Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  Kashmir was becoming another chapter in the centuries-long story of conflict between Sikhs and Pathans for control of the North-West Frontier. As a result, Nehru was being pushed into an ever more militant position by his cabinet’s fears that a soft response to Muslim incursions in Kashmir would trigger more communal riots across India. Mountbatten, though he did advise military operations, became increasingly desperate to rein Nehru in. At a defence committee meeting on 4 November, Mountbatten advised strongly against sending India’s Sikh troops into Muslim areas of Mirpur and Poonch, even for ‘liberation purposes’. He pointed out that, in such areas, it would be impossible to distinguish between hostile persons and friends, and that it was likely that the army would make mistakes and aggravate the situation. Instead, the Indian government should find a way of stopping the fighting through communication with the Pakistani government.64

  But Mountbatten would not be around to supervise the Indian Army at this crucial point, for he had already accepted an invitation to fly back to Britain with Edwina for his nephew’s royal wedding. He had originally hoped to have Nehru come with them, though that was untenable now; Patel, on the other hand, had been conspicuously encouraging of the Governor General’s little break away from India.65 Edwina was appalled that they might leave India in a state of acute crisis. She hated the thought of being dragged away from her relief work and, as she confided to Alan Campbell-Johnson, was ‘concerned about the construction that might be put on their departure to London’. She suggested cancelling the trip, but Campbell-Johnson talked her out of it on the grounds that to do so would be to acknowledge that there was a problem.66

  For some weeks, Edwina had been feeling that Dickie did not live up to the obsessive pace she set. She had been in Amritsar for a conference with the refugee commissioner and the military when news came through that her elder daughter, Patricia, had given birth to a baby boy. ‘I gathered that I was a Grandmama and that you were both flourishing and that Daddy was at the Chief’s House playing roulette!’ she wrote to her. ‘Very 1947!! Women work and men play!’67 The joke was not light-hearted. Edwina was now working an average of eighteen hours a day. Dickie still seemed to be able to fit in riding, exercise, genealogy and regular massages. Tension between the two of them ran high, and the fights grew more serious. On 10 November, they got back on their plane for the two-day journey to London, Edwina still full of misgivings.

  With the Mountbattens out of the way, Nehru’s first action was to take his long-threatened trip to Kashmir. On 12 November, he addressed a meeting at Srinagar: ‘I pledge before you on behalf of myself and the people of India that we – India and Kashmir – shall ever remain together.’68 He wrote at length to Attlee of hospitals, convents and libraries ransacked. ‘I saw large numbers of Muslim women with their ears torn, because their earrings had been pulled out,’ he stated, implying that the raiders were responsible. ‘The population of Kashmir Valley, which is chiefly Muslim, complain bitterly of this outrageous behaviour and begged us to continue to protect them.’69

  The Mountbattens arrived back in London that same day, and embarked upon a flurry of social and political events. In private Edwina was unable to disguise how furious she was with her husband, and they had a series of rows. She insisted on seeing her former lover, Malcolm Sargent, on one of the two nights they would have had together at Broadlands.70 Mountbatten went to see Churchill, and had a fight with him, too. Churchill patted him on the back, gave him a glass of port and a cigar, and then told him categorically that his sending British soldiers ‘to crush and oppress the Muslims in Kashmir’ was an act of gross betrayal. He described Nehru and Patel as ‘enemies of Britain’, and the Muslims as Britain’s allies; and accused Mountbatten of planning and organizing ‘the first victory of Hindustan’ (he refused to call it India) ‘against Pakistan’. Churchill told Mountbatten that he should leave India, ‘and not involve the King and my country in further backing traitors’.71

  The King and Queen hosted pre-wedding parties, which the Mountbattens attended. ‘The most lovely sight I have ever seen’, wrote Noël Coward, enchanted by the sight of Buckingham Palace full of glittering celebrities in full evening dress and decorations. ‘Everyone looking shiny and happy; something indestructible.’72 The following day saw an afternoon party at St James’s Palace so that guests could view the thousands of wedding presents. Members of the public had already been permitted to admire them, at a shilling a peek; everything from a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from the Chiang Kai-sheks, to a gold tiara from Haile Selassie, to dozens of pairs of nylon stockings sent in by ordinary people. Mountbatten had brought the present that excited the most comment – a fringed piece of khadi spun by Gandhi on his own spinning wheel. ‘Such an indelicate gift,’ thundered Queen Mary, apparently under the impression that the Mahatma had sent Princess Elizabeth his loincloth.73

  That evening, Dickie attended his nephew’s stag night at the Dorchester Hotel. The twelve men present drank sherry, champagne, port and beer, and afterwards cheerfully assaulted some photographers, ripping their cameras off them and throwing flashbulbs so that they exploded with loud bangs against the wall.74 The next morning, 20 November, 2000 people – and one Pekingese dog, hidden in Lady Munnings’s muff – packed into Westminster Abbey.75 The crowned heads of Europe sat in the sacrarium, with Dickie and Edwina in pride of place. They had arrived looking handsome, the full Mountbatten wattage disguising the frosty state of their private relationship. Churchill walked in, ‘his beaming smile almost as broad as his waistline’, according to Leo Amery; ‘rather looking as if the whole thing were his own show and he the genial parent or godparent of the Bride … The contrast between him and Attlee, trying to look as if he wasn’t there, very striking.’76

  The bride, in ivory silk and 10,000 pearls, walked down the aisle to join her tall, blond and apparently not too hungover groom at the altar. A full traditional ceremony followed, during which the future Queen promised to obey her husband. He had been created Duke of Edinburgh the day before, so that his wife need not suffer the name Mrs Philip Mountbatten.77 It had been reported that the Edinburghs were thinking of joining Uncle Dickie in India for their honeymoon, though in view of the situation there by November 1947 it is probably fortunate that this came to nothing.78 Instead, they had a week at Broadlands, beleaguered by a phalanx of royal watchers, who followed them into the local town, lurked in the shrubbery, and even queued outside the church after services to have a go at sitting in the seats warmed by the royal couple.79

  The Mountbattens flew back to India on 24 November. Much had happened during their vacation. Liaquat Ali Khan stated that Pakistan wanted to refer the Kashmir issue to the United Nations. Jawaharlal Nehru charged high Pakistani officials with inciting the tribesmen in Kashmir. A force of Afghans from Khost crossed the border into Kashmir, reportedly armed with Russian equipment.80 The President of the Congress Party, J.B. Kripalani, resigned in fear of an imminent war between India and Pakistan.

  Mountbatten was horrified. Without his steadying hand, the Indian Army had moved into militant action; it did not stretch the imagination to work out that this might have been precisely the reason Patel was so keen for him to go away. Just before he had left for London, he had reluctantly authorized Indian columns to move to Mirpur and Poonch, for the sole purpose of relieving the garrisons already there. ‘During my absence in London this object changed’, he wrote to Nehru. ‘It then evidently became the purpose of the Government of India to attempt to impose their military will on the Poonch and Mirpur areas.’ He protested that the inhabitants were mostly Muslim, and reminded Nehru that it would be ‘morally unjustifiable’ to use force to coerce them into India.81

  Immediately after stepping off the plane, Edwina, whose fears about leaving India had been proven right, went off to see Gandhi, and then Amrit Kaur. But there was no doubt about who she wanted to see most: it was Jawahar. More or less every day she saw or spoke to him now. The Government House diaries reveal the two of
them meeting for dinner on 2 December, at his home on 3 December, at hers on 4 December, and so on throughout the winter. Soon, she was happy enough to be kind to Dickie again. ‘Thanks for being so sweet and understanding during these days in England’, she wrote, though she had the note sent round to his room by a servant rather than taking it to him herself.82 On her forty-sixth birthday, she took the afternoon off for a visit to the Taj Mahal, the world’s greatest monument to love in sparkling white marble and lapidary, built by the heartbroken Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, Mumtaz.83

  At the end of November, Dickie flew his mistress, Yola Letellier, out to Delhi. Edwina invited Malcolm Sargent, and ignored him. ‘I fear I’ve hardly set eyes on them’, wrote Edwina of their guests.84 Her friendships with Jawahar and Gandhi cast her London friends in the shade. During her friends’ visits, she kept up the regular trips to Jawahar’s house in York Road. For both Edwina and Jawahar, it was the ideal relationship. Only in each other’s company could the two of them relax and lose themselves in endless conversations.85 Their talks were almost always about ideas rather than gossip, but were never dry or sterile. Ideas were what made them passionate. In their romantic lives, Jawahar and Edwina alike had always sought intimacy without suffocation. With each other, they found it.

  According to Nehru’s secretary, M.O. Mathai, Nehru paid a brief visit to Lucknow in the winter of that year. Sarojini Naidu was then the Governor of the United Provinces, and a rumour spread that Nehru was in Lucknow to propose to his old girlfriend, Sarojini’s daughter Padmaja Naidu. Padmaja was ecstatic, and prepared herself to accept. When Jawahar turned up, he was with Edwina. Padmaja locked herself in a room and refused to meet the Governor General’s wife.86 Later, when Padmaja came to stay with him, Jawahar would find one of his framed photographs of Edwina smashed on the floor.87

  On Kashmir, Nehru’s attitude was hardening, and he appeared to be losing interest in holding a plebiscite.88 On 6 December, he went again to the state and met the Maharaja’s son – ‘a very bright boy’, he told Indira.89 Mountbatten had desperately attempted to stop him from going.90 Edwina’s friends Richard Symonds and Horace Alexander, both relief workers, had paid a lengthy visit to Kashmir and afterwards sent Nehru a report. Symonds had described the conditions in Poonch, where the inhabitants had revolted against the Maharaja of Kashmir back in September or October, apparently before the Pathan raiders invaded. Nehru was furious, for the existence of a prior revolt would strengthen Pakistan’s argument that the raiders had responded to a cry for help from oppressed Kashmiri Muslims. ‘I don’t care a damn what happens to Poonch,’ he shouted. ‘They can go to Pakistan or Hell for all I care.’ Symonds and Alexander passed on suggestions made to them by Liaquat – that all non-Kashmiri troops should be removed from Kashmir, and replaced by a temporary United Nations government, pending a plebiscite. This made matters worse. ‘These people do not deserve to be listened to. They have behaved disgustingly and I will not have’ – as he banged on the table three times with his fist – ‘a single Pakistani soldier in Kashmir.’91

  Mountbatten, too, was beginning to think about calling in the international arbitrator. When Liaquat and Nehru met on 8 December, they argued for five hours straight before a pained Mountbatten interrupted them and begged them to telegraph the United Nations Security Council and get a team sent over immediately.92 Nehru was reluctant to accept United Nations involvement. Just a week before, the UN had voted to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Trouble had flared immediately in Damascus, Jenin, Tel Aviv, Acre and Nablus. Nehru did not see that the UN’s roles of peacekeeping or supervising a plebiscite were relevant until there was a peace to keep; in the meantime, a reference to the UN would involve admitting that the situation was one of war between India and Pakistan.93 His attitude came in for much criticism. In a moment of irritation, the British High Commissioner in Karachi would write that ‘We seem to be faced with a choice between what may be loosely described as natural justice and the appeasement of one man who, since he is himself a Kashmiri pundit, is blinded to realities by emotions passionately involved.’ For this, he earned a swift reprimand from Attlee.94

  On 12 December, India and Pakistan finally announced an agreement on the partition of their assets. Pakistan was to get 750 million rupees of British India’s sterling assets and cash balances (slightly less than one-fifth of the total), one-third of its military stocks, and 17.5 per cent of its liabilities. It was good news for the ailing dominion and its ailing leader. Just two weeks before, it had been reported that Jinnah had been bedridden secretly for a month. No details of his illness were disclosed.95 ‘I understand that he is now living on the edge of a nervous breakdown,’ reported the British High Commissioner to Pakistan.96 Nehru’s friend Sri Prakasa, the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, sent him a long report on the situation in Karachi. While Jinnah was ‘not quite a broken man as he was reported to be, he is not himself now and he has become extraordinarily sensitive’, Prakasa noted. The sensitivity was not surprising, bearing in mind that Prakasa had heard of three separate attempts to assassinate Jinnah, all of which had been kept from the press. Some said the plotters were Sikhs. Others said they were Punjabi Muslims, angry at what they perceived as Jinnah’s abandonment of them in the Indian Punjab. Either way, the last attempt had been ‘particularly nasty’. The would-be assassins had broken into Jinnah’s compound, killing one guard and seriously injuring another. Prakasa described Jinnah as increasingly isolated – not just by his illness, but also by his attitude. He took no advice, except from one person. ‘I am almost inclined to think that his sister, Miss Fatima, is his evil genius.’97

  The British High Commissioner, Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith, went to see Jinnah shortly after this, and found that, though ‘wispily frail in body’, the ‘fire of his fanatical ardour is certainly in no way diminished’. Jinnah harangued him with regard to his bugbear, ‘which has now acquired the strength of an obsession’ – that the person most responsible for the disaster of partition was Dickie Mountbatten.98

  Mountbatten, meanwhile, permitted himself a brief escape from the vicissitudes of Delhi life. On 12 December, he flew with Edwina and Yola to Jaipur, one of India’s most beautiful cities, a pink sandstone metropolis set in the heart of princely Rajputana. They stayed with the Maharaja, whose silver jubilee they were to celebrate. He had succeeded to the throne at the age of eleven, since which time he had ruled over three million people. His glamorous Maharani had been Tatler magazine’s cover girl just five months before, was said to be very Western-minded, and played tennis with the Queen when she was in London.99 Dickie and Edwina stayed at the Rambagh Palace, a huge and spectacular estate. They watched a lot of polo, and attended a lot of banquets; Edwina was taken to visit schools, and Dickie to shoot ducks. At his jubilee durbar the Maharaja walked barefoot across the palace grounds, wearing garlands of flowers and a white plume held in place by a sumptuously jewelled turban ornament. The Mountbattens followed: Dickie in full dress uniform, Edwina in lamé with a coronet of laurel leaves and five strands of pearls.100 Afterwards, the Maharaja gave a very nice speech about Dickie, crediting him with waging all sorts of battles in Burma.101

  From Jaipur, the Mountbattens flew on to Bombay; he to visit soldiers, she to visit refugee camps and women’s organizations. They returned to Delhi on 18 December to find that, once again, problems had blown up in their absence. Patel had ordered a freeze on 550 million rupees (£40 million) of Pakistan’s sterling assets, on the grounds that it would be used to arm invaders of ‘Indian territory’ in Kashmir. Jinnah and Liaquat were furious. The Pakistani treasury had only 20 million rupees left in it, and they were facing a serious financial crisis.102 Mountbatten presided over another hopeless meeting in New Delhi on 21 and 22 December, at which Liaquat and Nehru reached a complete deadlock. After sustained lobbying, Mountbatten persuaded Nehru to refer the Kashmir problem to the United Nations – a concession which he considered a great achievement, for ‘Nehru has been as tempera
mental and difficult over the Kashmir issue as he [had] ever known him’.103 To Mountbatten’s horror, Nehru had begun to talk of sending Indian troops into Pakistan to take out the ‘nerve centres’ from which raiders were being sent. The friendship between Dickie and Jawahar, recently so cordial, was rapidly souring. Jawahar’s relationship with Edwina remained strong, but even she could not always lift his despair. ‘I am afraid I have had no peace whatever for an age’, he wrote, ‘and I think rather longingly sometimes of the quiet days I had in prison.’104

  On 25 December, Jinnah celebrated Christmas with a Pakistani Christian community.105 In Delhi, Mountbatten spent it writing Nehru an extremely long and agonized letter about Kashmir. ‘I have never and will never from my experience of war subscribe to the view that the operations which are now starting to take place are anything but of the most dangerous and risky character,’ he declared. Correctly, he pointed out that the modern weapons and great resources of India counted for nothing in the face of guerrilla warfare. ‘The raiders with the local population on their side can take on our forces at their will. This process is bound to wear down our army and our resources.’ He deplored the possibility of sending Indian troops into Pakistan in the frankest terms: ‘Each time I have heard you say it I have been more and more appalled.’ He predicted that it would lead to war between India and Pakistan, and observed that the idea that such a war ‘could be confined to the sub-Continent, or finished off quickly in favour of India without further complication, is to my mind a fatal illusion.’ He reiterated the need to call in the United Nations, but the most striking message to emerge from the letter was the simplest. Several times, he repeated and underlined the phrase ‘stop the fighting’.106