Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  Mountbatten did not respond to this threat, though Sain remembered that his face changed colour; but apparently he took it seriously. Late that night, Radcliffe received a visitation in the suave form of V.P. Menon, who invited him to lunch with Mountbatten and Lord Ismay the next day. Christopher Beaumont, secretary to the Boundary Commission, was unusually excluded from the invitation. Beaumont later testified that Radcliffe returned from that lunch ‘agitated’, would not disclose what was said, and immediately redrew the line of partition to award Ferozepur to India. Both Beaumont and one of Mountbatten’s secretaries thought that the Viceroy was under pressure from Nehru as well as from Bikaner to make Radcliffe change the line. Evan Jenkins received a telegram bearing the two words: ‘eliminate salient’.22

  Throughout the rest of his life, Mountbatten kept up the position that he had never interfered with Radcliffe. This was a lie, as he himself allowed in at least one private letter. Mountbatten wrote to Ismay in April 1948, with the instruction that he should burn the letter. It survived, and provides a potentially less dishonest Mountbatten side of the story. Radcliffe, he says, came to him with the Ferozepur problem, and Mountbatten hinted that it would be fine to ‘make any adjustments necessary’ – with the caveat that, owing to the difficulty presented by the Sikh population in the Punjab, he would prefer any concession to Pakistan to be made in Bengal.23

  Mountbatten’s account to Ismay still does not tie up entirely with Beaumont’s testimony, which attributes the raising of the subject very clearly to Mountbatten rather than to Radcliffe. There is no reason to assume he was telling the whole truth to Ismay. But, even if he was, the other side of the bargain presented to Radcliffe was not fulfilled: there was no matching concession to Pakistan in Bengal. Mountbatten’s official biographer has suggested that the award of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bengal to Pakistan compensated for Ferozepur.24 But the award of Chittagong was supposed to make up for Pakistan’s loss of a far greater prize: Calcutta.

  Back in March, when Mountbatten’s principal secretary had expressed the opinion that ‘Pakistan would definitely be unworkable without Calcutta’, Mountbatten had proposed that Chittagong might do as a port instead.25 But Chittagong was far smaller than Calcutta, nowhere near as developed, and much less convenient for overland transport. Muslim-majority East Bengal was mainly agricultural, with a strong jute farming industry. But all the actual manufacturing and heavy industry was based in Hindu-majority West Bengal. The Governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, had predicted that an independent East Bengal without Calcutta would become a ‘rural slum’. It was felt among Muslims that partition of Bengal was a way of sabotaging East Pakistan. Mountbatten agreed. During the meeting, he made it clear several times that the whole point of the current policy was to allow Pakistan ‘to fail on its demerits’. If the plan presented to Jinnah was awful enough, the British thought, he could be made to reconsider the whole idea of Pakistan.26 They were wrong; Jinnah would surprise them by accepting Pakistan anyway.

  On 26 April, Mountbatten asked Jinnah how he would feel if Bengal, as a whole, became independent rather than joining Pakistan. Jinnah replied unhesitatingly: ‘I should be delighted. What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta; they had much better remain united and independent; I am sure that they would remain on friendly terms with us.’27 Congress, on the other hand, was under no circumstance prepared to countenance a fully independent Bengal, and the Muslim League in East Bengal was under no circumstance prepared to join India. What was created, then, in East Bengal, soon to be East Pakistan and afterwards Bangladesh, was a nation deliberately designed to be incapable of supporting itself. At least one half of Pakistan was set up to fail.

  Even the poor sop of Chittagong for Calcutta threw Congress into a frenzy. This was predicated on the grounds that the Chittagong Hills had a non-Muslim majority: most of the inhabitants were Buddhist or Animist. On 13 August, two days before the transfer of power, Patel wrote to Mountbatten deploring the probable award of the Chittagong tracts to Pakistan as ‘manifestly unjust’.28 The letter insinuated that not only might the people of Bengal resist the award of Chittagong to Pakistan by force, but that they would be justified in doing so; and that the Indian government would have to support them, both morally and militarily.

  Mountbatten was furious with Patel: ‘The one man I had regarded as a real statesman with both feet firmly on the ground, and a man of honour whose word was his bond, had turned out to be as hysterical as the rest.’29 The plain fact was that, even with Chittagong taken into account, India had done much better out of the partition of Bengal than had Pakistan. East Pakistan was also to be deprived on its north side of the high ground claimed by the Muslim League, which would have included the hill station of Darjeeling. There were sound arguments of geography, trade and communications for including most of the north districts between East Bengal and the borders of Bhutan and Nepal in Pakistan. These had been clear during the earlier partition of Bengal in 1905, when they had been included in the east. But for the partition of 1947 such concerns as geography, trade and communications had to be subordinated beneath religious identity, and the religious identity of the northern part of East Bengal was, in the main, non-Muslim. It went to India, creating a tight corridor across the Himalayas between West Bengal and Assam, around the back of East Pakistan.

  There was some debate among Mountbatten’s staff over when Radcliffe’s award should be published. Some suggested the earliest possible point, because it would be useful to the police and army. Others thought that, since it was bound to cause trouble, it was best left until 14 August. Mountbatten himself, after initially asking Radcliffe to publish the award on 10 August, ultimately suggested something even more radical than leaving it till the last minute – which was to make the announcement after independence.30 This was technically impossible, for states could not exist without borders.31 But Mountbatten argued that independence day itself should not be marred by the inevitable trouble that would follow the award’s publication.32

  Mountbatten saw Radcliffe on 9 August and asked him to postpone the award.33 Radcliffe refused point blank. He had finished the partitions of Bengal and the Punjab, and had almost finished partitioning Sylhet in Assam; any delay would be politically motivated. After a great deal of viceregal persuasion, he finally conceded that all three awards could be delivered simultaneously on 13 August. Handily, this would coincide with Mountbatten getting on a plane to Karachi. He would not be back in Delhi until the evening of 14 August, and the printing presses would be closed for the national Independence Day celebrations on 15 August. The awards arrived, and were put in a safe, where they would stay, apparently unperused, until 16 August.

  Mountbatten’s personal report to London of 16 August deliberately misrepresented these dealings. ‘It was on Tuesday, 12th August, that I was finally informed by Radcliffe that his awards would be ready by noon the following day, just too late for me to see before leaving for Karachi,’ he averred on the official record. Another line in the same report got closer to the truth: ‘It had been obvious all along that, the later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British.’34

  To Mountbatten’s expressed relief, his two most troublesome foes – Gandhi and Jinnah – were soon to be out of his life. On 9 August, Gandhi arrived in Calcutta. He moved into the mansion of a Muslim widow in the suburb of Belliaghatta with H.S. Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Prime Minister of Bengal, in an attempt to restore communal harmony. On the night of 13 August, a crowd of a thousand Hindu youths threw stones at the house, smashed windows and shouted at Gandhi to move to Park Circus, a Muslim area where Hindu houses lay vacant and ruined.35 ‘Gandhi has announced his decision to spend the rest of his life in Pakistan looking after the minorities,’ Mountbatten reported to London. ‘This will infuriate Jinnah, but will be a great relief to Congress for, as I have said before, his influence is largely negative or even destructive.’36 Verdicts outside the Viceroy’s House were similarly bleak.
‘Mr Gandhi today is a very disappointed man indeed,’ noted the Times of India. ‘He has lived to see his followers transgress his dearest doctrines; his countrymen have indulged in a bloody and inhuman fratricidal war; non-violence, khadi and many another of his principles have been swept away by the swift current of politics. Disillusioned and disappointed, he is today perhaps the only steadfast exponent of what is understood as Gandhism.’37

  Jinnah’s parting was more cheerful. On 7 August, he had left Delhi for Karachi, flying in the Viceroy’s silver Dakota with Fatima. He arrived at Mauripur airport, and descended wearing a sherwani and an astrakhan cap. Cheering crowds broke through the police cordon to greet him, and pursued him all the way to his new residence, Government House.38 Four days later, he was formally elected President of the constituent assembly, and delivered an extraordinary speech – so extraordinary, in fact, that it begs the question of what his intentions had ever been in proposing the idea of Pakistan. Some historians have put forward the notion that he may have intended it all along as a bargaining chip; and that, when Mountbatten advanced the date of the transfer of power and made it clear that the British were leaving, the rug was pulled from under his feet.39

  Jinnah’s speech on 11 August made it very clear that he intended Pakistan to be a secular state. ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State,’ he declared, guaranteeing equality in Pakistan for all faiths and communities. He went further still: ‘In course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community – because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on – will vanish,’ he said. ‘Indeed, if you ask me, this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain freedom and independence, and but for this we would have been free peoples long, long ago.’40 These were peculiar words from the man who had long hindered independence precisely by reinforcing the division between Hindu and Muslim, and add weight to the theory that Jinnah may have been less serious about Pakistan as a Muslim homeland than as a playing piece. Perhaps, all along, he had pursued not an Islamic state, but rather a non-Hindu-majority state. There was no time to worry about it. On 13 August, an exhausted Radcliffe delivered his award; the last few princely states were still squabbling over better deals; Gandhi, in Calcutta, tried desperately to hold Hindus and Muslims together; and Nehru, in Delhi, began to read reports of new outbreaks of disorder in the Punjab with growing concern. One hundred and fifty people, mostly Sikhs, had been murdered there in the previous twenty-four hours.41

  That afternoon, the Mountbattens flew to Karachi for the first of their independence days. In the evening, the Jinnahs threw a party at Government House. There was a state banquet, at which Fatima Jinnah and the Begum Liaquat Ali Khan teased Mountbatten about the midnight plans for Delhi’s independence ceremonies, and remarked how shocking it was that a government should be in thrall to the pronouncements of astrologers. ‘I refrained from retorting that the whole Karachi programme had had to change because Jinnah had forgotten that it was Ramazan,’ Mountbatten wrote sniffily, ‘and had had to change the lunch party he had himself suggested to a dinner party.’42

  On the verandah, the band played an eclectic selection of tunes – from ‘Finlandia’ to ‘A Whistler and His Dog’ – while the guests sipped soft drinks and ate ice cream and cakes. Jinnah, though elegant as ever, was showing the strain of the previous few weeks. The journalist Mildred Talbot, who was present, reported that his ‘appearance so shocked me that little else registered on my mind during the evening. I hadn’t thought it possible but he was even more slender and a worse colour than when we had seen him in Delhi last November. He looked like a walking, talking corpse. The nightmare I had that night was directly attributable to that vivid impression.’43 Despite his appearance, Jinnah was at his warmest that night. He and Mountbatten had their friendliest ever conversation, with Jinnah thanking Mountbatten for the creation of Pakistan and for staying on in India, and imploring him to defend Pakistan’s interests, too.44

  The next morning, the Mountbattens and the Jinnahs drove to Assembly Hall in a superannuated Rolls Royce that had been borrowed from a prince. Jinnah wore a silk sherwani, while both Mountbattens were in their trademark dazzling white. ‘Mountbatten was looking very dashing,’ remembered one British soldier who was on duty during the parade, ‘with an all-over, almost Chorus Girl tan.’45 All four waved and smiled as they drove through Karachi to the piping of the Royal Highlanders. Mountbatten doffed his cap as they passed the bronze statue of Mohandas Gandhi that stood between the secretariat and the chief court, a gift from Karachi’s Hindu merchants, who had threatened civil war within twenty-four hours if it were removed. Earlier that day, someone had put an Muslim fez on it: this had tactfully disappeared by the time the parade passed. When Mountbatten uncovered, Jinnah, too, raised his hand in an acknowledgement of his great rival.46

  At the assembly hall, the four descended from their car, which was by then so overheated that it burst into flames.47 Inside the hall, Mountbatten noticed that there was only one special chair set up. He was still busy thinking that Jinnah ought to have a special chair, too, when Jinnah sat himself down on the throne and indicated that Mountbatten should take one of the humbler seats.48 Both men gave gracious speeches, complimenting each other on a carefully chosen list of virtues. Edwina pressed Fatima Jinnah’s hand with affection as Jinnah gave his magisterial address.49 ‘History seems sometimes to move with the infinite slowness of a glacier and sometimes to rush forward in a torrent,’ said Mountbatten when it was his turn to speak. ‘Just now, in this part of the world our united efforts have melted the ice and moved some impediments in the stream, and we are carried onwards in the full flood. There is no time to look back. There is time only to look forward.’50 Jinnah read out the goodwill messages Pakistan had so far received. The very first was from one of the parties with the greatest interest in Pakistan’s future, President Harry S. Truman of the United States of America. It was followed by similar good wishes from Egypt, France, Syria and Nepal.51 The band played ‘God Save the King’ before the meeting broke up. Mildred Talbot cast some doubt on the supposed new spirit of camaraderie between Mountbatten and Jinnah. ‘If it were in truth a “parting between friends” as they both declared,’ she wrote, ‘it was the coldest friendship I have ever seen.’52

  After the ceremony, the Mountbattens and the Jinnahs emerged into the sunlight for a state parade. The atmosphere was reported as being one of ‘curious apathy’ – whether this represented a general antipathy towards Pakistan, or just the fact that most of Karachi’s population was Hindu, was not certain.53 Mountbatten had been warned the day before by the Criminal Investigation Department of a plot to throw bombs at Jinnah during the procession. He had tried to persuade Jinnah to cancel it, ‘but he was in his strongest “no” mood’.54 Instead, Jinnah advised Mountbatten not to join him in the open car; but the Viceroy would not baulk before Jinnah, and, in any case, he thought his presence might guard against any attempt by Hindus or Sikhs. ‘I knew that no one in that crowd would want to risk shooting me!’55 The parade went on. ‘I won’t pretend I wasn’t scared,’ Mountbatten later admitted. ‘I was, and did my best not to show it, but the new Governor-General of Pakistan did not seem in the least bit frightened. I was deeply impressed by his calm courage and high sense of duty.’ The car trundled along, Mountbatten unable to relax until the view of Government House drew close and they arrived back through the gates. ‘Never had my feelings been warmer to the man with whom I shared this traumatic experience’, he wrote.

  Jinnah flashed Mountbatten a grin, leaned forward to touch him on the knee and said, ‘Thank God I’ve brought you back alive.’ Mountbatten’s tension got the better of his etiquette. ‘You brought me back alive?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s I who brought you back alive.’56 But the imp
ortant thing, as he soon afterwards admitted, was that they had both come back alive – and that there was a new cordiality in the air between the Governors General of India and Pakistan. Before the Mountbattens climbed on to their aeroplane at midday, Fatima Jinnah bid them farewell. To Edwina’s surprise, she kissed her goodbye affectionately on both cheeks.57 But the cheerful mood sobered as the Viceroy’s plane flew over the Punjab boundaries on its way back to Delhi, the large fires of villages aflame clearly visible from the air.58 In the villages of the Punjab, the beginnings of the partition disaster were already underway.

  ‘My warmest thanks to you on this day which sees the successful achievement of a task of an unexampled difficulty’, Attlee cabled to Mountbatten that night – adding a special thanks to Edwina. Mountbatten replied delightedly that it was ‘the most encouraging telegram I have ever received’.59 He communicated Attlee’s thanks to Edwina in a heartfelt letter, perhaps intending to rebuild the relationship after the storms of the previous weeks: ‘surely no husband in history has had the proud privilege of transmitting a telegram of appreciation from the Prime Minister to his wife’, he wrote. ‘I’m proud to be that exception.’ He concluded with an appreciation of his own: ‘Thank you, my pet, with all my heart.’60

  In Delhi, the bunting was going up, and a joyful atmosphere prevailed. On every street, workmen climbed scaffolding to repaint walls and hang banners, wiring thousands of orange, white and green lightbulbs around trees and fences, swagging them across the roads. In the great shopping arcades of Connaught Circus, the national flag hung in every window. Drapers filled their windows with bales of silk in the national colours; restaurants offered special independence menus; cinemas proclaimed free shows of Indian movies for students and children. Gentlemen’s outfitters sold out of sherwanis: according to the Times of India, ‘An Indian dressed in a western suit is already beginning to feel self-conscious.’