Freedom at Midnight (85 page)

It was also a hymn to the memory of the little figure who had walked up that concrete ramp on a winter morning so long ago. For, if an era was ending there at the Gateway of India, another was beginning, the one that Gandhi had opened for three quarters of the inhabitants of the earth, the era of decolonization. The last of the race of the captains and the kings were departing from India, and the freshening breezes speeding them On their homeward journey were the heralds of those winds of change which would remake the map of the world and realign the balance of its forces in the next quarter of a century. Many a spot on the globe would witness in the years to come a ceremony similar to the one that took place in

Bombay on February 28, 1948, because of Gandhi and what he had wrought in India.

Not many of them, however, would be marked by the good will manifested that morning there in the shadows of that once triumphant arch of empire. It was the final accolade to India's murdered Mahatma, and to the Indians and Englishmen who had had the wisdom to seize the inexorable logic of his message.

WHAT THEY BECAME

Vallabhbhai Patel

Patel suffered terribly in the weeks following Gandhi's assassination from a whispering campaign that insinuated that as Home Minister he shared in the responsibility for the police's failure to apprehend the Mahatma's killers between January 20 and the date of his murder. Some of his political foes even circulated the wholly unfounded accusation that he had been indifferent to Gandhi's fate because of his own differences with him. The strain of that campaign of innuendo, coming on top of the genuine grief that the murder had produced in him, led to a major heart attack in March 1948. Patel recovered and resumed his posts as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. After Lord Mountbatten's departure, he organized and directed the "police action" against Hyderabad which forcibly integrated into India the last of India's old princely states. His conflict with his old rival Nehru, temporarily shelved in the months following Gandhi's assassination, broke out again in the beginning of 1950. Patel's death of a heart attack on December 15, 1950, prevented it from leading to a public parting of the ways between the two men.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Until his death in New Delhi, May 27, 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru occupied the office he assumed on August 15, 1957, that of Prime Minister of an independent

India. He emerged as an internationally respected statesman, one of the most familiar figures of what became known as the third world and the principal architect of the policy of nonalignment which engaged the support of most of the Afro-Asian nations that emerged from colonial tutelage in the fifties and sixties. He traveled extensively throughout the world visiting most of Europe's capitals, the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Domestically, he presided over three Indian Five-Year plans designed to provide for his nation's industrial and social development, oversaw the consolidation of India's democratic institutions, and reluctantly agreed to the forcible integration of the Portuguese enclave of Goa into the Indian Republic.

His most bitter disillusionment came in October 1962, with the massive Chinese invasion of his country's frontier in Ladakh above Kashmir and in the Northeast Frontier Agency between Tibet and Assam. Nehru never fully recovered from his shock at that action. China's friendship had been the cornerstone of his foreign policy for fifteen years. From that moment, his health faltered. He fell seriously ill in January 1964, recovered, but died four months later. Among those who rushed to New Delhi to attend his cremation was Louis Mountbatten. Appropriately, the parting gift of that most eloquent of leaders to his countrymen was words, the words of his last will and testament now inscribed outside the Nehru Memorial Library in the grounds of the former residence of the commander in chief of the Indian Army in New Delhi. In them, he asked that his ashes be scattered from an aircraft "over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust of the soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of her..."

The Mountbattens

In October 1948, Rear Admiral Louis Mountbatten returned to active naval service, taking up in Malta the command of the First Cruiser Squadron for which he had been destined when he was appointed Viceroy of India. The man who as Viceroy had ranked second only to the King-Emperor in the British Empire found himself ranked thirteenth in the island's social order of precedence.

His rise through the senior ranks of the Navy was rapid,

and on April 8, 1955, he realized his lifelong ambition: he was appointed First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, the office from which his father had been hounded by the outcry of a narrow-minded public in 1914. As First Sea Lord, he presided over the modernization of the Royal Navy, which brought Britain's Senior Service her first nuclear submarine and her first guided-missile destroyers. In 1958 as Chief of the Defence Forces he began his last major official task, the reorganization of the British Armed Forces and their integration into a unified Defence Establishment.

Mountbatten left service in July 1965, forty-nine years after he went to sea in World War I. For the next fourteen years, he divided his time between his country estate, Broadlands, outside Southampton, a modest London flat, and his castle Classiebaun in County Sligo in the Irish Republic. To the dismay of his family and his doctor, the consuming appetite for work which had characterized his active career continued undiminished in what was a retirement in name only. He was an active member of almost two hundred organizations, their nature as diverse as the Institute of Naval Architecture, the Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Institute of Structural Engineers, the London Zoological Society, the Society of Geologists, a skin-diving group, and the Hampshire County Cricket Club. He was president or chairman of no fewer than forty-two of those organizations.

His principal concern was with the development and welfare of the United World College, a multi-national and multi-racial education institution devoted to fostering better understanding between peoples and nations through its campuses in England, Canada and Singapore.

Above all, he maintained a close and active interest in India. In 1969, he served as chairman of the Gandhi Centenary Year, addressing the remembrance service which opened at St. Paul's Cathedral on January 30, 1969. He helped to raise and administer the Jawaharlal Nehru Fund, created to honor the memory of his old friend by sending Indian scholars to study in the United Kingdom.

Almost every day, his mailbag would deliver a fresh set of pleas from the subcontinent to his desk. From maharajas and former governors, from bankers seeking an introduction to someone in England, ex-bearers trying to unravel the complications of a pension fund, that never ending stream of letters was the evidence of a fascinating transi-

tion: India's last viceroy had become, in a sense, her first ombudsman in England.

In mid-August 1979, Lord Mountbatten left, as he did every year, for his annual summer vacation at his castle in Ireland. The day before he left, he spoke with one of the authors of Freedom at Midnight. There was no reason to be concerned for his personal security, he assured the author: his affection and understanding for the people of Ireland was well known in the republic. Indeed, he had accepted official protection during his yearly visits with the greatest reluctance.

On the morning of August 29, 1979, accompanied by the members of his family, he set out for a cruise on the waters of the Bay of Donegal in his fishing dory The Shadow V. A few minutes after the party had left the dock, the dory stopped to check a lobster pot. A bomb concealed in the pot was detonated by radio control by IRA terrorists hidden on a bluff nearby. Mountbatten was killed almost instantly at sea, to which he had given so much of his life and to which he never ceased to return for spiritual renewal and comfort. His young grandson, the Honorable Nicholas Knatchbull, and a young Irish friend died along with him. The mother of his son-in-law, Doreen Lady Brabourne, later died of injuries received in the explosion. Mountbatten's funeral at St. Paul's Cathedral a few days later was an occasion such as England had not witnessed since the funeral of her wartime chief, Sir Winston Churchill. And rightly so, for the last viceroy had provided for his death with the same meticulous passion for order and detail with which he had organized his life. Every aspect of that final ceremony had been planned by Mountbatten himself some years before.

Edwina Mountbatten continued to devote herself to the Red Cross and the St. John Ambulance Brigade, serving both with an energy she refused to diminish even after being warned by her doctors that she was exhausting herself. Four days after the wedding of her younger daughter, Pamela, in February 1960, she left on a tour of the Far East in her capacity as Superintendent-in-Chief of St. John and President of the Save the Children Fund. Despite her evident state of fatigue and exhaustion she refused any curtailment of her busy schedule and died in Borneo after having attended a banquet offered in her honor on February 21, 1960. When the news of her death Was announced on the floor of the Indian Parliament, its

members rose to offer her memory the spontaneous tribute of a moment of silence.

Four days after her death, as requested in her will, she was buried at sea off Spithead. Escorting the British Naval Frigate Wakeful, which took her to her burial place, was the Indian Frigate Trishul, a poignant gesture from a nation she had loved, to the last of the memsahibs.

The Policemen

Two of the principal figures in the investigation into Gandhi's murder survive, D. W. Mehra and Jimmy Nagarvalla, the man who conducted the investigation in Bombay. Both are retired. Mehra is an executive with a brewery outside Delhi. Nagarvalla engages in a commerce curious for a man who devoted most of his life to pursuing fugitives; he runs a travel agency.

The Maharajas

The princes who once ruled a third of India's people have faded so totally from the Indian scene that their days of glory now seem as distant as those of the Moguls. Their palaces have become museums, schools, hotels or crumbling ruins. Some have gone abroad, some into business, or government service. A few, like the Raj Matas of Gwalior and Jaipur, are active in politics. After three years of struggle, and despite a decision of the Indian Supreme Court in the princes' favor, Indira Gandhi's government was able in 1974 to secure the needed majority in both houses to amend the constitution and terminate the concessions the princes had been granted in 1947 in return for their peaceful accession. The flock of gilded peacocks had disappeared forever from the Indian scene.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As was the case with two of our previous books— Is Paris Burning? and O Jerusalem! — Freedom at Midnight is the result of almost three years of long and patient research The trail over which our work took us was difficult, often physically trying, but never dulL Eventually, it brought us into contact with almost five hundred people, Indians. Pakistanis, English men and women, took us over six thousand miles from the Khyber Pass to Fort St. George in Madras, from the bustees of Calcutta to cottages in quiet villages in Sussex and Kent.

Inevitably that trail began at the doorstep of the sole survivor of that quintet of great men largely responsible for the subcontinent's destinies in 1947, Admiral of the Fleet the Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Over the course of fifteen tape-recorded interviews in 1972-73, the last viceroy of India permitted himself to be subjected to the most painstaking and exhaustive review of his Indian experiences that he has ever been exposed to. The result of those interviews alone covered almost thirty hours of tape and six hundred typewritten pages: they constitute in themselves a unique record of the Mountbatten viceroyalty.

The last viceroy retains in his possession in his estate, Broadlands in Romsey, what is probably the most extensive collection of documents and papers relating to his viceroyalty and the period following India's independence, in which he served as her first governor general. By nature a very meticulous man. Lord Mountbatten has retained in those archives every paper relevant to the period including

materials as diverse as the handwritten note sent to him by his cousin the King on his departure for India, to the menus and seating arrangements for his state dinners. There is, however, a series of five sets of documents which are the indispensable historical record of the period. They are:

1. The record of Lord Mountbatten's conversations with everyone who entered his office and particularly with the key Indian leaders: Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Patel. As explained on pages 99-100, Lord Mountbatten met alone with these men, limiting his talks to forty-five minutes, and dictated a summary of his conversation to a secretary as soon as each man left. The summaries of these conversations are vivid and detailed, and they appear today almost as fresh as they must have seemed at the moment they were dictated in 1947.

2. The minutes of his almost daily meetings with his staff at which the Viceroy had the habit of unburdening himself with great frankness.

3. The minutes of the meetings of the Emergency Committee of the Indian Cabinet, over which he presided during the crisis in the Punjab.

4. His seventeen weekly reports together with the extensive annexes to the Secretary of State during his service as Viceroy.

5. His Monthly Report to the King during his period as governor general.

Lord Mountbatten was able to refer constantly to that material during the hours of our work together as a means of refreshing his own memory and to provide an authentic and historically valid guide to his activities in India. Our thanks, therefore, must go first and foremost to Lord Mountbatten.

We also owe a special debt of gratitude to two members of his personal staff—John Barratt, his private secretary, and Mrs. Mollie Travis, the Archivist of the Broadlands Archives—both of whom were particularly generous in the amount of time and effort they devoted to our behalf. Lord Mountbatten's two daughters, Lady Brabourne and Lady Pamela Hicks, both were kind enough to reminisce with us about their parents and their experiences with them in India. Lord Brabourne, himself the son of a for-