indian princedoms, in localized groups, while retaining British jurisdiction at the centre. When all the bits and pieces were under Indian control, the British could bow out discreetly – leaving the Indians to deal with the civil war that would almost certainly be left behind.

  The Breakdown Plan was far from perfect, and made no attempt to save the Indian people from disaster. But the point was that the disaster would not be occurring on Britain’s watch. Moreover, it was what Congress had been demanding for years: that Britain simply quit India. Yet it had not been thought acceptable in Whitehall – partly because the resulting civil war would reflect badly on Britain, but also because it would not work quickly enough. According to the Indian government’s political adviser, Sir Conrad Corfield, the American government was now leaning on London ‘to confer on India the advantages of undiluted democracy as soon as possible’.11 The Americans were ever more concerned about the outward creep of communism from Russia and China, and cannot have been reassured by the fact that, a week before Mountbatten’s viceroyalty began, British intelligence services reported the first clear case of direct financial aid passing from the Soviets to the Communist Party in India.12 That same week, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had been in Moscow: Stalin told him that Russia would not interfere in Indian independence, but noted that it was a time of grave dangers. This did not placate the British. ‘It would clearly be imprudent to take Stalin’s profession of non-interference at its face value, particularly having regard to certain recent signs to the contrary’, wrote the India Secretary, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, to Mountbatten.13 Suddenly, the focus of President Truman’s campaign against communism shifted from Greece and Turkey – which had been worrying the United States for some weeks – abruptly eastwards.

  The morning after the Mountbattens’ arrival, the Wavells departed with dignity and cordial handshakes, their plane taking off promptly at ten. Most of Delhi’s white population was dismayed to see them go. Wavell’s directness and unemotional approach had made him popular; the manner of his sacking had predisposed many to dislike his successor. Mountbatten’s press attaché, Alan Campbell-Johnson, had already discovered that the consensus in Delhi was against his master.14 The Europeans felt that he knew nothing about India and was little more than a playboy. The fact that Mountbatten spent his first day arranging press and photography for his grand swearing-in did little to contradict their view.

  On the bright Monday morning of 24 March, the dignitaries of British India congregated at the Viceroy’s House, under the massive gold dome and ornate chandeliers of the Durbar Hall. English gentlemen in tailcoats and pith helmets strode up the steps alongside turbaned Sikhs; Indian ladies in silk saris chatted to Congressmen in homespun kurtas; princes glittered in their ancient jewels. The crowd hushed as a fanfare of trumpets heralded Dickie and Edwina’s appearance through the back doors: he a handsome prince in shining regalia with a sword clasped by his side, she a beautiful princess in a flowing gown of ivory brocade, with that carelessly treated diamond tiara flashing brilliant sparkles of light back at the photographers.

  The Mountbattens marched sedately and in perfect synchrony up the aisle, an ethereal and slender pair of white-clad and gold-strewn presences, shimmering in the crowded hall. They came to a halt in front of two enormous thrones under a towering scarlet-draped canopy, and turned towards each other, then around to face their audience and a salvo of exploding flashbulbs.15 Surrounded as he was by all these new and exciting outfits, the Viceroy puffed up with delight. ‘What a ceremony!’ Mountbatten remembered later in life. ‘I put on everything. My white full dress uniform. Orders, decorations, medals, the whole lot … Obviously, I wore the Garter. Then I wore the Star of India, I was the Grand Master of the Order, I wore the Star of the Indian Empire, and then I wore the Victorian Order and that made the four; that’s all you’re allowed to wear. And I wore the aiguillettes as personal ADC to the King Emperor.’16

  It is easy to laugh at Mountbatten’s obsession with decorating himself, and with his fussing over protocol. But these trivialities were prerequisites for the job. A large portion of the Viceroy’s responsibilities had to do with awarding honours, remembering faces, seating people appropriately at parties, writing correct letters and invitations, remembering how to address the divorced wife of the second son of an earl after she had remarried a sea captain, and so on. In all of these matters, Mountbatten’s skills were peerless. But the key to perfect protocol is knowing when to break it, and Mountbatten had reserved a surprise for his audience. ‘This is not a normal viceroyalty on which I am embarking,’ he admitted, in a forthright address which newspapers back in London reported with some shock. ‘Every one of us must do what he can to avoid any word or action which might lead to further bitterness or add to the toll of innocent victims,’ he said. ‘I am under no illusion about the difficulty of my task. I shall need the greatest good will of the greatest possible number and I am asking India today for that good will.’17 This was the sound of the British Empire owning up to its limitations, and the old guard of the raj might have been outraged. Fortunately, the acoustics in the hall were so bad that few could hear. Nevertheless, both Nehru and Liaquat were observed to be paying very close attention and, during the last sentence, even the poised Lady Mountbatten could be seen to turn her head slightly to look at her husband.18 Mountbatten had established his style with immediate effect. The new regime was to be frank, inclusive and open-minded. It was no
w full steam ahead to the transfer of power, and the old guard could come on board or stay on shore as they pleased.

  During the week that followed, Mountbatten’s vision of sophisticated imperial elegance rapidly deteriorated. His wife was miserable; the parade of Indian leaders through his study conjured up a portent of insoluble quarrels; and, above all, the full horror of India’s communal violence would set in. Tension in the Punjab had been tightening for years, owing to the visible economic difference between wealthy caste-Hindus and Sikhs, and relatively impoverished, labouring Muslims. That March, it had finally snapped. The worst riots in a century had left thousands dead, mostly Sikhs massacred by Muslims in Rawalpindi and Multan.19 On the very day after Mountbatten arrived, rioting broke out in Delhi itself. Chandni Chowk is the main street of Old Delhi, running from the Lahore Gate to the Red Fort. Its wide avenue was lined with stalls selling the requisites of Delhi life: fine woven dupattas, sweet lassi, festive tinsel. Amid the labyrinth of alleyways and bazaars running off the Chowk are diverse shrines, including one of the Sikhs’ most important temples, the Sisganj Gurdwara, and India’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid. The district was a tinderbox for trouble, loaded that day by a Muslim meeting at the mosque in support of Pakistan, and ignited, according to eyewitnesses, by the ‘recklessly provocative behaviour’ of Sikh protesters. The Sikhs arrived at the busy marketplace in two lorries and assorted jeeps, and ‘careered about’, brandishing swords. (The Chief Commissioner of Delhi noted rather flippantly that this had the effect of ‘accidentally injuring some Muslims’.20) At least two people were killed and six seriously injured.21 It was not much of a welcome party for the new Viceroy.