Freedom at Midnight (2 page)

With his sallow complexion, his indifferently trimmed mustache, his shapeless tweed suit, which seemed blissfully ignorant of a pressing iron's caress, the man waiting for Mountbatten exuded in his demeanor something of that gray and dreary city through which the admiral's car had just passed. That he, a Labour prime minister, should want a glamorous, polo-playing member of the royal family to fill the highest position in the empire that Labour was pledged to dismantle, seemed at first sight incongruous.

There was much more to Mountbatten than his public image reflected however; the decorations on his naval uni-

form were proof of that. The public might consider him a pillar of the Establishment; the Establishment's members themselves tended to regard Mountbatten and his wife as dangerous radicals. His command in Southeast Asia had given him a vast knowledge of Asian nationalist movements, and there were few Englishmen who could match it. He had dealt with the supporters of Ho Chi Minh in Indochina, Sukharno in Indonesia, Aung San in Burma, Chinese Communists in Malaya, unruly trade unionists in Singapore. Realizing that they represented Asia's future, he had sought accommodations with them rather than try to suppress them as his staff and the Allies had urged. The nationalist movement with which he would have to deal if he went to India was the oldest and most unusual of them all. In a quarter of a century of inspired agitation and protest, its leadership had forced history's greatest empire to the decision that Attlee's party had taken: to quit India in good time rather than be driven out by the forces of history and rebellion.

The Indian situation, the Prime Minister began, was deteriorating with every passing day, and the time for an urgent decision was at hand. It was one of the sublime paradoxes of history that at this critical juncture, when Britain was at last ready to give India her freedom, she could not find a way to do so. What should have been Britain's finest hour in India seemed destined to become a nightmare of unsurpassed horror. She had conquered and ruled India with what was, by the colonial standard, relatively little bloodshed. Her leaving threatened to produce an explosion of violence that would dwarf in scale and magnitude anything she had experienced in three and a half centuries there.

The root of the Indian problem was the age-old antagonism between India's 300 million Hindus and 100 million Moslems. Sustained by tradition, by antipathetic religions, by economic differences subtly exacerbated through the years by Britain's own policy of divide and rule, their conflict had reached a boiling point. The leaders of India's 100 million Moslems now demanded that Britain destroy the unity she had so painstakingly created and give them an Islamic state of their own. The cost of denying them their state, they warned, would be the bloodiest civil war in Asian history.

Just as determined to resist their demands were the

leaders of the Congress Party, representing most of India's 300 million Hindus. To them, the division of the subcontinent would be a mutilation of their historic homeland, an act almost sacrilegious in its nature.

Britain was trapped between those two apparently irreconcilable demands. Time and again British efforts to resolve the problem had failed. So desperate had the situation become that the present viceroy, an honest, forthright soldier, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, had just submitted to the Attlee government a final, and drastic, recommendation: should all else fail, he proposed, the British should "withdraw from India in our own method and in our own time and with due regard to our own interests and we will regard any attempt to interfere with our program as an act of war which we will meet with all the resources at our command."

Britain and India, Attlee told Mountbatten, were moving toward a major disaster. The situation could not be allowed to continue. Wavell was a man of painfully few words, almost hopelessly inarticulate, and had been unable to establish any real contact with his loquacious Indian interlocutors. A fresh face, a new approach, was desperately needed if a crisis was to be averted. Each morning brought a batch of cables to the India Office announcing an outburst of wanton savagery in some new corner of the subcontinent. It was, Attlee indicated, Mountbatten's solemn duty to take the post he had been offered.*

A sense of foreboding filled Mountbatten as he listened to the Prime Minister's words. He still thought India was "an absolutely hopeless proposition." He liked and admired Wavell, and he had often discussed India's problems with him during his periodic visits to Delhi as Supreme Commander in Southeast Asia.

Wavell had all the right ideas, Mountbatten thought. "If

* Although Mountbatten didn't know it, the idea of sending him to India had been suggested to Attlee by the man at the Prime Minister's side during their meeting, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps. It had come up at a secret conversation in London in December, between Cripps and Krishna Menon, an outspoken Indian leftist and intimate of the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru. Menon had suggested to Nehru that Congress saw little hope of progress in India as long as Wavell was viceroy and had advanced the name of a man Nehru held in highest regard, Louis Mountbatten, as a possible substitute. Menon became independent India's first High Commissioner in London and later, ambassador to the U.N.

he couldn't do it, what's the point of my trying to take it on?" Yet he was beginning to understand that there was no escape. He was going to be forced to accept a job in which the risk of failure was enormous and in which he could easily shatter the brilliant reputation he'd brought out of the war.

If Attlee was going to drive him into a corner, Mount-batten was determined to impose on the Prime Minister the political conditions that would give him some hope of success. His talks with Wavell had given him an idea what they must be.

He could not accept, he told the Prime Minister, unless the government agreed to make an unequivocal public announcement of a precise date on which British rule in India would terminate. Only that, Mountbatten felt, would convince India's skeptical intelligentsia that Britain was really leaving and infuse her leaders with the sense of urgency needed to get them into realistic negotiations.*

Second, he demanded something no other viceroy had ever dreamed of asking: full powers to carry out his assignment without reference to London, and above all, without constant interference from London. The Attlee government could give the young admiral his final destination, but he alone was going to set his course and run the ship along the way.

"Surely," Attlee said, "you're not asking for plenipotentiary powers above His Majesty's Government, are you?"

"I am afraid, sir," answered Mountbatten, "that that is exactly what I am asking. How can I possibly negotiate with the Cabinet constantly breathing down my neck?"

A stunned silence followed his words. Mountbatten watched with satisfaction as the nature of his breathtaking demand registered on the Prime Minister's face, and he hoped that it would prompt Attlee to withdraw his offer.

Instead, the Prime Minister indicated with a sigh his willingness to accept even that. An hour later, shoulders sagging, Mountbatten emerged from the portal of Downing Street. He knew that he was condemned to become India's last viceroy, to write an end to his countrymen's fondest imperial dream.

As he got back into his Austin Princess, a strange thought struck him. It was exactly seventy years to the day,

* Interestingly, Wavell too had recommended a time limit to Attlee during a London visit in December 1946.

almost to the hour, from the moment when his own great-grandmother had been proclaimed Empress of India on a plain outside Delhi.

India's princes, assembled for the occasion, had begged the heavens that day that Queen Victoria's "power and sovereignty" might "remain steadfast forever." Now, on this bleak New Year's morning one of her great-grandsons had initiated the process that would fix the date on which "forever" would come to an end.

History's most grandiose accomplishments sometimes can have the most trivial origins. Five miserable shillings had set Great Britain on the road to the great colonial adventure that Louis Mountbatten had been ordered to conclude. They represented the increase in the price of a pound of pepper proclaimed by the Dutch privateers who controlled the spice trade. Incensed at what they considered a wholly unwarranted price rise, twenty-four merchants of the City of London had gathered on the afternoon of September 24, 1599, in a decrepit building on Leadenhall Street, barely a mile from the residence in which Mountbatten and Attlee had met. Their purpose was to found a modest trading firm with an initial capital of 72,000 pounds, subscribed by 125 shareholders. Only the simplest of concerns, profit, inspired their undertaking. Called the East India Trading Company, the enterprise, expanded and transformed, would ultimately become the most grandiose creation of the age of imperialism, the British raj.

The Company received its official sanction on December 31, 1599, when Queen Elizabeth I signed a royal charter assigning it exclusive trading rights with all countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope for an initial period of fifteen years. Eight months later, a 500-ton galleon, the Hector, dropped anchor in the little port of Surat, north of Bombay. It was August 24, 1600. The British had arrived in India. Their initial landing on those fabled shores toward which Christopher Columbus had been sailing when he discovered the Americas by accident was a modest one. It came in the solitary figure of William Hawkins, captain of the Hector, a dour old seaman who was more pirate than explorer. With a guard of fifty Pathan mercenaries, Hawkins marched off into the interior of a land

whose myths and marvels had already inspired the imagination of the Elizabethan age, prepared to find rubies as big as pigeons' eggs; endless stands of pepper, ginger, indigo, cinnamon; trees whose leaves were so enormous the shade they cast could cover an entire family; magic potions derived from elephant testicles to give a man eternal youth.

There was little of that India along the captain's march to Agra. There, however, his encounter with the Great Mogul compensated him for the hardships of his journey. He found himself face to face with a sovereign beside whom Queen Elizabeth might have seemed the ruler of a provincial hamlet. Reigning over seventy million subjects, the Emperor Jehangir was the world's richest and most powerful monarch, the fourth of the Great Moguls.

The first Englishman to reach his court was greeted with a gesture which might have disconcerted the 125 worthy shareholders of the East India Trading Company. The Mogul made him a member of the royal household and offered him as a welcoming gift the most beautiful girl in his harem, an Armenian Christian. Fortunately, benefits of a nature more likely to inspire his employers' esteem also grew out of Captain Hawkins's arrival in Agra—Jehangir signed an imperial firman authorizing the East India Company to open trading depots north of Bombay.

The Company's success was rapid and impressive. Soon two ships a month were unloading mountains of spices, gum, sugar, raw silk and Muslim cotton on the docks along the Thames and sailing off with holds full of English manufactures. A deluge of dividends, some of them as high as 200 percent, poured down on the firm's fortunate shareholders.

The Company's galleons appeared on the horizons off Madras and then in the Bay of Bengal. One of its bolder captains, Job Charnock, founded a settlement in the pestilential Gangetic Delta near the banyan tree under which he liked to smoke his hubble-bubble. His first trading counters provided the foundations of the city of Calcutta.

The British were generally welcomed by the native rulers and population. Unlike the zealous Spaniards, who were conquering South America in the name of a redeeming God, the British stressed that it was in the name of another god, Mammon, that they had come to India. "Trade,

not territory," the Company's officers never ceased repeating, was their policy.

Inevitably as their trading activities grew, the Company's officers became enmeshed in local politics and were forced to intervene in the squabbles of the petty sovereigns on whose territory they operated, in order to protect their expanding commerce. Thus began the irreversible process that would lead England to conquer India almost by inadvertence. On June 23, 1757, marching through a drenching rainfall at the head of 900 Englishmen of the 39th Regiment of Foot and 2,000 Indian sepoys (native infantrymen), an audacious general named Robert Clive routed the army of a troublesome nawab in the rice paddies outside a Bengali village called Plassey.

Clive's victory, which cost him only twenty-three dead and forty-nine wounded, opened the gates of northern India to the merchants of London. With it, the British conquest of India truly started. The merchants of the Company gave way to the builders of empire; and territory, not trade, became the primary concern of the British in India.

The century that followed was one of conquest. Although they were specifically instructed by London to avoid "schemes of conquest and territorial expansion," a succession of ambitious governors general relentlessly embraced just the opposite policy. Proclaiming that "no greater blessing may be conferred on the native inhabitants of India then the extension of British authority, influence and power," the fourth governor general, Richard Wellesley, extended Britain's mantle over the states of Mysore, Travancore, Baroda, Hyderabad and Gwalior, subdued the Hindu kingdom of the martial Marathas, and finally spread British rule over most of the Deccan, Bengal, and the Gangetic Valley.

His successors conquered the Rajput states, annexed the province of Sind with its port at Karachi and subdued the Punjab in two ferocious and bloody wars with the Sikhs. Thus, in less than a century a company of traders was metamorphosed into a sovereign power, its accountants and traders into generals and governors, its warehouses into palaces, its race for dividends into a struggle for imperial authority. Without having set out to do so, Britain had become the successor to the Mogul emperors who had opened to her the doors of the subcontinent.