‘Dickie and I have of course found the Jinnahs the most difficult,’ Edwina admitted to Isobel Cripps. They were personally charming, she said, and remarkably intelligent: ‘I cannot help but liking [sic] them both very much indeed.’ But she and Dickie despaired of getting them to compromise. ‘Yet one sympathises so much with their fears and apprehensions and wants to do everything one can to give the necessary safeguards and as fair a deal as is humanly possible.’53 Edwina had Fatima to tea that week, and struck up a conversation about how encouraging it had been to see Muslim and Hindu students integrating happily at Lady Irwin College. ‘Don’t be misled by the apparent contentment of the Muslim girls there,’ Fatima told her, bleakly; ‘we haven’t been able to start our propaganda in that college yet.’54
It is impossible to dismiss the notion that Fatima Jinnah’s coolness to Edwina Mountbatten may have been informed by the latter’s close and obvious friendships with Gandhi and Nehru. Previous vicereines had not gone visiting Gandhi’s hut in the sweeper colony; they had certainly not gone alone to dine with the handsome widower Nehru. Edwina did both, and regularly. Fatima Jinnah was a perceptive woman, well-connected in political circles, and can hardly have been unaware of Edwina’s friendship with her brother’s rival. Whether or not she believed the more scandalous gossip, it is only logical that the connection with Jawahar would have raised suspicions that Edwina had a leaning towards Congress. Any further suspicion that Mountbatten might be influenced by his wife would have been well founded. Dickie’s interest in Asian politics had, by his own admission, followed Edwina’s.
As April began, the situation in the country at large was getting worse, and little was being done about it. On 6 April, it was reported that riots had left 350 dead and 4000 homeless in the town of Gurgaon, around 20 miles from Delhi on the road to Jaipur; from Noakhali came reports of people being roasted alive.55 Gandhi went on a twenty-four-hour fast ‘to vindicate swaraj through Hindu–Muslim unity, hand spinning, and the like.’56 It did not achieve much, but it was more than the Viceroy could do. Just four days later, on 11 April, five major cities – Calcutta, Delhi, Amritsar, Agra and Peshawar – were placed under curfew following riots. In Calcutta, a food shortage was beginning to hit. The market and most of the shops were closed. Great heaps of rubbish had been piling up in the streets for a fortnight, for the Untouchable sweepers were too scared to perform their normal function.57 The simultaneous collapse of public hygiene and public nutrition had predictable consequences in the form of a cholera epidemic. Three hundred and fifty people had been admitted to hospital already, the numbers increasing exponentially.
On 15 April, something hopeful happened at last, when Gandhi and Jinnah issued a joint proclamation against violence. It was not a sign of any softening in their personal relationship. The two men had not seen each other for two and a half years, and did not even meet to discuss their joint declaration. Mountbatten had asked Jinnah to appeal for a truce in the communal disturbances in conjunction with Congress.58 Jinnah had agreed, but only on the grounds that the ‘unknown nobody’ of a Congress President, J.B. Kripalani, should not be invited to sign.59 Gandhi agreed to sign it in Kripalani’s place, telling Mountbatten that it was a great political step and that he was pleased to have given him the idea in the first place. ‘Although I have absolutely no recollection of Mr Gandhi making any such suggestion,’ Mountbatten noted, ‘I felt it would be politic not to point this out. For although I believed it to have been my own idea I am only too delighted that he should take the credit.’ He was not, however, convinced by Gandhi’s motives. At the same meeting, Gandhi asked Mountbatten to hand over full control of unpartitioned India to the interim government. Mountbatten answered that he could not, for it would mean handing over the reins to Congress and ignoring the Muslim League, which would precipitate civil war. Gandhi replied with a smile that, by signing the declaration, Jinnah had forsworn violence in perpetuity: he could not start a civil war now, even if he wanted to. Mountbatten was deeply shocked. It seemed to him that Gandhi was proposing to take advantage of Jinnah’s good intentions to crush Muslim dissent. ‘I find it hard to believe that I correctly understood Mr Gandhi’, he wrote.60
Whatever its motives, the joint declaration was a significant diplomatic achievement. But it proved only that Jinnah had as little control over Muslim India as Gandhi had over the Hindus. Communal violence continued across the entire subcontinent, increasing in Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Peshawar and Cawnpore. Within days of the proclamation, newspapers were reporting that the North-West Frontier Province had descended into chaos, with widespread arson attacks and brutal violence against the Hindu minority. The situation became so awful that Mountbatten was obliged to take action. He did so, as usual, by calling a meeting in Delhi. Mountbatten, Nehru and Sir Olaf Caroe, Governor of the North-West Frontier Province, congregated at the Viceroy’s House on 18 April. Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, Prime Minister of the North-West Frontier Province, was summoned away from his erupting province and flown by RAF special aircraft from Peshawar to join in. It was agreed that all non-violent political prisoners in NWFP jails would be released, which seemed like a step forward; but most of the 5000 prisoners refused to leave their prisons.61
The North-West Frontier was far from the only problem on the Viceroy’s plate. Mountbatten went straight from that meeting into another with the Sikh leaders Tara, Kartar and Baldev Singh, who demanded partition of the Punjab, and hinted that they aimed at an independent state or province of their own. Khalistan, or ‘Sikhistan’ as it was nicknamed, was to include Simla and perhaps even Lahore.62 ‘Any hopes that I still entertained of being able to avoid the partition of the Punjab if Pakistan is forced on us were shattered at this meeting,’ Mountbatten reported to London; ‘all three Sikhs made it quite clear that they would fight to the last man if put under Muslim domination.’63
On 24 April, Mountbatten had another meeting with Patel. It was to prove one of his trickiest. ‘Since you have come out here,’ Patel accused him, ‘things have got much worse. There is a civil war on and you are doing nothing to stop it. You won’t govern yourself and you won’t let the Central Government govern. You cannot escape responsibility for this bloodshed.’64 Patel demanded that he turn over full authority to the government to allow it to fight what he considered to be the insurgents: Muslim League armies in the Punjab, the North-West Frontier and Assam.
‘Like you and Stafford, both Dickie and I like Vallabhai [sic] Patel very much indeed’, wrote Edwina to Isobel Cripps, ‘although we quite realise the dominant attitude he adopts and his rather dictatorial manner. He and Dickie, however, are getting on very well indeed and when he behaves like a bit of a gangster, Dickie, as you well [sic] imagine, does not lag behind!’65 Patel had described one of Mountbatten’s actions in a written minute as ‘pointless and inappropriate’, sparking a massive argument between the two men. Mountbatten demanded that he tear the minute up and withdraw it; Patel refused, and Mountbatten said he would proceed directly to Nehru, resign the viceroyalty, and fly home immediately unless Patel left the government instead. ‘He questioned whether I would throw up the viceroyalty after only a month in the job,’ he remembered. ‘I replied that he evidently did not know me. I could be tougher than him and unless he withdrew his minute then and there I would send for his Prime Minister and announce my resignation to him.’ To Mountbatten’s immense satisfaction, Patel gave in.66
By the end of April, Mountbatten’s situation seemed bleak. His relationships with Gandhi, Jinnah and Patel were all in troublesome states; the princes presented a range of awkward grievances that he had not yet even begun to address; the Sikhs were threatening civil war; and violence continued to flare up across the country. A malaise began to spread among the Viceroy’s staff. Alan Campbell-Johnson confided his misgivings to the Chief of Staff, Lord Ismay. Ismay was a good deal older than Campbell-Johnson, and had spent much more time in sticky diplomatic corners. He shrugged off Campbell-Johnson’s concerns, saying, ‘I like
working for lucky men.’67 Campbell-Johnson cheered up immediately. Mountbatten was nothing if not lucky.
That luck came to his aid almost immediately. On 28 April, Dickie and Edwina flew to Peshawar, an ancient Pathan town near the border with Afghanistan in the North-West Frontier Province. Like many frontiers, the north-west was a wild and tribal place. Muslim Leaguers wore green; Congress-aligned unionists (also mostly Muslim) wore red. Friction between the two was common, and often violent. This was the territory of the Pir of Manki Sharif, a fearsome Islamic fundamentalist nicknamed the ‘Manki Mullah’. Still only in his mid-twenties, the Manki Mullah excited the interest of the press with his burning eyes and flowing black beard, preached an extreme interpretation of sharia law, and commanded a following of some 200,000 devotees.68 Only a month before, on 28 March, the Manki Mullah had been captured in the Muslim League office in Peshawar. Since then he had languished in prison, to the enormous benefit of his reputation; and his Greenshirts, enraged, had been rioting. The Redshirts had rioted back, and the city had been placed under stringent curfews while the police struggled to cope.
Fearing the worst, Caroe and Jabbar Khan had persuaded the Redshirts not to demonstrate during Mountbatten’s visit, and had effectively cordoned off the centre of Peshawar. As a result, on the morning of the Viceroy’s arrival, at least 50,000 Greenshirts assembled on the outskirts of the town at Cunningham Park, shouting political slogans and stamping their feet.69
The scene was too great a temptation for Mountbatten’s brazen self-confidence. He insisted on driving right to the centre of Cunningham Park, where he seized Edwina’s hand and climbed gamely to the top of an embankment. The sight of an enormous sea of coloured turbans and green flags gave the Mountbattens temporary pause. For the first time, they were facing a hostile crowd. It was a very large one, and potentially deadly – Caroe later estimated that there would have been between 20,000 and 40,000 rifles in the crowd, many of which were being jabbed threateningly into the air.70
Edwina quickly came to her senses, and simply smiled and waved. Dickie did likewise and, to the great surprise of everyone except himself, did not get shot. Instead, the crowd gave him a ten-minute ovation, and some even chorused a previously unimaginable phrase: ‘Viceroy zindabad!’ (‘Long live the Viceroy!’).71 In all probability, the warmth of the reception had little to do with Dickie’s charm, and much more to do with the fact that he had chosen that day to wear a military uniform of the same Islamic green hue as the flags, banners and shirts of the Muslim League that fluttered in the breeze for miles across the park.72 His decision may have been sartorial rather than political, but the effect was not lessened. Sometimes, Lord Mountbatten’s love of dressing up paid off.
CHAPTER 11
A BARREL OF GUNPOWDER
WHEN THE MOUNTBATTENS WENT ON FROM THEIR JOYFUL reception at Peshawar up to the tribal territories, it was possible to believe that their attempts to woo the Muslims of India were going well. The day after Peshawar, they flew to the Khyber Pass, that famous corridor between the dangerous peaks of the Hindu Kush through which Alexander, Timur and Babur had marched on India, now guarded by Muslim Afridi tribesmen who were generally reckoned to be among the ablest fighting forces in the world. Seated on fine carpets in the dappled shade of tamarisk trees, the elders greeted Mountbatten in Pashtun and invited him to join their loya jirga, or tribal council. They told him that, when the British left, they wanted control of the Khyber Pass. He replied that it would be up to the tribes to negotiate with the new authorities, which seemed to satisfy them, though they did mention that they might prefer to negotiate with Afghanistan than with a Congress-run India.
The elders proceeded to hold forth against Nehru. Mountbatten avoided responding and instead told a nice story about his days in the Navy and a brave ship called HMS Afridi that had fought valiantly in the North Sea. This went down well, and the Afridis presented him with a rifle. Edwina got a pair of slippers. According to The Times, ‘The Jirga dispersed in high good humour.’1
Back in Delhi, things did not seem so agreeable after Mountbatten returned to begin what his political adviser, Sir Conrad Corfield, referred to as his ‘Dutch auction’ of British India.2 Mountbatten asked Sir Frederick Burrows, Governor of Bengal, whether he still felt that he was sitting on a barrel of gunpowder. ‘Good Lord no,’ replied Burrows, ‘we got off that a long time ago and are now sitting on a complete magazine which is going to blow up at any time.’3 As if to prove the point, Jinnah made a statement on 30 April demanding that Pakistan consist of all the Muslim-majority provinces: Sind, the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan in the west, and Bengal and Assam in the east. Such a Pakistan would certainly have included Calcutta, for though that city’s population was mainly Hindu it was crucial to the economy of the surrounding Muslim-majority lands of east Bengal. It could have included the historically Muslim cultural and business centres of Delhi, Lucknow, Aligarh, Agra and Cawnpore.4 Anything less, particularly any subpartition of Bengal or the Punjab, would result in a ‘truncated or mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan’, Jinnah told the press.5 Visitors to Jinnah’s elegant Delhi villa had their attention drawn to a silver map of India he had put up on his mantelpiece, with his claims for Pakistan picked out in vivid green.6 But Bengal and the Punjab were hotly disputed. Each had large areas of non-Muslim-majority populations, and, owing to centuries of intermingling, more areas yet where there was no clear majority at all.
The obvious answer was to divide the provinces up. But partitioning Bengal and the Punjab was not an option that readily appealed to anyone. Bengal had been split in two, most contentiously, by the Viceroy Lord Curzon back in 1905, and that had gone so badly that the King had revoked it at the Delhi Durbar in 1911. When Mountbatten raised the possibility of partitioning the provinces with Jinnah, the latter blanched, and argued that those provinces had strong internal identities: that Hindus identified themselves more strongly as Bengalis or Punjabis than as Hindus or Congress supporters, and that the integrity of their provinces ought be preserved above all. But Mountbatten pointed out that such arguments would also apply to India as a whole, and if they were accepted there could be no Pakistan. ‘I am afraid I drove the old gentleman quite mad,’ reported Mountbatten jovially, ‘because whichever way his argument went I always pursued it to a stage beyond which he did not wish it to go.’7
While her husband returned to Delhi, Lady Mountbatten extended her tour for two days. At the suggestion of Vallabhbhai Patel, she had decided to travel around the hostile region on her own.8 On 30 April she was in Rawalpindi, and from there she visited the Wah Relief Camp for victims of recent rioting. Photographs in the press showed her crouching down to talk face to face with refugee women, establishing an informality that was a departure from the style of previous vicereines.9 Even to Edwina, who had served in London during the war, the scene at Wah was shocking – ‘like the Blitz at its worst’, she wrote.10 The wards were filled with dust and bereft of drinking water. Very few of the beds had sheets. Visitors and children were allowed in and out of the infectious diseases wards freely: as a result, measles had spread everywhere, including the maternity ward, and both dysentery and pneumonia were rife. Most upsetting of all, though, were the injuries which had been inflicted by human hands. People had been carried in from the villages with horrific burns. ‘They seem to be very fond of tying whole families together, pouring oil on them and then lighting them as a single torch,’ Lord Mountbatten remarked.11 Among the survivors were young children whose hands had been hacked off.12
From Wah, Edwina flew to the towns of Dera Ismael Khan and Tank, where she spent five hours walking in the burning heat among heaps of rubble left by communal riots. She asked people directly what they needed, and when the answer came – clothing – she took the matter to local officials, and was able to promise that some would be provided within a few days. The next day, she flew to Amritsar to visit more areas devastated by rioting. In the afternoon, Jawahar’s cousin, Rameshwari N
ehru, showed her around similar locations in Lahore.13 On 2 May she was supposed to fly to Multan for more of the same, but a dust storm prevented the aircraft from landing. With the greatest difficulty, her aides persuaded her that she would have to return to Delhi.14 She had nonetheless visited nine hospitals, seven refugee centres, and four riot areas. She had been seen to speak to Hindu, Sikh and Muslim victims alike.
This first tour made a great impact on Edwina herself as well as on the Indian public – and on Jawaharlal Nehru who, as a result of her efforts, began to view her with an ‘undying admiration’, according to his friend Marie Seton.15 After it, she made a serious effort to involve herself in improving the public health situation. She corresponded with high officials who, by etiquette if not by inclination, were unable to ignore her, and forwarded notes to Dickie with advice for the setting up of health clinics in refugee camps. It was obvious from the tone of her letters that she was not content to observe events, but meant to direct them. She questioned the government’s policy on refugees, and recommended a range of practical interventions. She suggested setting up a full-time clinic in each refugee centre. Within two weeks, it was done.16
Indian Summer Page 21