Alex von Tunzelmann: Indian Summer

Kapil Komireddi: Indian Winter: A little bit about the prospects of turning Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire into a movie. I can't really see Hugh Grant in the role of Lord Louis Mountbatten, last viceroy and first governor-general of India -- Clive Owen maybe. Hard to improve on Cate Blanchett as Lady Mountbatten. Still, the bigger problem is that it will be all but impossible for a movie based on the principal characters not to compound the book's most serious weakness, which is that it makes so much history turn on the actions of a small number of larger-than-life figures: the Mountbattens, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Churchill. The book tends to fall into the Great Man bag, even if the greatest figure on that list is the Lady. This approach isn't without its insights. In particular, the intense personal dislike between Louis Mountbatten and Jinnah seems to have preceded the prejudice that Mountbatten showed against Pakistan in dividing the empire. On the other hand, it reduces Pakistan to a personal delusion of Jinnah, as if there was nothing more behind it than the ambitions of one determined politician. And it leaves the eruptions of violence mostly unexplained, since they don't much figure into the actions or programs of the principal figures. I finished the book grateful for what I learned but with so many residual questions I wanted to read further.

The "secret history" has much to do with the Mountbattens, but remains rather discreet about Edwina's romance with Nehru. The movie, of course, even if they don't take liberties with the record will inevitably render the affair so explicit as to be undeniable -- and needless to say, the cash register bets that they will go further. And there's the rub. I've seen a dozen or more major movies about India over the last couple of decades, and all ultimately portrayed India in positively glowing terms. I hadn't realized that this is to some extent a consequence of the censorship rights the Indian government demands as part of the price to film there. Despite its much ballyhooed boast to be the world's largest democracy, India is tightly controlled by Nehru's direct heirs, who don't take kindly to publicizing Nehru's dalliance with a foreign woman -- something Nehru himself was very circumspect about. Komireddi does a good job of explaining how this works. Indeed, his notes on the proliferation of Nehru-Gandhi names reminds me of the Ronald Reagan sanctification project here.

A Tryst with Destiny (p. 3):

On a warm summer night in 1947, the largest empire the world has ever seen did something no empire had done before. It gave up. The British Empire did not decline, it simply fell; and it fell proudly and majestically onto its own sword. It was not forced out by revolution, nor defeated by a greater rival in battle. Its leaders did not tire or weaken. Its culture was strong and vibrant. Recently it had been victorious in the century's definitive war.

When midnight struck in Delhi on the night of 14 August 1947, a new, free Indian nation was born. In London, the time was 8:30 p.m. The world's capital could enjoy another hour or two of a warm summer evening before the sun literally and finally set on the British Empire.

(p. 4):

Yet amid all the power and finery, two persons were conspicuous by their absence. One was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, who was in one of those parts of the empire that had just become Pakistan. His absence signified the partition o the subcontinent, the split which had ripped two wings off the body of India and called them West and East Pakistan (later Pakistan and Bangladesh), creating Muslim homelands separate from the predominantly Hindu mass of the territory. The other truant was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was sound asleep in a smashed-up mansion in a riot-torn suburb of Calcutta.

Gandhi's absence was a worrying omen. The seventy-seven-year-old Mahatma, or "great soul," was the most famous and the most popular Indian since Buddha. Regarded as little short of a saint among Christians as well as Hindus, he had been a staunch defender of the British Empire until the 1920s. Since then, he had campaigned for Indian self-rule. Many times it had been almost within his grasp: in 1922, 1931, 1942, 1946. Each time he had let it go. Now, finally, India was free, but that had nothing to do with Gandhi -- and Gandhi would have nothing to do with it.

(pp. 7-8):

The world was redefined that night, but not in the way that most of those present thought. On either side of Old Europe, two new powers were rising to world superiority -- and both took a close interest in the new dominions of India and Pakistan. In the East, Stalin's Russia was in the process of supporting Communist movements across Europe and Asia, bolstering the influence of Moscow and extending its borders. In the West, the president of the United States of America had announced the Truman Doctrine just five months before. He had stated his intent to promote democracy across the world and resist the tide of communism flowing forth from Russia. The Americans had become particularly concerned about its flow into India, and Russian agents were already suspected of funding Indian Communist parties in Bengal. That very night, Nehru's sister and close confidante, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was in Moscow, preparing to present her credentials to Stalin as free India's first ambassador. Though its envoys were on good terms with Nehru, the U.S. government was alarmed by these developments and moved fast to create a new alliance with Pakistan. During the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia had played the "Great Game" for control of central Asia, centered in Afghanistan and the territory that would become West Pakistan. In 1947, the United States was gearing up to play a new Great Game against Russia, and the slow but significant rise of a fundamentalist Islamic movement would ensure that Afghanistan and Pakistan would remain at the center of international politics well into the next century.

Part One: Empire

1. In Their Gratitude Our Best Reward (pp. 11-12):

In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swatch of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

The year was 1577, and the Mogul emperors were in the process of uniting India. The domain spread twelve hundred miles along the Tropic of Cancer, from the eerie white salt flats of the Rann of Kutch on the shores of the Arabian Sea, to the verdant delta of the holy river Ganges in Bengal; and from the snowy crags of Kabul to the lush teak forests of the Vindhyan foothills. The 100 million people who lived under its aegis were cosmopolitan and affluent. In 1577, the average Indian peasant enjoyed a relatively higher income and lower taxation than his descendants ever would again. In the bazaars were sold gold from Jaipur, rubies from Burma, fine shawls from Kashmir, spices from the islands, opium from Bengal and dancing girls from Africa. Though governed by Muslims under a legal system based loosely on sharia law, its millions of non-Muslim subjects -- Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists -- were allowed freedom of conscience and custom. [ . . . ]

In England, meanwhile, most of the population of around two and a half million lived in a state of misery and impoverishment. Politically and religiously, the country had spent much of the sixteenth century at war with itself. Around 90 percent of the population lived in rural areas and worked on the land, going hungry during the frequent food shortages. They were prevented from moving into industry by the protectionist racket of guild entry fees. Begging was common, and the nation's ten thousand vagabonds were the terror of the land. The low standard of living endured by much of the population -- two-fifths of which lived at subsistence levels -- and squalid conditions in towns ensured that epidemics of disease were common. The Black Death still broke out periodically, as did pneumonia, smallpox, influenza and something unpleasant called "the sweat."

(pp. 14-15):

But the history of empire did not remain so cozy for long. After the English republic fell and the monarchy was restored, King Charles II would turn the East India Company into a monster. With five acts, he gave it an amazing array of rights without responsibilities. By the 1670s, the company could mint its own coin, maintain its own army, wage war, make peace, acquire new territories and impose its own civil and criminal law -- and all without any accountability, save to its shareholders. This was pure capitalism, unleashed for the first time in history. Combined with the gradual fragmentation of Mogul control, which had begun after Akbar's death in 1605, it would prove to be almost unstoppable. [ . . . ]

In the century after Robert Clive's famous victory over the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the company had embarked upon a run of military enterprises. Its armies fought the Burmese twice, annexing Burma in 1852; the Afghans once; and the Sikhs twice, taking the entirety of the Punjab by 1849. They took Gwalior in 1844 and conquered Sind in 1843, Nagpur in 1853, and Oudh in 1856. By then, almost 70 percent of the subcontinent could be called British territory. [ . . . ] The Moguls had been lulled by the promise of ever greater riches and had invited the East India Company across their own threshold. Once inside, it had been able to suck the wealth and riches out of India and impose its own regime -- all by the grace of the Indian rulers. "The English have not taken Idnia," wrote Mohandas Gandhi succinctly in 1908; "we have given it to them."

2. Mohan and Jawahar: Short bios of Gandhi and Nehru; Gandhi was married at age 13 to Kasturbai Makanji, also 13 (p. 21):

But, despite her youth, Kasturbai had already mastered the most effective technique available to women who live in extremely restrictive societies: that of passive resistance. She was a devout Hindu from a very traditional background and would not openly disobey her husband. Instead, she found a loophole.

Mohan's mother asked Kasturbai to accompany her to the temple every day. Because this request was made in the daytime, when the young spouses were not supposed to communicate, Kasturbai was unable to ask Mohan's permission. To disobey the command of the matriarch, on the other hand, would have been a terrible sin. So Kasturbai went with Putliba to the temple and returned to have her first fight with her husband, which she won by the sheer power of logic. Mohan was forced to remove the restrictions he had placed on Kasturbai.

This small incident would hardly be worthy of note, except for the fact that it formed the basis for Gandhi's entire political method. In later years, when he found that he was at an disadvantage being an Indian in a white world, he would remember and develop the tactic of a woman in a man's world. All Gandhi's most famous tactics -- passive resistance, civil disobedience, logical argument, nonviolence in the face of violence, emotional blackmail -- had come from Kasturbai's influence. He freely admitted this: "I learned the lesson of non-violence from my wife."

(p. 33):

Few political figures have been so widely misunderstood as Gandhi, in his own time or today. He emerged at a time when monarchies were falling and communism loomed; he was contemporary with Lenin. To many listeners, aware of the march of events in Russia, Gandhi's speech sounded like a rallying cry to Indian socialism, with its talk of the casting off of jewels and the power of the workers. This was, indeed, the reason that young radicals like Jawahar [Nehru] were so attracted to him. But a closer examination of Gandhi's words reveals something different,a nd much more profoundly religious. Gandhi called for the princes to stop wearing their finery and instead "hold it in trust" for their subjects. This is not the same thing at all as telling the masses to rise up and seize it. Gandhi was not challenging the princes' right to hold wealth, nor even their right to reign. He was asking for a change of heart.

Gandhi's condemnation of princely luxury was part of a much broader preoccupation with returning India to what he supposed had been a prehistoric "golden age" of godliness, simplicity and humility. He had begun to reject Western ideals of progress and technology, and insisted that India's future lay in a return to simple village life, not industrialization. As a symbol of this, he adopted hand-spinning on a wooden wheel and used only khadi -- hand-spun -- textiles. He developed a distaste for the synthesized drugs and surgery which he associated with Western medicine, describing them as "black magic." Doctors, he believed, "violate our religious instinct" by prioritizing the body over the mind and curing diseases that people had deserved by their conduct. Lawyers, meanwhile, had propped up British rule by espousing British law and were like "leeches" on the people, their profession "just as degrading as prostitution."

(p. 34):

At the end of the First World War, India found itself subject to a new onslaught of oppression. The subcontinent had been heavily taxed, repeatedly hit for loans, and had given one and a half million of its men into the service of a distant military effort. Indian harvests had been requisitioned to fill European bellies, with the effect that the bounteous land that produced them suffered shortages. Four out of every five British soldiers engaged in defending the vulnerable North-West Frontier against Afghans and tribal warfare had been called away to fight for the Allies. As a result, militant pan-Islamic fundamentalists were able to gain a strong foothold in the Punjab, as well as in Bengal. Across the rest of India, Hindu nationalism seized the opportunity to capitalize on public discontent.

3. Civis Brittanicus Sum: Starts with Prince Louis of Battenberg, b. 1900, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, in 1914 49th in line to the British throne, known as Dickie. With the coming of war against Germany, Dickie's father, another Prince Louis, was sacked by Asquith and Churchill for his suspiciously German name, then renamed Mountbatten. Dickie [Lord Louis] Mountbatten would later become viceroy of India (p. 40):

In 1919, Dickie was released from the navy to go to Cambridge, where he matriculated at Christ's College. Entrance to the two most hallowed of English universities in those days had little to do with academic merit and a lot to do with connections and money. The intensely anti-intellectual Prince of Wales, Prince Edward ("David"), had already been through Magdalen College, Oxford, where he found it necessary to keep his private tutor with him at all times. His younger brother Prince Albert ("Bertie"), who had been placed sixty-eighth out of sixty-eight in his final examinations at Osborne, was at Trinity College, Cambridge. Another brother, Prince Henry, was so profoundly dim of wit that even the royals themselves looked down on him (David was said to have remarked that the only reason "poor Harry" recognized the national anthem was because everybody stood up). He was about to start alongside his brother at Trinity. Unfortunately, the royal family viewed education with the same suspicion with which a villageful of medieval peasants viewed witchcraft. The king refused to let Bertie and Harry live among their college peers. Instead he put them up at Southacre, a large house which was a good distance out of town, and consequently the shy Bertie made no friends at all, while Harry spent most of his university career setting up mousetraps in the conservatory. The young princes were fortunate in having one person who could provide a link to the distant social whirl of undergraduate life: their cousin, Dickie Mountbatten.

(p. 41):

Even before the war, the British Empire had been modifying it relationship with its colonies. Four of its great territories -- Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada -- now held "dominion status," allowing them a measure of self-government. It was incongruous that India remained a mere colony. The incongruity was enhanced by the fact that India had provided wartime supplies of food and soldiers, the latter widely recruited by Mohandas Gandhi, who still professed that those who wished for rights must act like they deserved them. But the British government in India appeared to be moving toward greater control. In February 1919, it introduced the Rowlatt Bills, two pieces of antiterrorist legislation which were intended to reinforce the totalitarian powers that had been granted to the judiciary in wartime. Gandhi saw these bills as an open challenge.

Gandhi called "a hartal -- a day of prayer and fasting that effectively functioned as a general strike"; the hartal was intended as nonviolent, but riots broke out (pp. 41-43):

But the most significant incident, which would change the whole course of British imperial history, was to take place in Amritsar, north of Delhi. On 10 April 1919, two Indian leaders who had been organizing the hartals were arrested. In consequence, there was a massive riot. Forty thousand people ran amok in the city, pillaging and burning buildings, and killing five white men as well as seriously injuring two women. The next morning, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer arrived from Jullundur to take command of the scorched city. [ . . . ]

The gathering, though technically illegal, had been peaceful until Dyer showed up. At his order, 1,650 bullets were fired into the throng of men, women and children. Soldiers deliberately blocked the exits, trapping people in the killing ground. In desperation, they clawed their way up the walls, scrambled over their injured friends and leaped down the open well, which filled with 120 bodies drowning and suffocating in water thick with blood. The slaughter went on until the ammunition was spent. Official estimates put the death toll at 379, with at least 1,200 more injured. Popular estimates went much higher. Many of the victims were too scared to seek medical assistance from the British hospitals, and the curfew prevented families from searching for their dead.

Dyer showed no remorse in the aftermath of his massacre. Instead, he had high-caste Indians whom he suspected of political agitation rounded up and publicly flogged. Any Indian who dared approach the street where a Christian missionary had been dragged off her bicycle was forced to crawl facedown in the dirt.

Dyer's action had been vicious, decisive and unforgettable, and would polarize political opinion across the empire. [ . . . ] Amritsar was the most influential single incident in the radicalization of Congress, and in the radicalization of the Nehrus.

More surprising, perhaps, was the great upsurge in popular backing for Dyer. "I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good," said the man himself, and there was no shortage of people who agreed with him. The House of Lords passed a motion in his support. The Morning Post newspaper started a drive to raise funds for his retirement; twenty-six thousand pounds were collected, from members of the public and celebrities, including Rudyard Kipling and the Duke of Somerset. When Sir Edwin Montagu rose in parliament to condemn Dyer for terrorism and racial humiliation of the Indians, he was shouted down by Conservative members, crying "It saved a mutiny," accusing him of Bolshevism and screaming anti-Semitic insults; the session nearly turned into a physical fight.

4. Dreaming of the East: The Prince of Wales (David) and Dickie Mountbatten sail to India (pp. 49-50):

The prince's itinerary had been planned according to long-established royal tradition. He was to progress around India attending interminable parties, opening buildings, killing as much wildlife as possible and only interacting with the common people by waving at them from a parade. [ . . . ]

But a smooth disembarkation could not allay fears that the prince's four-month tour would end in disaster -- and the probable culprit was obvious. Gandhi, according to the prince, "was regarded as a sinister if somewhat ludicrous figure" in government circles. This was perhaps an understatement. The year before, Winston Churchill had astonished a dinner party by suggesting that he have Gandhi bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample the Mahatma into the dirt.

(pp. 53-54):

That night, David was encouraged to dance away his woes at Government House. "I am afraid that I prefer native states to British India," Dickie complained, but the evidence suggests that he had a good time. His card for the evening reveals that he danced with so many new girls that he could not remember all their names. There was a foxtrot with "Red Ostrich Feather," a one-step with "Pink Gray Stockings" and two more foxtrots with "Miss Slim Ankles." Despite appearances, though, the girl-crazy days of 1920 were behind him. Miss Slim Ankles was destined for disappointment, for he had been writing to the Honorable Edwina Ashley throughout the tour.

Edwina Ashley was a year younger than Dickie Mountbatten. Her maternal grandfather was Sir Ernest Cassel, an enormously successful banker and close friend of King Edward VII (who had stood as her godfather and after whom she had been named). Sir Ernest bequeathed to his first granddaughter the greatest portion of his estate. This included properties in Mayfair, Bournemouth, Newmarket and Switzerland; a considerable collection of art treasures and valuable furnishings; and a trust fund worth something close to £3 million (equivalent to over £100 million today). From her father's side, Edwina would ultimately inherit even more money, along with the estates of Broadlands in Hampshire and Classiebawn in Sligo. It was from that side that she also inherited a colorful family tree, ranging from Prime Ministers Melbourne and Palmerston to the Algonquin princess Pocahontas.

Despite all this gilding, Edwina had endured an austere and lonely childhood. Her mother had died in 1911, after which her father, Lord Mount Temple, had taken a new wife -- described later by Dickie as "a wicked woman, a real bitch." Because Edwina and her sister could not get on with their stepmother, they were doomed to a youth of freezing showers and endless lacrosse at a hearty girls ' boarding school in Eastbourne. Edwina was bullied on account of her grandfather being rich, German and Jewish, and later described school as "sheer hell." [ . . . ]

Dickie and Edwina had met in October 1920, at a dance given by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt at Claridge's Hotel in London. They met again in the town at Cowes during the Regatta Week of 1921, when the keener-eyed society doyennes noticed the pair dancing together every night. Grace Vanderbilt was among those doyennes and invited them both on a ten-day cruise around Belgium and France on the Vanderbilt yacht.

(p. 56):

Between December 1921 and January 1922, the British authorities arrested an almost unbelievable total of thirty thousand people in connection with the hartals. It was hard for them not to arrest even more. Jawahar's sister Betty remembered that everyone was so keen to support Gandhi's cause that "people who were not arrested would pile into prison vans, which arrived at the jails with more prisoners than the jailers expected or could handle. The officials were at their wits' ends; what could you do with people like that?"

5. Private Lives (pp. 63-66):

On 18 July 1922, Lord Louis Mountbatten married the Honorable Edwina Ashley at St. Margaret's Church, Westminster. It was the wedding of the year. Policemen linked arms to hold back the crowd of eight thousand people, which had not been deterred by the drizzly London weather.

The guests included most of the royal family, led by Queen Mary, imposing in plumes, feathers and fat strands of pearls; and her seventy-seven-year-old mother-in-law, Queen Alexandra, stylist in a jeweled turban and a long coat edged with black fur. The groom arrived, looking impossibly tall, slim and handsome next to his diminutive best man, David, the Prince of Wales. The bride debuted in a gown of silver tissue. [ . . . ]

The couple had two daughters together, Patricia in 1924 and Pamela in 1929. Often they had the young Prince Philip of Greece to stay after he began his education at Cheam prep school in 1930. [Prince Philip, b. 1921, after some name changing and title swapping, married Queen Elizabeth II in 1947.] Behind this illusion of wedded bliss, Edwina embarked on a long and ostentatious series of affairs. These started very early on, even if one discounts the claim Charlie Chaplin once dropped into conversation about Edwina having made a pass at him during her honeymoon. Dickie's posting to the Dardanelles aboard HMS Revenge in 1923 left his young wife alone to the gaudy pleasures of London's night life, and she -- still quite recently emancipated from her maiden existence -- made the most of them. "Went to see David at St. James's Palace," Dickie wrote warily in his diary on 3 December 1925. "He had a queer story about Edwina."

There would be many more queer stories to come. In October 1926, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a lurid story titled "A Royal 'Spanking' for Gay Lady Mountbatten." Though not quite as scandalous as it sounds to modern ears, the article was damaging enough. It contained a list of her misdeeds, which were said to have included an inappropriate Charleston with Fred Astaire, and a florid description of the rebuke she had allegedly received from Queen Mary. By then, Dickie knew all too well that his wife was doing more than the Charleston with some of her "ginks," as her admirers became known. He was devastated. His younger daughter, Pamela, later said that he had nurtured a romantic dream about "a wife that was purer than pure," whom he could put on a pedestal and who would support his career indefatigably." And then, of course, he finds that she's not like that at all." [ . . . ]

Despite the Mountbattens' marital dramas, the marriage did not break up. There had been a decisive row, with Edwina sitting in her bath, sobbing, and telling Dickie that she wanted to be free. Dickie agreed to leave the next morning and retired to bed. His cooler action worked; it was Edwina who came to his room to make up. They agreed to stay together, though with, effectively, an open relationship. Dickie had realized, with a commendable grasp of reality that would elude him in his working life, that he could not have his wife to himself. Edwina would be allowed her boyfriends, and Dickie, somewhat perfunctorily, would take a girlfriend. He met Yola Letellier, the wife of a French newspaper owner, at a polo game. According to Dickie's younger daughter, Pamela, "He didn't fall head over heels, but he found her very attractive, to flirt with, to dance with, and to enjoy life with." Though it may have been adultery in a technical sense, Dickie's relationship with Yola would demonstrate his instinctive urge for fidelity. They would stay together, in one form or another, for decades.

6. We Want No Caesars: In 1930, Gandhi organized to protest the British government's monopoly on salt (pp. 75-76):

Gandhi and his fellow satyagraphis marched 241 miles to the shores of the Arabian Sea, attracting many more marchers as they went. A crowd of thousands, waited upon by the international media, arrived at the coastal village of Dandi on 5 April. They prayed all night, and the next morning, Gandhi led them down to the ocean and picked up a handful of salt from the shore. The marchers immediately crowded into the sea and filled all manner of kettles and pans, boiling them over fires to evaporate the water, leaving behind in each a few muddy crystals of contraband.

The effect was sensational. Along five thousand miles of coastline, many thousands of Indians went to the shore and simply picked up or boiled down their own salt. The British administration in Delhi, aware that it was being made to look foolish, started making the situation worse by arresting people. These included Nehru and Gandhi, the latter's detention provoking a demonstration by one hundred thousand people in Bombay. Twenty-five thousand others followed their leaders into British prisons.

The American journalist Webb Miller made his way with some difficulty past the British authorities to watch a satyagraha protest at the salt pans north of Bombay. His eyewitness report shocked the world. Two and a half thousand satyagrahis clad in white khadi, led by Gandhi's son Manilal and the poet Sarojini Naidu, marched toward the salt deposits. Indian police guards, commanded by a handful of British officers, ran forward to meet the first column of marchers and struck at them brutally with their steel-tipped lathis. "Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows," Miller wrote. The air filled with the grisly thud of steel against undefended skull. The first line fell in pools of their own blood, many struck unconscious. The rest marched on until they, too, were beaten down. Then a second column formed, and the same thing happened again. Hundreds of bodies piled up, bones broken, flesh slashed open, white clothes spattered and soaked with crimson. But not a single satyagrahi fought back. Frustrated, the police began harassing the casualties, beating them brutally, kicking them in their stomachs and groins and throwing their bruised bodies into ditches. That afternoon, Miller counted 320 injured and two dead in the shed that served as a field hospital. [ . . . ]

In January 1931, Gandhi, Nehru and other leaders were released by the viceroy, Lord Irwin, probably the most sympathetic viceroy India had yet seen. He invited Gandhi to the Viceroy's House and did not even object when the old man brought his own illegal salt to consume pointedly in front of him. In London, Churchill launched into an outraged condemnation of the spectacle of "a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace," but Irwin ignored him.

(pp. 78-79):

By the early 1930s, even the British prime minister supported the idea of Indian self-rule. And yet independence would take until 1947. To a considerable extent the delay may be attributed to the actions of three men: Winston Churchill, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi.

One of the great faults of the British attitude toward India was simply that it was pigheaded. It preferred the illusion of imperial might to the admission of imperial failure; it put prestige before common sense. And the most pigheaded of all British politicians when it came to India was Winston Churchill, who, following the defeat of his party, had returned to the backbenches as an opposition MP. "I hate Indians," he declared. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." Churchill was fond of quoting his father, the former chancellor of the exchequer Lord Randolph Churchill, "Our rule in India is as it were a sheet of oil spread out over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity," the elder Churchill had said. As a metaphor, it was apt, though for different reasons than he intended. An oil slick does not protect the sea from storms but stifles all life beneath it. Winston Churchill made it his business to incapacitate any attempt to move the Indian nation toward self-government. Clement Attlee remembered of the Simon Commission recommendations that "it took a very long time to get through and a great deal of harm was done during the debates by Winston and his die-hards. Halifax [formerly Lord Irwin], who was Viceroy, believed that there was a good chance that we might have got it accepted and had an all-Indian Government but for Churchill and the die-hards. That is one of the things one has to chalk down against the old boy."

But within Indian division, Churchill saw an opportunity. An argument continually repeated saw the large Muslim and Untouchable minorities as being under serious threat in Hindu-majority India. The British, in their role as paternalistic rulers, had a moral duty to protect them. If the British left, it would be a dereliction of that duty; therefore the British could not leave India. The existence of the Muslim League served to strengthen this argument. Meanwhile, it suited the Muslim League to have friends in the British establishment.

(pp. 80-81):

Despite his position as one of the key figures in the rise of twentieth-century Islam, Jinnah was no fundamentalist. His Islam was liberal, moderate and tolerant. It was said that he could recite none of the Koran, rarely went to a mosque and spoke little Urdu. Much has been made of his reluctance to don Muslim outfits, his fondness for whiskey and his rumored willingness to eat ham sandwiches. In fact, he never pretended to be anything other than a progressive Muslim, influenced by the intellectual and economic aspects of European culture as well as by the teachings of Muhammad. The game he played was carefully considered: here was a Muslim who understood the British sufficiently to parley on equal terms, but asserted his Islamic identity strongly enough that he could never be seen to grovel. His refusal of a knighthood was significant; so, too, was his demurral in the face of Muslim attempts to call him "Maulana" Jinnah, denoting a religious teacher. Some historians go so far as to describe him as a "bad" Muslim, revealing more about their own ideas of what a Muslim should be than about Jinnah's faith. In any case, the Muslim League suffered from no shortage of good Muslims. What it lacked was a good politician. And Jinnah was without question one of the most brilliant politicians of his day.

The line about Jinnah speaking little Urdu is curious given that he was an advocate of making Urdu the official language of Pakistan (along with English, but pointedly rejecting Bengali of East Pakistan as well as the native languages of West Pakistan. Jinnah was born in Karachi, so most likely his first language was Sindhi. (Most Urdu speakers in Karachi moved in after the 1947 partition.) As an Oxford graduate, Jinnah certainly spoke English, probably much better than he spoke Urdu.

(pp. 81-82):

But probably the most surprising obstacle to Indian independence was the man who was widely supposed to be leading the campaign for it: Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi's need for spotless moral perfection hamstrung his party's progress. His principal object was to make the Indian people worthy of freedom in the eyes of God. The object of actually achieving freedom from the British was secondary. Gandhi's most influential work, Hind swaraj, published in 1908, set out very clearly his point of view: that European civilization was corrupt, atheist and destructive, but that merely driving the British out of India would not serve to make India free. To be free, Indians needed to relinquish violence, material possessions, machinery, railways, lawyers, doctors, formal education, the English language, discord between Hindu and Muslim, alcohol and sex. It is for this reason that his campaigns so often faltered. Gandhi stood for virtue in a form purer than politics usually allows. Whenever he had to make a choice between virtue and politics, he always chose virtue. He strove for universal piety, continence and humility, regardless of the consequences. Even if a person were faced with death, or a group with obliteration, he would sanction no compromise of moral integrity.

(pp. 89-90):

On 1 April 1937 the Government of India Act came into force, bringing the vote to almost thirty-five million people. When the election results came in, Congress, under the presidency of Nehru, had won a great victory. The news was nowhere near as good for the Muslim League, which failed to win any outright victories. In the Punjab, for instance, the Unionist Party commanded the largest portion of the Muslim vote. "I shall never come to the Punjab again," declared Jinnah; "it is such a hopeless place."

Jinnah had not expected to win overall, but he had pinned his hopes on achieving a strong enoughs hare of the vote that Congress would have to offer the Muslim League seats in its cabinets. But so decisive were its majorities that congress had no need to do so. The British Indian civil servant Penderel Moon called Congress's rejection of the league at this point "a fatal error -- the prime cause of the creation of Pakistan."

7. Power without Responsibility (p. 95):

If the viceroy was out to sabotage Congress, he would have pleased the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, who took office on 10 May 1940. Churchill's reactionary stance on India was so extreme that it depressed even committed imperialists like his India secretary, Leopold Amery. Had Nehru been privy to Churchill's cabinet orations, all his worst fears about the British policy of divide and rule would have been confirmed. Churchill described Hindu-Muslim antagonism as "a bulwark of British rule in India" and noted that, were it to be resolved, their concord would result in "the united communities joining in showing us the door."

Dive and rule had worked exceptionally well. Both sides now hated each other even more than they hated the British. But perhaps divide and rule had worked too well; the last thing the British wanted on their hands was a civil war. Shortly before Churchill came to office, the Muslim League had, for the first time, voted in favor of a separate state of Pakistan. Jinnah was acclaimed as the "Quaid-e-Azam" (Great Leader) for his championing of this policy. It was said that he had told a few close associates that the demand for Pakistan was a "tactical move," rather than a serious aim. Either way, it served to stir up trouble. Tara Singh, a Sikh radical, immediately declared, "If the Muslim League wants to establish Pakistan they will have to pass through an ocean of Sikh blood."

There is a section here on Dickie Mountbatten's naval career, which involved a lot of mishaps before his ship was ultimately sunk somewhere near Crete. The tale of the sunk ship was spun into movie In Which We Serve by his friend Noel Coward. Churchill ultimately rescued Mountbatten, installing him as an adviser in Combined Operations, where he planned the disastrous 1942 invasion of northern France at Dieppe. He was promoted again.

(pp. 104-106):

On 15 February 1942 the Allies -- and Britain in particular -- had received a devastating shock when the supposedly "unconquerable" Singapore was taken by the Japanese. Singapore's huge guns pointed out to sea and were mounted in concrete; the Japanese simply went around the back and attacked from the land. The parallel with Lawrence of Arabia's capture of Aqaba in 1917, one of the most famous escapades in British military history, is so strong that it seems extraordinary that a British command would not have anticipated such an approach. Yet it did not. Without firing a single shot, Colonel Hunt surrendered with sixty thousand troops of the Indian army.

This brought Japan right up to India's doorstep, threatening British interests on a new and potentially devastating front. "If the Japanese adopt a bold policy," the joint planners warned Churchill, "we are in real danger of losing our Indian Empire -- with incalculable consequences to the future conduct of the war." The old man reacted instantly when stung in his Indian Empire. Until then, the British had not bothered to improve upon their offer of dominion status with a date or a constitution. But whether or not they planned on keeping India, they could not lose it to the Japanese; and its defense could be facilitated by some form of cooperation from Indian politicians. Meanwhile, Churchill was under attack domestically and internationally for his reactionary stance on Indian freedom. The Labour leader, Attlee, told Churchill his views were "not widely shared," and that imperialist braggadocio was "fatally short-sighted and suicidal." Roosevelt leaned on him harder still.

Besieged on all sides, even Churchill had to accept that only some sort of settlement would satisfy the Americans and result in a useful war effort from the Indians. Just three weeks after the Japanese took Singapore, he sent Labour MP Sir Stafford Cripps to Delhi. In India, the march to independence had been milling about pointlessly for so long that its leaders were completely taken aback. [ . . . ] Nehru took over negotiations, for he was prepared to fight Japan if it would result in an agreement. But Cripps's eventual offer soured his ambivalence into dissatisfaction. Heavy concessions to the princely states, and a voted system weighted by caste and creed, would deprive Congress of overall control. Furthermore, dissenting provinces would be permitted to leave the Indian Union. [ . . . ]

The United States had taken little interest in Indian until the rise of Gandhi had made it interesting. But owing to the Americans' own long memory of colonial rule, as well as the nation's principles of liberty and democracy, there was a general feeling against empires -- and against the British Empire in particular.

8. A New Theater (pp. 107-108):

In June 1942, Louis Fischer spent a week at Gandhi's ashram and observed the preparations for a new campaign under the slogan "Quit India." The slogan was not only catchy but accurate: the British administration was to be harried, disobeyed and besieged until it simply upped and left, war or no war, economy or no economy, responsibility or no responsibility. The Quit India resolution, passed by Congress on 8 August 1942, announced that congress would "no longer [be] justified in holding the nation back from endeavouring to assert its will" against the British administration, and sanctioned "a mass struggle on nonviolent lines under the inevitable leadership of Gandhiji." The struggle would only begin at Gandhi's word; but this was a call for treason as far as the British were concerned. The first arrests were made in the early hours of the morning of 9 August.

Over the following days, India exploded in violent uprisings, described by the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, as the "most serious since that of 1857." There were Quit India hartals across the country, which turned into riots. The police and army fought back, often brutally, leaving an official civilian death toll of 1,028; bazaar gossip put the total at 25,000. Effectively, Congress had given the raj an excuse to imprison hundreds of its leaders, including Gandhi himself and Nehru -- who, according to his sister, was almost thankful for it, so uncomfortable had he felt opposing the war effort. The resolution could never have succeeded. Britain could not evacuate India in the middle of the Second World War, with Japan looming on its eastern front. But the empty space created in politics by the Congress leaders being in prison gave the Muslim League its chance to rush in.

According to Jinnah, it was not in the interest of the Muslims for the British to abandon them in a potentially hostile swamp of Hinduism. The logical position of the League was actually to keep the British in India -- at least for as long as it took to convince them of the case for Pakistan, and perhaps indefinitely. The effect of Gandhi's Quit India misstep, and the League's hugely successful campaign during the 1940s, can be seen from the election statistics. In the general election of 1945-46, the Muslim League would win about 75 percent of all Muslim votes. In every previous election, its share of the Muslim vote had hovered around 4.6 percent. During the war years, Gandhi and Congress handed Jinnah a sixteenfold increase in his support. Quit India damaged the chances of a united India at least as much as any single act of the British administration ever had.

(pp. 111-113):

Back in England Dickie Mountbatten, amazingly, had kept his job. Churchill was not especially perturbed by the horror of Dieppe. He had proved his point, which was that to invade across the Channel at this time was impossible. Instead of being sacked, Mountbatten was given a new set of toys to play with. "Winston adored funny operations," remembered an intelligence liaison officer. Mountbatten planned a raid on the Channel Islands, leading General Brooke to complain that he "was again putting up wild proposals disconnected with his direct duties." He planned to sneak troops into the north of Norway, whence they would descend on Axis forces like Valkyries in little armored snow-carts. He puzzled over the anchorage of the Mulberry harbor, demonstrating models to Churchill in his bathtub aboard the Queen Mary. At one stage, he championed an enormous, rolled-up spiral of roadway, called the Swiss Roll, which would be released by rocket propulsion. Unfortunately, when he invited a group of admirals and generals to watch him demonstrate it, the Swiss Roll went off course and rolled most of them into the sea.

Geoffrey Pyke, one of a group of scientists Mountbatten nurtured at Combined Operations, was his coconspirator in the greatest of all his flights of fancy. Habakkuk was to be an aircraft carrier, fashioned out of a colossal molded iceberg. It could be frozen in Canada or Russia and then dragged to the North Sea to fight Hitler. Pyke invented a special extra-strong ice, which he named Pykecrete, made from paper pulp and seawater. A prototype Habakkuk, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and twenty feet deep -- about the size of twelve double-decker buses -- was set up on Canada's Patricia Lake, so that Mountbatten could sell the idea to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Quebec. With typical theatrics, Dickie produced two blocks of ice -- one standard, one Pykecrete -- pulled out a revolver and shot each one. The standard ice exploded; the Pykecrete survived, and so impressively that the bullet glanced off it and stung the American chief of naval operations in the leg before lodging in the wall. The Americans vetoed the project.

In August 1943, Mountbatten had confessed to Churchill, "I have a congenital weakness for feeling certain I can do anything." Churchill seemed to believe he could do anything, too, for he proposed Mountbatten for the new role of supreme Allied commander, Southeast Asia. Roosevelt agreed; he had met Dickie during the latter's propaganda tour of the United States in the autumn of 1941 and liked him. In the military, it appeared that Churchill and Roosevelt were more or less the only two men who did. [ . . . ]

Mountbatten's role at Southeast Asia Command (SEAC) was ill defined, and he was regarded with suspicion by much of the existing hierarchy. His own superiors had conflicting interests: the British chiefs of staff intended for SEAC to recapture Burma, Malaya, Singapore and the rest of the former European colonies; the Americans only really cared about helping China and were wary of imperialist tendencies among their European allies. [ . . . ]

By the middle of 1944, Mountbatten had moved his headquarters from Delhi to the beautiful Botanic Gardens at Kandy in Ceylon, which was two thousand miles from the front line. This distance was probably no bad thing. Mountbatten was, it must be admitted, a hopeless strategist. It was left to commanders of proven competence -- notably William Slim and the Fourteenth Army -- to win the battles. Mountbatten spent a lot of time sitting in Kandy devising complex and manpower-heavy operations against the Japanese, which were canceled by the chiefs of staff whenever he finished putting them together.

(pp. 113-114):

Meanwhile, outside India, something alarming was happening. Subhas Chandra Bose had fallen in with the Nazis. The political vacuum created by Quit India not only had benefited the Muslim League but had allowed the Indian National Army (INA), Bose's militia, to get a foothold. In Germany, Bose met Hitler, Mussolini and high officials from the Japanese governments and, to the disgust of Nazi eugenicists, involved himself with a German woman. He was indulged with the creation of an Indian legion in the German army, though the reputation it soon carved out for itself as brutal and ill disciplined did him no credit.

In the summer of 1943, Bose emerged from the foam off the coast of Singapore, a fascist Aphrodite spewed up from the deep, with a Japanese submarine serving as his scallop shell. The Germans had put him in a U-boat at Hamburg three months previously, and he had swapped ships off the coast of Madasgascar. He was taken to Tokyo and given command of the formerly British Indian soldiers that had been captured in Singapore More than half of them had refused to fight for the Japanese and were put in camps, where thousands perished. But Bose managed to persuade ten thousand more among the survivors to join the turncoats, and was able to add twenty thousand recruits from Malaya. In October 1943, he declared a provisional government of Free India and made himself head of state, prime minister, minister of war and minister of foreign affairs. He set up his government's headquarters in the Andaman Islands, a tropical archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, and declared war on the United States and Britain. In January 1944, he moved his base to Rangoon in Japanese-occupied Burma and marched on India with seven thousand of his men.

(p. 118):

Among the highest ranks of the British empire, few wee ready for the shift into a postcolonial era. One man, however, was. "It is horrifying," Mountbatten had written in his diary shortly before the end of the war in the East, "to think that the American and Indian press evidently still regard us as merely Imperial monsters, little better than Fascists or Nazis." When Attlee vacillated and Churchill blustered over setting a date for Burmese self-government, it was Mountbatten who tried to persuade them to set a firm timetable for the handover. It was Mountbatten, too, who had opened negotiations with Aung San; it was Mountbatten who had wanted to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh; it was Mountbatten who had persuaded the Dutch to negotiate with independence advocate Sukarno in Indonesia. In all of these matters, he was led by his wife. Referring to Indonesia, he admitted: "Nobody gave me an idea of the strength of the nationalist movements. Edwina was the first person to give me an inkling of what was going on." From then on, said Driberg, "she showed an instant strong sympathy with any Asian nationalist who was being oppressed by some American-backed right-wing regime."

9. Now or Never (p. 119):

With the war won, Winston Churchill called a general election. The race pitted Churchill, victorious and iconic, against the flat and efficient Clement Attlee. Despite his friendship with Churchill, Dickie Mountbatten shared the political colors of his wife. During the campaign, he answered the door at Broadlands to a Tory canvasser. "I don't have a vote because I'm a peer," he told her. "If I did, I'd vote Labour. You can try going round the back. I think my butler's a Conservative."

To the surprise of almost everyone, and most of all Churchill, there was a Labour landslide, and Attlee became prime minister. In his speech opening the new parliament, Attlee had the king announce that his government planned "the early realization of full self-government in India." The contention that India should be given back to the Indians did not sit well with Churchill and the opposition, but they had little room for maneuver. The war had ended, and Britain was broke. The gap in the balance of payments at the end of the war had widened to £2.1 billion (then $8 billion), roughly the cost of administering the empire for two years. Keynes had told Attlee frankly that he was facing a "financial Dunkirk," and the only option was to seek aid of around $5 billion from the United States. The funds available to repair wartime devastation would hardly benefit Britain; they were diverted to the nations that had hosted land battles, such as France, Holland and Belgium. The treasury was all but empty, and the debts of empire lay in the middle of it like an open drain. An economic aspiration had started the British Empire. An economic reality would end it.

(pp. 119-120):

There was a practical urgency to the desire to dump the empire, which had shown up most clearly during the Bengal Famine of 1943. During the war, the British had shipped grain and railway stocks out of India, weakening its domestic food supply network. At the beginning of 1943, Churchill ordered a cut of 60 percent in sailings to the subcontinent, saying that the Indian people and the Allied forces there "must live on their stocks." But Bengal had been lashed by a massive cyclone in October 1942, and in the wake of that by three tidal waves. The rice harvest had been relatively poor during 1942 and 1943, prompting panic buying in the market, stockpiling by producers and a massive increase in the price of food grains that coincided unhappily with a falling real-term agricultural wages.

Around six million people were affected by the subsequent famine, and between one and two million of them died. Hospitals filled up with wretched and emaciated peasants, suffering from dysentery, anemia, cholera and smallpox; patients came in sweating from malarial fevers and breaking out in the hard papules of scabies. Almost all of the dead were poor people in rural areas, except for those few in the cities who contracted disease from the wandering sufferers. In the cool bungalows and elegant mansions of Calcutta, rich Europeans and Indians alike supped on plenty. Supplies were available, just at a price that the poor could not afford. Shameful fortunes were reaped from misery and hunger. The administration moved more quickly to suppress evidence of its failure than to right it.

The famine was the direct result of the failure of the Bengal government and, indeed, the government of India as a whole, to regulate the market -- thus allowing the price of rice to rise out of the reach of rural agricultural workers. When the governments realized their mistake,they compounded it by handing the market over to "unrestricted free trade" in March 1943. The blame for the famine cannot entirely be laid upon the British, for the government of Bengal was run by elected Indians; but the gross inhumanity shown by that government was matched in London. During the crisis, the army veteran Lord Wavell took over as viceroy. He repeatedly telegrammed Churchill, telling him that millions of people were dying in India and that extra food was needed. In reply, "Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet!" Churchill refused to release the government's readily available food stocks, on the grounds that British people might need them at some point. Despite enormous pressure from Wavell in Delhi and the India secretary, Leopold Amery, in London, Churchill and the Bengal government persisted in a policy whose effect was a sort of genocide by capitalism. The government of India, in a panic, lied and pretended that the food stocks were on the way. The damning official report concluded that the famine had been avoidable,and its management had been a catastrophe.

(p. 124):

Wavell announced his intention to form an interim government of six Congress Hindus (including one Untouchable), five Muslim Leaguers, a Sikh, a Parsi and an Indian Christian. Jinnah had already accepted the plan, and it was rumored that Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel were ready to acquiesce. But Gandhi leaned heavily on Congress to reject it, on the grounds that there was no Congress Muslim in the government. Gandhi meant well: he hoped to demonstrate to Muslims that Congress was their party, too. In retrospect, though, most commentators have agreed that his derailment of the plan was a point of no return. The Muslim League's mistrust of Gandhi reached a fever pitch; from then on, the partition of India was inevitable. It fell to Nehru, on 10 August, to inform Wavell that he was prepared to form a government.

As soon as Nehru accepted the premiership, Jinnah dropped his support for the plan. The council of the Muslim League declared a Direct Action Day for 16 August. "We will have," Jinnah announced, "either a divided India or a destroyed India." It looked like he might get both.

(p. 128):

Churchill's behavior over the next year would be extremely favorable to Pakistan and to Jinnah personally. There can be no doubt that his public championing of the Muslim League's cause in the House of Commons throughout 1946 and 1947, and of Pakistan's thereafter, was crucial both to the creation of Pakistan and to the British government's support for its interests over the years to come. If Jinnah is regarded as the father of Pakistan, Churchill must qualify as its uncle; and, therefore, as a pivotal figure in the resurgence of political Islam.

(p. 132):

Mountbatten was summoned to meet the prime minister, Clement Attlee, for quite another reason on 18 December 1946. According to Attlee, Dickie was taken aback at the offer of the viceroyalty of India -- "Bit of a shock for him, you know" -- and initially was reluctant to accept owing to the probable hitch in his naval career. But the consent of the lords of the Admiralty for Mountbatten's removal was obtained with noteworthy ease.

(p. 134):

Once [Attlee] had received the king's nod, he announced the new plan, the new viceroyalty and a date: 1 June 1048, flexible to within one month. Mountbatten's instructions from Attlee, while vague in their wording, were clear enough in their implication. It was the "definite objective" of His Majesty's government to negotiate a plan for the transfer of power, with India or the divided bits of India remaining in the British Commonwealth if possible. Mountbatten was to stop short of compulsion. If his negotiations had reached no conclusion by 1 October 1947, Attlee had mandated him to get Britain out in nine months at most, regardless of whether the Indians were ready or not.

Part Two: The End

10. Operation Madhouse (p. 141):

Wavell believed that the great achievement of the raj was the unification of India. He also knew that the partition of the same would be incendiary. It was, he thought, in Britain's best interests to stand well back before lighting the touch-paper. He wanted to hand over power gradually to democratic provinces and Indian princedoms, in localized groups, while retaining British jurisdiction at the center. When all the bits and pieces were under Indian control, the British could bow out discreetly -- leaving the Indians to deal with the civil war that would almost certainly be left behind.

The Breakdown Plan was far from perfect and made no attempt to save the Indian people from disaster. But the point was that the disaster would not be occurring on Britain's watch. Moreover, it was what Congress had been demanding for years: that Britain simply quit India. Yet it had not been thought acceptable in Whitehall -- partly because the resulting civil war would reflect badly on Britain, but also because it would not work quickly enough.

(p. 144):

If the local situation seemed bad, the national was far worse. On the Wednesday after Dickie and Edwina's arrival, riots broke out in Calcutta, killing eight and injuring 111. In Patna, the police went on strike and occupied the arms depot at Gaya; the prime minister of Bihar blamed Communists. By Thursday, casualties in Calcutta had risen to fourteen, and fires ripped through the east of the city. The police were rapidly losing control. First they attempted to subdue the mob with tear gas; when that did not work, they resorted to bullets and fired eighteen rounds into the crowd.

(p. 145):

While all this was going on, Mountbatten had to meet with the Indian leaders. For that first week, the two least compromising and highest profile among them declined his invitation, though he had been so anxious to meet these two in particular that he had written to each of them before his viceroyalty had begun. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, representing the Muslim League, remained in Bombay, making inflammatory speeches. Mohandas Gandhi, representing Mohandas Gandhi, was living among the outcastes in distant Bihar and refused to take advantage of the viceregal aircraft. Among those Mountbatten did meet, the impression was already less than encouraging. Many of the princes seemed determined to press for the independence of their states, rather than transferring their allegiance to an independent India -- a plan which would fragment the subcontinent into dozens, perhaps hundreds, of private kingdoms. The Maharaja of Bikaner blamed the Nawab of Bhopal for dividing the princes along communal lines. The Nawab of Bhopal said the Maharaja of Bikaner was nothing more than a patsy of Congress. Both begged Mountbatten not to let the British leave India at all. This opinion was not confined to the princes. John Matthai, the minister for transport, told him that "but for Congress, there was no body in India which would not move Heaven and Earth to keep the British."

(p. 146):

Jinnah made a speech in Bombay that confirmed Nehru's picture of him as a thorn in everyone's side. He alleged that the British had deliberately conspired against the Muslims, trying to force them into staying in India rather than creating their own state of Pakistan, in order to produce greater bloodshed and destruction after the raj's departure. He was in a better position than anyone else in India to know that the opposite was true, for the person who had been attempting to conspire with the British to create Pakistan for more than seven years was Jinnah himself.

(pp. 146-147):

While the viceroy struggled to generate a rapport with the Indians, his vicereine was doing far better. Edwina began by entertaining the wives of her husband's guests, but, within a couple of days of arriving, she established her own political network. In the first few days, she sought out and befriended Gandhi's right-hand woman, Amrit Kaur, who was to become one of her greatest friends and the new government's minister for health; Vallabhbhai Patel's influential daughter, Maniben; Liaquat's wife, the Begum Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan, who, like Edwina herself, was deeply involved in health and welfare work; the Untouchable leader B.R. Ambedkar; the radical feminist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya; and the poet and politician Sarojini Naidu, who coincidentally had been a childhood friend of her mother's. Very few of the women or, indeed, the men she met had ever been allowed into the Viceroy's House before.

Women were prominent in Indian politics, a trend which Edwina Mountbatten, along with many Indian women, attributed to Gandhism. Nonviolence, passive resistance and boycotts were all tactics which could be practiced by women without breaking social conventions; and Nehru had insisted as early as 1937 that the Congress manifesto pledge to remove all social, economic and political discrimination against women. As a result, there were more powerful women in India's Congress than there were in Britain's Labour Party or in the United States' Democratic Party at the time. The Muslim League, too, had Fatima Jinnah and the Begum Liaquat, unofficial but significant and visible figures, at the highest level. As Edwina would later tell an audience in London, "We shall have to wake up in this country when we see how the women of India have achieved emancipation to such a remarkable degree in spite of the backwardness of the country, the illiteracy of the people, the low standard of life, and all kinds of disadvantages from the point of view of religious feeling and other obstacles."

For years Edwina had been looking for a role in which she could actually do something, and, to her surprise, it would be in India that she found it. One of her most important friendships was quickly established with the sharp and personable Congress politician Vijaya Lakshmi "Nan" Pandit.

Then there was Edwina's relationship with Nan's brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, about which we're likely to hear more.

11. A Barrel of Gunpowder (pp. 163-164):

After two days, Mountbaten received the exciting news he had been awaiting. Back in London, the cabinet had authorized his plan for the transfer of power. Only six weeks into his viceroyalty, it seemed that he had already solved the insoluble problem. Immediately he issued a statement staying that he was ready to present the Indian leaders with the plan, and invited Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, Liaquat and Baldev Singh to attend a meeting at the Viceroy's House in Delhi on 17 May at 10:30 a.m.

So well had things been going with Jawahar that, on a whim, Dickie broke protocol and ignored the advice of his staff to show his new chum a copy of the secret plan in the study after dinner that very night. But when Jawahar read through the top-secret papers, his disposition turned from affable to shocked, and from shocked to furious. At two o'clock the next morning, he stormed into Krishna Menon's bedroom. The draft proposals, he wrote to Dickie that night, "produced a devastating effect upon me." They presented, he said, "a picture of fragmentation and conflict and disorder, and, unhappily also, of a worsening of relations between India and Britain."

The plan from which Nehru recoiled was known as "Plan Balkan," a name hardly more inspiring than "Operation Madhouse," and indeed approximately synonymous. Having for centuries enforced rule by unelected men from London, the British government had recently developed an unprecedented enthusiasm for the will of the people -- preferably, for the will of as many people as possible. There would be an India, there would be a Pakistan,a nd each province could choose which one to join. But the principle of self-determination would be extended further yet. Should Bengal or the Punjab be divided in their wishes, each state could be split; or it could choose to become an independent nation. Should the troublesome North-West Frontier Province wish to become independent, it could do so too. As for the 565 princely states, each of those could also determine its own future in or out of the two dominions, "presumably as feudatories or allies of Britain," Nehru commented sharply. What Nehru had foreseen was the prospect of Balkanization, but on the colossal scale of the subcontinent: the proliferation of dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of small and potentially antagonistic nation-states. Too small to survive alone, these would inevitably end up serving the interests of peripheral giants: not just Britain but the United States, Russia, China and Afghanistan. This would stir up civil conflict, undermine the central authority and split the army, police and services.

Mountbatten cancelled his meeting. Mountbatten was called back to Britain to explain why his plan was rejected. (pp. 166-168):

It was a reprimand, and Mountbatten took it very badly. Without hesitation, he threatened to resign. Edwina, together with V.P. Menon, calmed him down. It was Edwina, too, Menon's daughter remembered, who extracted a concession from Nehru to offset the revisions to the plan. She persuaded him that India should accept an initial phase of dominion status. This was no mean feat. Dominion status had been seen as an unacceptable halfway house by Congress since its declaration of purna swaraj (complete self-rule) in 1930, and by Nehru, who had been behind that declaration, for longer still. It is a clear demonstration of Edwina's extraordinary intimacy with Jawaharlal Nehru and her influence over policy. [ . . . ]

Mountbatten met with the opposition, in the forms of Churchill, Anthony Eden, John Anderson and Lord Salisbury, and reassured them off the record that it might be worth their while to take up Nehru's concession. If they were prepared to offer India a very early transfer of power, they could expect it to accept dominion status rather than full independence. The next day, Churchill wrote to Attlee that "if those terms are made good, so that there is an effective acceptance of dominion status for the several parts of a divided India, the Conservative Party will agree to facilitate the passage this session of the legislation necessary to confer dominion status upon such several parts of India." There was no ambiguity in his words. It was the phase of dominion status, as secured by Edwina, that persuaded him to support the bill. [ . . . ]

Mountbatten saw Churchill again on 22 May, finding him still in his bed -- a sight well known to the old man's colleagues. Churchill habitually organized breakfast meetings over a cigar and a weak whiskey and soda, often attended by his malodorous poodle, Rufus, and his budgerigar [parakeet], Toby, the latter perching on a square sponge atop the Churchillian pate. [ . . . ] It is no easy feat to maintain one's focus while being scolded by a man with a budgerigar on his head, and perhaps Mountbatten's confusion is attributable to such a distraction. Certainly Mountbatten seemed "very anxious" about the old man's attitude when he spoke to Amery later that week. "Dominion status has done something to ease the position with Winston, but he still fears some explosion," Amery noted. All accounts agree that Churchill gave Mountbatten a message to deliver to Jinnah. "This is a matter of life and death for Pakistan, if you do not accept this offer with both hands," the Conservative leader advised the Muslim. Mountbatten emphasized to his staff that Churchill's opinion was the only one in the world likely to sway Jinnah.

12. Lightning Speed Is Much Too Slow (pp. 169-171):

The plan had been approved; the acts drafted; the viceroy returned to Delhi, chastened but still hopeful. [ . . . ] That morning, future leaders of India and Pakistan were summoned to the viceroy's study for a two-hour briefing on the new plan. Sitting around the table with him were Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and J.B. Kripalani for Congress, Jinnah, Liaquat and Abdur Rab Nishtar for the Muslim League, and Baldev Singh for the Sikhs. "I got the feeling that the less the leaders talked the less the chance of friction and perhaps the ultimate breakdown of the meeting," noted Mountbatten, and consequently filibustered for as long as possible. His ploy was to declare upfront that he was not asking for the leaders' agreement to the plan -- because he knew that it met no one's demands. If they accepted that the plan was a solution in the interests of the country, that would be enough. He asked the leaders to let him have their responses by midnight. Jinnah told Mountbatten he would return at eleven o'clock after consulting his committee, and, sending the others off to read their copies of the plan, Mountbatten held him back "to impress on him that there could not be any question of a 'No' from the League." [ . . . ]

One troublesome icon having been dealt with, another showed up. Gandhi had spent the previous week railing against the new plan and trying to revert to the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 -- which he had been instrumental in refusing. The Congress Working Committee was thoroughly annoyed with him, and Mountbatten too had had his fill of the Mahatma. "He may be a saint but he seems also to be a disciple of Trotsky," the viceroy wrote to London. [ . . . ]

The next morning, the leaders of all parties arrived back at the Viceroy's House, tired and acquiescent. Mountbatten was prepared to listen to their many reservations in private but decided that none should be allowed to speak at the meeting in case they upset each other. And so, for the first time in history, no party raised an objection against a plan for independence. Immediately after they had not objected, Mountbatten theatrically raised and then thumped onto the table a plan for the transfer of power. The first paragraph revealed the unexpected fact that power was to be transferred by 15 August 1947 -- ten months in advance of the June 1948 deadline, and just ten weeks from the 3 June meeting itself. The room's silence changed its quality from one of studied etiquette to one of shock. The viceroy dismissed the bewildered leaders into the searing brightness of a Delhi day and could reflect on his personal moment of glory. Both parties had been forced to compromise -- Congress accepting partition, Jinnah more or less accepting what would probably be a moth-eaten Pakistan -- but he, Mountbatten, had finally been able to set a date.

(p. 173):

"A terrific sense of urgency had been pressed upon him by everybody to whom he had spoken," Campbell-Johnson wrote. But the records do not show anyone else pressing Mountbatten to hurry up: not the British government, not his advisers, not the Sikhs, not the Muslim League, not Gandhi and not even the majority of Congress. Nehru and Patel may have hinted that they were keen to get on with governing, but neither expressed any demand that Mountbatten set a date in August that same year. The rush was Mountbatten's alone.

A few months before the Mountbattens went to India, their marriage was in one of its healthier phases. Photographs of the time show them smiling, affectionate and relaxed, and their letters reveal a matching picture. A few weeks afterward, they reached a nadir, and by the beginning of June were constantly fighting. It is hard to believe that this turbulence did not have an effect on Mountbatten professionally -- especially as he had to work closely with Nehru and Gandhi, two men whose company his wife plainly preferred to his own. Edwina had not wanted to be in India in the first place, and in the first few weeks she put pressure on her husband to ensure that they would be on their way back to Britain as soon as possible. Dickie had always striven to impress her with his achievements at work. Perhaps, if he could carry out the transfer of power swiftly and efficiently enough, he might still save the marriage.

(pp. 175-176):

On 18 June, the Mountbattens flew to the beautiful lakeside city of Srinagar, for a visit to the largest of India's princely states, Kashmir. Nehru had already warned Mountbatten that the Muslim-majority Kashmir might prove to be a problem. Mountbatten knew the Hindu maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, having first met him in Calcutta at Christmas dinner in 1921, for which Sir Hari had been specially selected as one of the British government's best-behaved princely allies. Their acquaintance had been sufficiently cordial that Dickie and Edwina had holidayed with him at Srinagar as late as 1946.

It was known that the maharaja wanted Kashmir independent, a scheme unpalatable to Nehru, Gandhi and the British. The Mountbattens' visit to Kashmir was not a raging success. [ . . . ] Mountbatten assured the maharaja that he would be allowed a free choice of which dominion to join after 15 August, emphasizing the importance of ascertaining the will of the Kashmiri people, but making it clear that any moves toward independence would be foolish and dangerous.

Mountbatten had asked Nehru to brief him on Kashmir just before he left for Srinagar, and received an essay in return arguing that, despite its overwhelming Muslim population of 92 percent in Kashmir proper (excluding Jammu) and 77 percent overall, "the normal and obvious course appears to be for Kashmir to join the Constituent Assembly of India." Furthermore, "it is absurd to think that Pakistan would create trouble if this happens." Nehru himself was a Kashmiri by descent, and his detachment would repeatedly fail him when dealing with his ancestral state. Nonetheless, there was another reason for his desperation to secure Kashmir. If the North-West Frontier Province went to Pakistan, India would lose the Kindu Kush mountains -- its natural defense against attack from the north. Mountbatten was insisting that a plebiscite be held in the NWFP, to the despair of Nehru and Gandhi. If both the NWFP and Kashmir went to Pakistan, there would be nothing but farmland between India and the Soviets, the Afghans, the Pakistanis and the Chinese. The danger from the north was real and immediate, especially after 2 July, when Afghanistan revived its old claim to territory on the North-West Frontier, comprising most of the land between the Indus River and the border. [ . . . ]

One month later, the North-West Frontier plebiscite would register a decisive vote to join Pakistan, with 289,244 for Pakistan against only 2,874 for India. Mountbatten declared himself most satisfied with having "insisted on the referendum in spite of the strongest possible opposition" from Congress. Neither he, nor his staff, nor anyone in London seems to have realized that the die had been cast for conflict in Kashmir.

(pp. 176-177):

That day [23 June], the Punjab voted in favor of its own partition; Bengal had already done so. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, was flown in to take up the onerous and vulnerable job of drawing the lines of partition. He had been nominated by the British government with the approval of Jinnah. The Muslim League's victory over the principle of basing statehood on identity inspired all sorts of new demands. The 3.5 million Pathans in the northwest were raising a call for a separate state of Pathanistan, and the "Frontier Gandhi," Abdul Ghaffar Khan, added his voice to that call on 2 July. The original Gandhi also supported Pathanistan, though Jinnah condemned it as "disastrous." The following day, Tamil separatists in the south cabled Attlee from Madras to note that they also wanted a separate Dravidanadu for Muslims and Dravidian people. Shortly afterward, it was reported that the Naga tribes in Assam were keen to establish a Nagastan; their leaders turned up in Delhi, threatening to fight "to the last drop of their blood" to win independence. The Sikhs were split over whether or not to accept partition, and some among them still hoped for a separate Khalistan. A Sikh protest day against the partition of the Punjab was declared. Many went to their gurdwaras wearing black armbands, and rumblings began to be heard from agitators. "With clear vision, determination, and vigour that is characteristic of our virile race, we shall extricate ourselves out of this whirlpool of annihilation that is facing us," read one pamphlet. "Our phoenix like rise shall signal the fall of our enemies."

This rapidly expanding chaos made the British keener still to escape from India. In late June, riots in Lahore and Amritsar had left hundreds of houses burned down. People running from their blazing homes were shot in the street for breaking the curfew order. Nehru was horrified and asked Mountbatten to declare martial law. "If you will forgive a personal touch, I should like to tell you that my mother came from Lahore and part of my childhood was spent there," he wrote to Mountbatten. "The fate of Lahore, therefore, affects me perhaps more intimately than it might many other people who are not connected with that city." It affected Jinnah, too. "I don't care whether you shoot Muslims or not," he told Mountbatten, "it has got to stopped." The Sikh minister, Baldev Singh, advised him to "shoot everyone on sight." But the British government had made it clear that it would send no more troops or resources. [ . . . ] All Mountbatten could propose was the setting up of a multi-faith security committee, which would sit in Delhi and resolve that things would be better if everyone stopped killing each other.

(pp. 178-179):

A founding principle of Mountbatten's plan was the reappointment of himself as joint governor-general of both new dominions for a short period after 15 August. Nehru had acquiesced; Jinnah had hedged and recommended separate governors-general with a supreme arbitrator -- in which post he was happy to have Mountbatten -- to oversee such matters as the division of financial assets and arms stocks. Foolishly, Mountbatten had assumed that Jinnah would eventually come around to the idea of a single governor-general. As might have been guessed from his doodle on 2 June, Jinnah wanted to become governor-general himself.

During the last week of June, Jinnah announced that he would be unable to accept any position apart from governor-general of Pakistan in six weeks' time. [ . . . ]

But there was more to it than that. Yahya Bakhtiar, a Baluchistani politician who was a close associate of Jinnah's, argued that a joint governor-generalship under Mountbatten would have meant Pakistan "getting destroyed at inception." By July, Jinnah had very strong reasons to suspect that Mountbatten was wrapped around Nehru's finger. "Nehru in those days was having a roaring love affair with Lady Mountbatten," added Bakhtiar, "said to be with the tacit approval of Mountbatten."

This was ultimately resolved in Jinnah's favor, with Jinnah as governor-general for Pakistan and Mountbatten governor-general as India.

13. A Full Basket of Apples (pp. 184-185):

Unfortunately, this appealing portrait of a smooth, tolerant and accountable system was a fiction. In reality, the British presence in India was relatively small and unable to keep watch over so many princes. The notion that the "British race" had a monopoly on freedom and democracy was unsupportable with regard to the lengthy traditions of public debate, heterogeneous government and freedom of conscience that had existed for centuries in the Indias of Asoka and Akbar. If anything, the presence of the British damaged these traditions and actually safeguarded the princes from any new incursion of democracy. The British army was always on hand to give succor to each imperiled tyrant and stamp out any attempts by the people to express their discontent. As one staunch imperialist boasted, the princes had been "mostly rescued from imminent destruction by British protection." And so imperialists were able to perfect a classic piece of doublethink: railing against what they called "Oriental despotism" on one hand, while propping it up with the other.

(pp. 187-188):

Mountbatten set up the States Department in July, convinced by then of the need to absorb the states into India or Pakistan rather than surrender them to the capricious rule of their princes. India's offer to the states was straightforward. Control over defense, foreign affairs and communications would go to the government of India. Their domestic affairs, including their privy purses, were to be their own concern. Nehru had told Mountbatten, "I will encourage rebellion in all States that go against us," which had caused the viceroy to question his friend's sanity. "On the subject of the States," Mountbatten reported to London, "Nehru and Gandhi are pathological." He was relieved that the unsentimental Vallabhbhai Patel had been made head of the department rather than the more emotional Nehru. For Patel's part, he realized immediately that Mountbatten, with his own semiroyal status and personal friendships with many of the princes, was uniquely suited to help India achieve its aim of leaving no state behind. [ . . . ]

With no Pakistani representative to match Mountbatten and Patel in the States Department, the states would turn into a major point of conflict between Indian and Pakistani interests. But Jinnah did not clamor for the inclusion of a Muslim Leaguer. It was not that he took no interest; he did, and actively. But he was not especially concerned about whether states acceded to Pakistan or remained independent. His strategy was simply to stop them acceding to India. If enough states could be persuaded to stay out, Nehru and Patel would inherit a moth-eaten India to go with his moth-eaten Pakistan. And so the stage was set for one of the bitterest, most scandalous and most secretive battles of the transfer of power, in which Mountbatten and Patel would try every possible tactic to scare the princes into India, and Jinnah would do everything he could think of to scare them out of it.

(pp. 188-189):

The great majority inclined to join India. But four of the most important states -- Hyderabad, Kashmir, Bhopal and Travancore -- wanted to become independent nations. Each of these states had its own unique set of difficulties. The Nizam of Hyderabad was the richest man in the world; he was a Muslim, and his people were mostly Hindus. His state was enormous, and both France and the United States were rumored to be ready to recognize it. The Maharaja of Kashir was a Hindu; his people were mostly Muslims. His state was even bigger than Hyderabad but more limited by its lack of trade routes and industrial potential. The Nawab of Bhopal was an able and ambitious Muslim prince, and one of Jinnah's advisers; unfortunately for him, his state had a Hindu majority and was stuck right in the middle of India, over five hundred miles from the likely border with Pakistan. Uranium deposits had recently been discovered in Travancore, lending the situation there a greater international interest. [ . . . ]

The Nawab of Bhopal attempted to get the states to band together, so that they might hold out for independence; such a coalition might have formed an area the size of Pakistan. Not only Lord Mountbatten, but also Lady Mountbatten, crushed the plan, according to the Maharawal of Dungarpur: "It was an end brought about by one man and his wife."

Though Mountbatten's heavy-handed strategy is certainly open to criticism, his aim was to bring the states' people into a democratic India. British historians who have scolded Mountbatten for that aim have argued that the princes were strong supporters of Britain during the war, and that they had rights under the British paramountcy system which were discarded. Such arguments ignore the political and immediate realities of the situation. Many of the princes were regarded as tyrants by the All-India States Peoples' Conference (president, 1935-46: Jawaharlal Nehru), an organization set up to represent the interests of the princes' 100 million subjects -- who counted as "British protected persons." By supporting the princes against the people and against the new dominions of India and Pakistan, Britain would have undermined the entire process of transferring power to democratic institutions.

(p. 190):

There was further trouble with Travancore. It was incorrectly rumored that the state had already reached a private agreement with Britain over the fate of its uranium deposits, prompting Nehru to threaten that he would send the Indian air force to bomb it. Meanwhile, the Maharaja of Travancore refused to throw his lot in with India on the grounds that Nehru had established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. When Mountbatten cornered him, the maharaja professed to see himself as only the Dewan, or Prime Minister, of Travancore. The real maharaja, he explained, was the god Padmanabha, an aspect of Vishnu. The maharaja's actual dewan, Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, turned up at the Viceroy's House with a set of files to present to Mountbatten. "The first of these contained a number of rather amusing cartoons, to which he took the greatest exception," Mountbatten reported, "and in particular one published that morning showing him being spanked by me at this very meeting!" Another file "contained cuttings to prove that Gandhi was a dangerous sex maniac who could not keep his hands off young girls." It took Mountbatten two hours to calm Aiyar down.

(p. 193):

Two big flies remained in the Kashmiri ointment: the maharaja, still evading any form of straight discussion, and Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru again tried to visit Kashmir at the end of July, describing it as his "first priority." He had to be stopped by Mountbatten, Patel and Gandhi, on the grounds that this would be taken as political lobbying. According to Mountbatten, when Patel attempted to talk him out of it, "Nehru had broken down and wept, explaining that Kashmir meant more to him at the moment than anything else." Gandhi went instead, took goat's milk and fruit under a chinar tree with the maharaja and his family, and told them to obey the wishes of their people. He was later accused of lobbying for India in Nehru's place.

(pp. 193-194):

Mountbatten would not be able to provide Patel with a completely full basket of apples, but it is striking that he managed to secure as many as he did. After independence, Patel would maintain his focus on the states, coralling them into groups, extracting from them their vestigial rights and responsibilities, and assimilating them into the body of democratic India.

Most of the princes, reduced to the status of adequately remunerated mascots, would disappear quietly into estate management or gin palaces, as they pleased. But an impressive number of exceptions ran for office in the new democratic India. Among Indian princely families who were guaranteed privileges at the time of their accession, more than one-third have produced electoral candidates for public office. Whatever may be said about Mountbatten's tactics or the machinations of Patel, their achievement remains remarkable. Between them, and in less than a year, it may be argued that these two men achieved a larger India, more closely integrated, than had ninety years of the British raj, 180 years of the Mogul Empire, or 130 years of Asoka and the Maurya rulers.

14. A Rainbow in the Sky (pp. 197-198):

Despite his preoccupation with trivialities, even Mountbaten could not ignore the fierce controversies thrown up by the two partitions of Bengal and the Punjab. For centuries, both regions had been melting pots of cultures, a jumbled variety of Muslims and Hindus living side by side, with Sikhs, Buddhists, Animists and Christians fitted in too. In times of peace, it had not mattered much to which of these religions a Punjabi or a Bengali adhered. As Jinnah himself had admitted, most people within the regions tended to consider their local identity before their religious affiliation. But the importance of religious identity had been growing in the twentieth century, notably in India and more slowly in the world beyond it.

The reason for this effect can in part be traced to the British policy of "divide and rule." Undoubtedly, the raj did plenty to encourage identity politics. The British found it easier to understand their vast domain if they broke it down into manageable chunks, and by the 1930s they had become anxious to ensure that each chunk was given a full and fair hearing. But picking a few random unelected lobbyists, based on what the British thought was a cross-section of Indian varieties, was not a reliable way to represent 400 million people. India's population could not be divided into neat boxes labeled by relgion and cross-referenced with social position. India was an amorphous mass of different cultures, lifestyles, traditions and beliefs. After so many centuries of integration and exchange, these were not distinct, but rippled into each other, creating a web of cultural hybrids and compromises. A Sunni Muslim from the Punjab might have more in common with a Sikh than he did with a Shia Muslim from Bengal; a Shia might regard a Sufi Muslim as a heretic; a Sufi might get on better with a Brahmin Hindu than with a Wahhabi Muslim; a Brahmin might feel more at ease with a European than he would another Hindu who was an outcaste. When the British started to define "communities" based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. At the same time, Indian politicians began to focus on religion as a central part of their policies -- defining themselves by what they were, and even more by what they were not.

This phenomenon is shown at its clearest with Jinnah, who began his career as the leading light of Hindu-Muslim unity, and ended it by forcing the creation of a separate Islamic-majority state. But the arc of Jinnah's career merely amplifies that of Indian politics as a whole. Congress was a largely secular and inclusive organization during Motilal Nehru's prime in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Though it was the opposite of his intention, the emergence of Gandhi gave confidence to religious chauvinists. While Gandhi himself welcomed those of all faiths, the very fact that he brought spiritual sensibilities to the center of politics stirred up extreme and divisive passions. Fundamentalist Hindus were rare presences on the political scene before Gandhi. In the wake of Gandhi, though, Hindu nationalists were able to move into the central ground of politics; while organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dedicated to the formation of a Hindu nation, swelled their ranks from the fringes. This was no slow, invisible political trend; it was happening visibly during the spring and summer of 1947, when holy sadhus clad in saffron robes marched around the streets of Delhi, bellowing forth political slogans.

(pp. 198-199):

The Punjab is a great sweep of plain, laced with rivers, stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Thar Desert in the west. According to a religious breakdown of the population, the western wing along the Indus River had to go to Pakistan; the eastern wing between the Sutlej and Jumna rivers had to go to India. The central sections were in dispute, mainly because they were rich, populous districts, and strategically important. Religiously speaking, the populations in those central tracts were far too integrated and too complex for a straight partition of their land. The economic case was labyrinthine. There would be conflicting interests over the divisions of holy shrines, railways, defensive frontiers and water supplies.

The Punjab Boundary Commission had been set up to report to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, with four judges -- two Muslims, a Hindu and a Sikh. These judges were given no mandate to negotiate with political leaders or other interested parties, which might have been supposed to be their most crucial function. Instead, they simply heard the cases presented, and then predictably divided in two when it came to the judgment -- the Muslims sticking together, and the Sikh siding with the Hindu. Radcliffe was left to consider these inconclusive verdicts and consequently had no choice but to make the decisions of where to draw the dividing line entirely according to his own opinions. Suffering terribly from the heat, he was left alone with a secretary in a bungalow in the grounds of the Viceroy's House, amid daunting piles of maps, submissions and reports. He was not supposed to speak to any of the Indian leaders about his work, including the viceroy; perhaps blessedly, he enjoyed a complete ignorance of Indian politics and had never previously been east of Gibraltar. He later admitted that it would have taken two years to draw up a just partition. The governor of the Punjab, Evan Jenkins, told Mountbatten it would have taken twice that to partition it peacefully. Radcliffe had forty days.

(p. 201):

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. 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 fall 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. 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." 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 afterward Bangladesh, was a nation deliberately designed to be incapable of supporting itself. At least one half of Pakistan was set up to fail.

(pp. 203-204):

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 U.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. "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." [ . . . ]

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. 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.

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." [ . . . ] 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.

Part Three: The Beginning

15. Paradise on Earth (p. 214):

That afternoon, Mountbatten handed Radcliffe's finished award to the leaders in Delhi and cabled it to their counterparts in Karachi. "Nobody in India will love me for my award about the Punjab and Bengal," Radcliffe had written bluntly to his stepson three days earlier, "and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me." He had the good sense to get on a plane to London on 17 August and later burned all his papers relating to the partition.

It was inevitable that none of the parties would be happy, which was why Mountbatten had secured on 22 July an agreement from both governments-to-be that they would accept the award, whatever it was. They did so without pleasure. In Pakistan, the communications minister, Abdur Rab Nishtar, described the award as "the parting kick of the British," while Liaquat was livid at the loss of Gurdaspur. In India, the reaction was no less grim. "Bhai [brother] and the other Congress leaders read it with deepening misery," wrote Nehru's sister Betty Hutheesing. Patel could not contain his rage at the award of the Chittagong Hill Tracts to Pakistan. But it was the Sikh minister Baldev Singh's wordless dejection that augured the worst for the trouble to come. The Sikh population that he represented, scattered between West Pakistan and India, received the news hardest of all. The inclusion of the western Punjab and Lahore in Pakistan provoked an immediate response. A wave of violence, familiar in its intent but renewed in its vigor, spilled forth across the Punjab.

(p. 216):

In the four days since partition, the Punjab had been reduced to open anarchy. Seventy thousand Muslims from India had already arrived in Lahore. The Pakistani government opened camps for forty thousand, but the rest were obliged to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, Hindus and Sikhs fled the city. In April 1947, the Hindu and Silk population of Lahore had been estimated at three hundred thousand. It was now, just four months later, barely ten thousand. In Amritsar, on the Indian side of the border, a large group of Muslim women was stripped naked, paraded through the streets and raped by a Sikh mob. Some Sikhs were able to rescue a few of the women and hide them in the Golden Temple until the army could arrive. The rest of the women were burned alive. Murders were running at several hundred a day, and a bonfire had been made of Muslim homes. The police on both sides either stood by or, in many cases, joined in. The phrase "a thousand times more horrible than anything I saw during the war" became a cliché among British and Indian officers. One officer was confronted with the sight of four babies that had been roasted to death over a fire.

A strong desire for revenge following the massacres of Sikhs by Muslims in March meant that the Sikh campaign was being organized with striking efficiency, recruiting and mobilizing ex-servicemen and arming them from private stockpiles. Groups of anywhere between twenty men and five thousand men (and sometimes women and children) would meet in gurdwaras and organize themselves into Jathas, or fighting mobs, to raze Muslim villages. They were well armed with machine guns, rifles and shotguns, as well as grenades, spears, axes and kirpans, the ceremonial blade carried by all Sikhs. [ . . . ]

Retaliation against these atrocities was swift and furious. On 23 August, a train full of Sikh refugees was attacked by Muslims at Ferozepur, leaving twenty-five dead and one hundred wounded. IN Quetta, riots kicked off between Muslim League supporters and Pathans. After three boys were paraded through the streets, bearing injuries sustained from riots in West Punjab, both sides turned on the local Hindus. One week after partition, Delhi was a temporary home to 130,000 Muslim refugees on their way to Pakistan, a quarer of whom had arrived in the preceding fortnight. Five thousand crowded into a squalid refugee camp in front of the Jama Masjid; sixteen other camps were set up to host the rest. Inside these enclaves, according to Lord Ismay, "conditions defied description": there was no water, no food, no sanitation and no security.

(pp. 221-222):

From Mountbatten's point of view, the greatest mistake was staying on as governor-general of independent India. At the strokes of midnight on the morning of 15 August 1947, he had been transformed from a servant of British interests to a servant of Indian interests. The best interests of Britain had been served by a swift exit, a slapdash partition, the creation of Pakistan, and the repatriation of British armed forces. The best interests of India might well have been served by exactly the opposite. After 15 August, Mountbatten was in the unenviable position of having to deal with a combusting and hamstrung India that had been left that way by his own successful management of his previous job. He had been deeply reluctant to accept the governor-generalship but had had little choice under pressure from his king, government and opposition. From his point of view, though, his reputation would have endured far better had he been on his plane heading for London alongside Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

16. The Battle for Delhi (pp. 228-229):

"One million dead": this is the most convenient number to have come out of the wildly varying estimates of how many people may have been killed following partition. Mountbatten preferred the lowest available estimate, which was two hundred thousand, and has been widely condemned for it; the denial of holocausts is always a sticky business, and yet more so when one may be implicated personally. Indian estimates have ranged as high as two million. Many historians have settled for a figure of somewhere between half a million and a million. The figure of one million dead has now been repeated so often that it is accepted as historical fact. [ . . . ]

In Stalin's famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were two hundred thousand deaths, or a million, or two million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at a million deaths than at two hundred thousand? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burned alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their songs held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate the monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

(pp. 231-232):

At the suggestion of Nehru, Edwina Mountbatten was put in charge of the emergency committee's refugee group. While Dickie was still fiddling with his map room, Edwina established and chaired the United Council for Relief and Welfare. It was a swift, effective and hands-on attempt to deal with the reality of the situation. Edwina coordinated fifteen separate relief organizations, two government ministries and one Mahatma into a single targeted team with clear instructions and purpose. She began touring the worst areas of trouble, mobilizing volunteers and personally directing the Red Cross effort to improve water, sanitation and medical supplies. Through the United Council, she suggested initiatives ranging from the establishment of a sister organization in Pakistan, all the way down to the setting up of Girl Guide knitting circles to provide pullovers for refugees. A sure sign of her effectiveness was that the governor-general's aides-de-camp began to try to avoid being on her staff. Anyone required to serve with Edwina would have to help with a variety of gruesome tasks in unpleasant locations. She stopped her car when she saw injured or dead people, got out, dodged bullets and retrieved their bodies to take them to hospitals or morgues. She also ordered her husband's personal bodyguards to forget about him and patrol the hospitals, following a number of unspeakable attacks on helpless patients as they lay in the wards. In Edwina's wake, the main emergency committee also got into its swing, canceling all holidays -- including Sundays -- to keep the economy going, punishing errant officials and arranging a volunteer police force.

(pp. 232-233):

The battle to bring Delhi back under control was prolonged and vicious. On 6 September, a bomb was thrown into New Delhi's packed railway station, aimed at fleeing Muslims. The police arrived and fired into a massed Hindu crowd. By this point, 450 were reckoned to have been killed in the previous forty-eight hours of rioting alone. But the worst was still to come. The worst was still to come. The following day, outbursts of violence erupted all across Delhi, so simultaneously and so brutally that many thought it must have been planned. Looters descended on Connaught Circus, the huge central plaza of New Delhi, built by the proud British as concentric circles of graceful neoclassical arcades. This forum was filled with a baying mob, which began to smash up Muslim-owned shops. The army arrived and attempted unsuccessfully to disperse the crowd with bullets and tear gas. Nehru himself arrived a little later armed with a stick, plunged into the crowd and chased looters away from outside the Odeon Cinema. [ . . . ]

Outside the camps, things kept getting worse. On 8 September at Sabzimandi, north of Old Delhi, a confrontation between troops and rioters lasted for twelve hours, leaving the roads "littered with bodies," and the town "burnt to ashes," according to the British high commissioner. Paharganj, just north of Connaught Circus, was reported to be "like a battlefield," its streets filled with dead animals, its buildings ablaze, and the constant patterning of machine-gun fire in the air. All flights from Bombay and other cities into Delhi were canceled. Reports suggested that six hundred thousand were involved in rioting in the city, and Muslim estimates put their death toll at ten thousand. The telephone, telegraph and mail systems shut down, as did all public transport. A shoot-to-kill order was issued to Delhi police and armed forces. Patel called the Sikh leaders to a meeting and threatened to set up "concentration camps" and put all Sikhs in them unless the leaders appealed for an end to the violence. They duly did. All weapons were banned except, to Jinnah's fury, Sikh kirpans, which had to be sheathed. In conjunction with Pakistan's prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, Nehru organized an airdrop of more than one hundred thousand leaflets over the Punjab, saying that lawbreakers would be hunted down without mercy or hesitation. By the end of the day, the number of Muslims in the Pak Transfer Office in Connaught Place had doubled to twelve thousand.

(pp. 238-239):

On 21 September, the Mountbattens took Nehru, Patel and a few others on a round-trip in Dickie's plane to view the Punjab migrations. Near Ferozepur, they found the first caravan -- and followed it for over fifty miles against the stream of refugees without finding its source. The refugees moved slowly, in bullock carts or on foot, carrying children, the elderly and the infirm on their backs. Vultures followed the convoys, waiting for deaths which came frequently. Exhausted families would sometimes be forced to abandon their invalid relatives by the roadside rather than carry them along. Suffering pushed the communities further apart. Punjabi Hindu women entering Delhi openly rejoiced at the sight of streets filled with Muslim corpses. According to Nirad Chaudhuri, "the group of corpses which drew forth the strongest expression of delight from the ladies was that of a mother lying dead with her dead baby clasped in her arms."

That night, the party returned to Government House, where the Sunday film was A Matter of Life and Death, and the Sunday dinner was austere. The severe rations in Government House became severer still under Edwina's watchful eye. When Lord Listowel, the former secretary of state for India and now the secretary of state for Burma, came to visit, the Mountbattens threw a full ceremonial banquet with all the state pomp -- and served a first course of cabbage water, followed by a main course of one slice of spam with a potato, and finished off with a solitary biscuit and a small piece of cheese. "The ADCs are mad with rage at me," Edwina wrote with satisfaction, "as they think food can be spirited out of the skies."

(pp. 239-241):

To the north and east, Pakistan fared ill. Like India, it suffered riots; trains full of dead bodies turned up in its stations; rich Hindu merchants streamed out of its cities, despite efforts by the Pakistani government to persuade them to stay. Grim conditions prevailed at West Pakistan's refugee camps. Richard Symonds remembered gaunt women with half-starved babies throwing themselves at his feet, their ration in some camps just two ounces of flour a day -- enough to make one single chapati. Unlike India, Pakistan had to deal with these problems on an empty treasury. The Punjab, its only profitable region, had collapsed. As a result of the migrations, Pakistan had lost four million people who had been settled, established and productive, and gained five million destitute refugees. British India had not been poor, but the dominions had not yet agreed on the details by which its assets would be divided between them. In the meantime, India held on to the lot, while Pakistan struggled to cope. Even at the most basic level, the logistics of setting up the new government had proven impossible. When Ghulam Mohammed, the finance minister, had turned up in his Karachi office on 15 August for his first day's work, he had found it bare except for one table. Everything else had been sent on a train from Delhi and looted en route.

Jinnah was livid at what he saw as a deliberate sabotaging of Pakistan. In early September, Ismay had visited him in Karachi and, according to Alan Campbell-Johnson, found the Quaid-e-Azam seething on the brink of "precipitate action." He wrote irate letters to Attlee, demanding the help of the Commonwealth; but Attlee had no intention of wading into a fight between two dominions. Jinnah appealed to all the other Commonwealth governments directly, and Ismay began to suspect his aim was to push India out of the Commonwealth altogether. At the beginning of October, Jinnah sent another long letter to Attlee. By then, the strain was making him ill. Jinnah's writing was full of spelling mistakes and repetition. "I regret to say that every effort is being made to put difficulties in our way by our enemies in order to paralyse or cripple our State and bring about its collapse," he began. "It is amazing that the top-most Hindu leaders repeatedly say that Pakistan will have to submit to the Union of India. Pakistan will never surrender." At the bottom, the usually sharp "M.A. Jinnah" was signed with a tremulous hand.

Under the circumstances, Jinnah saw that he would have to cultivate international allies. On 7 September, he had told a cabinet meeting that communism could "not flourish in the soil of Islam," and that Pakistan's interests would best be served by friendship with "the two great democratic countries, namely, the U.K. and the U.S.A., rather than with Russia." [ . . . ] The Pakistani finance minister had already brought up the question of possible financial aid with the American embassy in Karachi. Pakistan now asked the United States for a massive $2-billion loan, for the purposes of development and defense. In December, to the great disappointment of the Pakistani government, the Americans would offer a more realistic $10 million. But the Cold War was only just beginning: Pakistan's argument that it should be supported for being anti-Russian would be taken more seriously by the late 1950s, with happy results for its treasury.

(p. 241):

The status of Hyderabad troubled India, too. To Patel's embarrassment, Nehru put Mountbatten rather than him in charge of negotiations. Patel's relationship with Nehru, never great, was rapidly souring. Patel made it clear that he thought Nehru was too soft on Muslims. Nehru made it clear that he disliked Patel's Hindu-chauvinist tone. With almost half of his cabinet tending toward the establishment of India as a Hindu nation, Nehru had to fight an increasingly hard battle against the swell of fundamentalist feeling. "As long as I am at the helm of affairs India will not become a Hindu state," Nehru announced in a public speech, with a deliberate dig at the orthodox members of his government. "The very ideas of a theocratic state is not only medieval but also stupid."

17. Kashmir (pp. 244-245):

Kashmir had come into existence as a princely state on 16 March 1846. The British had acquired the territory following the First Sikh War but lacked the resources or the inclination to administer it. Instead they sold it under the Treaty of Amritsar to Gulab Singh, the Raja of Jammu, for 750,000 rupees. It is sometimes said that this sale was the root cause of the Kashmir conflict; either because Gulab Singh was a Dogra Hindu and most of the people were Muslims or because he was, in the words of Viceroy Lord Hardinge's, "the greatest rascal in Asia." But Kashmir had hosted a religiously mixed population for centuries before the beginning of Dogra rule, and for 101 years following the Treaty of Amritsar, it remained comparatively peaceable. Successive maharajas had ruled despotically and had discriminated to various degrees against Muslims, but the region did not see any major incidents of unrest except once. In 1931, there had been Muslim riots against the regime of Gulab Singh's great-grandson, Maharaja Hari Singh; these were soon quashed and did not inspire any widespread rebellion. Though around three-quarters Muslim, the population was neither homogeneous nor especially orthodox. Buddhists formed the majority in remote Ladakh, perched high among the slopes of the Himalayas; while most of the population of lower-lying Jammu was Hindu. The stripped-down casteless Bhakti form of Hinduism found favor with many. Mystical traditions such as Islamic Sufism had extensive roots in the vale. When Jinnah had sent a Muslim League envoy to Kashmir in 1943 to assess its potential, the conclusion had been disheartening. "No important religious leader has ever made Kashmir . . . his home or even an ordinary centre of Islamic activities," wrote the envoy. "It will require considerable effort, spread over a long period of time, to reform them and convert them into true Muslims."

(pp. 245-246):

It is impossible to tell the story of what happened in Kashmir in 1947 without upsetting at least one or, more likely, all of the factions that remain involved. The following year, the Indian and Pakistani governments presented their cases to the United Nations; their irreconcilable accounts of what had happened each lasted six hours. Even at the time, international observers repeatedly complained that facts were hard to come by, and harder yet to prove. Sixty years of furious debate has fogged the view yet further.

It had always been assumed by the British, by the Muslim League and indeed largely by Congress apart from Nehru himself, that Kashmir would eventually go to Pakistan. Kashmir was the K in Pakistan. Its population was predominantly Muslim. Its lines of trade and communication ran into Pakistan. Around one quarter of Kashmir's total revenue came from timber, which was floated down the Jhelum and Chenab rivers and collected in towns in Pakistan. Other major exports were fruit and vegetables, also exported through Rawalpindi; and woolens, including the prized cashmere, pashmina and shahtoosh wools, which were sold through the West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. There were only three roads running in and out of Kashmir. Two of them went into Pakistan, and one into India -- but it was the maharaja's private route, a crumbling track described optimistically on the Ordnance Survey maps as "jeepable," and snowbound for five months of each year.

(pp. 246-247):

The decision of the maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, not to accede to Pakistan by 15 August had been based on what was generally seen as a whimsical notion of remaining independent. Both the British and Pakistani governments assumed that the maharaja would soon enough come to his senses and throw his lot in with Pakistan. But the maharaja was showing little sign of coming to his senses and every sign of losing his grip. He was under pressure from his wife and her brother, who served as his household minister -- both of whom were strongly in favor of joining India. Torn, he consulted his astrologer, who held out for independence in picturesque terms, telling him that the stars showed the flag of Gulab Singh flying from Lahore to Ladakh. The maharaja consequently dismissed his moderate prime minister, who had apparently recommended accession to Pakistan, and the British officers who had remained in his armed and police forces. He restocked his ranks from among his own Dogra people. Noting a change in the wind, Muslim units swiftly began to desert the Kashmir army.

During September and October 1947, the maharaja's Dogra-led troops carried out a campaign of sustained harassment, arson, physical violence and genocide against Muslim Kashmiris in at least two areas: Poonch, right on the border with Pakistan, and pockets of southern Jammu. Just as in the Punjab, precise numbers were impossible to assess. According to some sources, more or less the entire Muslim population of Jammu, amounting to around half a million people, was displaced, with around two hundred thousand of those disappearing completely, "having presumably been butchered, or died from epidemics or exposure," noted Ian Stephens, the editor of the Calcutta Statesman.

The maharaja meant to create a buffer zone of uninhabited land, approximately three miles wide, between Kashmir and Pakistan. Muslims were pushed into Pakistan or killed. Hindus were sent the other way, deeper into Kashmir. India would deny that any holocaust had taken place, perhaps because it had secretly been providing arms to the Dogra side. The figures are open to question, but the fact that Muslim civilians were persecuted by the maharaja's troops is not.

The expulsion of Muslims from Jammu raised the ire of Pathans in Pakistan's NWFP, combining a desire for revenge with a taste for looting (p. 248):

By 20 October, a more public war seemed inevitable. The maharaja's troops crossed the border into Pakistan and attacked four large villages with mortars, grenades and automatic fire. A British officer on the scene estimated the casualties at 1,750, excluding those who had been taken to the hospital. The following night around two thousand of the massed tribesmen left Pakistan from the Hazara district of the North-West Frontier Province and marched on Kashmir via the Jhelum Valley. Despite extensive research by the Indian government, the United Nations and independent researchers, no conclusive evidence has ever been found to confirm Indian suspicions that Jinnah was directing this invasion.

The tribesmen headed for Srinagar, sacking towns and villages on the way, and recruiting local Muslim troops which had deserted from the Kashmir army. They were held at Baramula by the maharaja's army on 25 October. The result was a massacre, during which the town was reduced to ashes by Mahsud tribesmen. In their frenzy, the Mahsuds failed to distinguish between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri kaffirs. Among the dead was a Muslim youth, nailed to a cross in the town square. Khurshid Anwar suggested that the tribesmen stop looting, and consequently lost control of them. The tribal council spent two days debating whether to have him killed and replaced. This gave the maharaja, trembling in Srinagar, time to consider his next move.

India's top civil servant, V.P. Menon, was dispatched to Srinagar to speak to the maharaja and his prime minister. According to the British high commissioner, Menon "so alarmed them that they were convinced that accession to India offered the only hope of salvation." The two of them packed up and bolted for Jammu in the small hours of 27 October in a fleet of American limousines, leaving no administration in the capital. Public order collapsed. In Delhi, pressure to send troops grew, led by the hawkish Vallabhbhai Patel. Mountbatten insisted that troops could not be sent in unless Kashmir formally acceded to India first. It was a curious condition to demand. Had the maharaja, as head of an independent state, asked India to help defend against an invasion, his action would have been legal. Had India responded to such a call, its action would have been legal, too. Many in Pakistan smelled a rat.

Nehru cabled to Attlee in London, "I should like to make it clear that the question of aiding Kashmir in this emergency is not designed in any way to influence the state to accede to India." The integrity of Nehru's sentiments was undermined when, the very next day, the maharaja wrote to Mountbatten agreeing to do just that. There is some muddiness in the evidence as to whether Indian troops were sent in before the instrument of accession was signed or delivered, and even as to whether it was signed or delivered at all. The original seems to have disappeared from the Indian archives. But the question of when exactly the maharaja signed the instrument is a red herring. He had already deserted his capital by the time he even requested the instrument, and had lost control of his state. Under such circumstances, it is doubtful that he was still the maharaja in any meaningful sense, and whether he had the authority to accede to either dominion.

(pp. 249-250):

The British high commissioner in Pakistan telegraphed urgently to London that India should not accept Kashmir's accession without a plebiscite, but it was too late. Nehru and Mountbatten accepted the accession and prepared to fly Indian troops to Kashmir.

The fact of the maharaja's personal involvement in genocide was not known in Delhi at this point, but this cannot entirely excuse Nehru's action. Nehru had spent much of his adult life excoriating the British for defending "princely rights." The maharaja's antecedents had purchased their territory from a regime that Nehru had long held to be illegitimate. He had ruled autocratically over a population, much of which was hostile to his authority.

(p. 250):

It was Patel who went off to All-India Radio and ordered a command requisitioning private aircraft, and Patel who organized the fly-in of Indian troops to Kashmir the next day. Only later did Mountbatten realize that the home minister must have had the whole operation planned in advance.

That evening, Ian Stephens dined with the Mountbattens and "was startled by their one-sided verdicts on affairs," he wrote. "They seemed to have become wholly pro-Hindu." This statement was not fair. Neither Mountbatten nor Nehru saw the situation in terms of Hindu versus Muslim, but both were profoundly opposed to religious extremism in any form, and both suspected the worst of Jinnah.

(p. 251):

The following evening, [Edwina's] party was in Rawalpindi when she was called upon by General Douglas Gracey, acting commander in Chief of the Pakistani army. Gracey warned Edwina that war between Pakistan and India might break out at any point. He confessed that he would probably be required to arrest her, but chivalrously offered to take her to dinner first. She accepted. The following day, she continued to Sialkot, to see camps where Hindu Kashmiri refugees waited with increasing anxiety to be evacuated to India. They recounted stories of Muslim atrocities, and a local Sikh official told her that he had seen Pakistani troops in civilian dress crossing into Kashmir. That afternoon, Edwina flew back to Delhi, taking with her a frightening and one-sided view of the situation to impart to Dickie and Jawahar.

Edwina's story, based on hearsay, of Pakistani troops being sent into Kashmir would have confirmed all of Jawahar's worst suspicions. Now Dickie began to worry about the influence his wife and Jawahar had over each other. The Mountbattens were overheard having a fight about it: "He's very emotional, very emotional about Kashmir," Dickie had warned her. The Kashmir situation was profoundly worsened by the deep and personal loathing between Nehru and Jinnah. Both men suspected the worst possible motives in each other. Nehru became convinced that Jinnah had organized and directed the Pathan tribesmen to invade Kashmir. According to British officials on the scene, Jinnah was innocent, though they conceded that the Pakistani government had passively supported the invasion by keeping local supply routes open.

Mountbatten tried to arrange a meeting in Delhi between Jinnah, Liaquat, Nehru, Patel, and himself; ultimately the meeting was held in Lahore with just Mountbatten and Jinnah (pp. 252-253):

Consequently, the talks were of little use, and the main result of them seems to have been that the rankling dislike of the governors-general for each other increased. Both left the meeting with a new distrust of the other's motives: Mountbatten believing that Jinnah was directing the raiders, and Jinnah believing that Mountbatten was directing the Indian army.

Just three days later, the Pakistan Times reported that Mountbatten -- whom it described in an epithet both politically and factually incorrect as "conqueror of the Japs" -- was commanding operations for India in Kashmir. Any Pakistani officers familiar with Mountbatten's record as an operational commander might well have started planning their victory party, but the implication was that Mountbatten represented Britain, and therefore that Britain was siding with India. [ . . . ]

In all the calamities of Pakistan's young life, the hand of Dickie could be detected: the mysterious delay in the publication of the Radcliffe award; the failure to arrest known Sikh troublemakers just before partition; and now the accession of Kashmir to India. [ . . . ] More and more Pakistanis were beginning to believe that the British government "[is] led by the nose by Lord Mountbatten, who is himself led by the nose by Mr. Nehru, who in turn, is frightened of Mr. Patel, Pakistan's greatest individual enemy."

(p. 253):

In Kashmir, fighting had spread to Uri at the mouth of the valley, and into the southwest. On 5 November, 120 trucks arrived in the city of Jammu. Local Muslims were rounded up and told that they would be taken to the Pakistan border, then released across it. Five thousand civilian men, women and children complied and got into the trucks. Instead of driving to the border, the trucks turned the other way and took the Muslims farther into the heart of Jammu. The convoy halted, the guards got out and then, with machine guns and blades, massacred their charges. A few hundred escaped by hiding in fields or canals. The rest were killed.

The Mountbattens returned to England for Elizabeth and Philip's wedding, encouraged by Nehru, who flew to Srinagar in their absence to "pledge before you on behalf of myself and the people of India that we -- India and Kashmir -- shall ever remain together." (p. 255):

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. 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."

(p. 258):

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. 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.

18. Maybe Not Today, Maybe Not Tomorrow (p. 263):

Rather than calming the two dominions down, the chance to air their grievances at enormous length on the international stage would rile them up. Attlee telegraphed his most important ambassadors on 10 January to emphasize that under no circumstances should they allow Pakistan to think they were siding with India, because "in view of Palestine situation this would carry the risk of aligning the whole of Islam against us."

Attlee's fears were prescient. Israel was due to become an independent state on 14 May, prompting an immediate response characterized by the Pakistani newspaper the Light. Under the headline "America's Challenge to Islam," the Light contrasted Washington's refusal to recognize Pakistani Kashmir with its keenness to recognize the state of Israel. The article described the United States' backing for Israel against the Arabs as "the first link in the chain of planned acts of hostility" against Islam, and regretted that its policies were pitting Islam against its natural ally, democracy.

(pp. 266-268):

As it had in Calcutta, Gandhi's fast brought results from the people at large as well as the government. Representatives from across Delhi sent assurances that Muslim life, property and religion in Delhi would be respected. Nehru brought the messages to the Mahatma's cot, and, on 18 January, Gandhi gave up his fast. Together with the Muslim minister Abul Kalam Azad, Nehru took turns to feed the old man fruit juice.

Quickly Gandhi recovered his strength, but not his optimism. "India will virtually become a prison if the present conditions continue," he said on breaking his fast. "It may be better that you allow me to continue my fast and if God wills it He will call me." Two days later, he was addressing his daily prayer meeting on the grounds of Birla House when a bomb exploded only yards away. Both Jawahar and Edwina rushed to the scene but found Gandhi unhurt and unflustered, declaring that he had merely thought the army must have been work nearby. Edwina congratulated him on his cool response, but Gandhi was modest. "If somebody fired at me point plank and I faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama in my heart," Gandhi told her, "I should be deserving of congratulations."

The bomb thrower was a young Hindu refugee from West Punjab, caught in the act of lighting the fuse; he also had a live grenade on him. The police suspected that he was not acting alone. Rumors were rife about an extreme Hindu nationalist group from Bombay who saw Gandhi as the betrayer of Hinduism, and who had been inflamed by his efforts to save Muslim lives. Yet Gandhi refused any extra security at prayer meetings -- except for demanding that every Hindu or Sikh bring a Muslim friend. [ . . . ]

That afternoon [30 January, 1948], Gandhi shared a meal of goat's milk, vegetables and oranges with Vallabhbhai and Maniben Patel. He got up and, supported by his grandnieces Abha and Manu, walked down the colonnade that ran from outside his ground-floor quarters to the large and beautiful back garden of Birla House. He was about ten minutes late for the prayer meeting that day, and a crowd of around five hundred had gathered. As he walked through the bowing attendees toward his platform at the center of the garden, a young man stepped out and pressed his palms together, with the traditional Hindustani greeting, "Namaste." Manu caught his hand to move him out of Gandhi's way, but he pushed her over. The man looked Gandhi in the eyes, pulled out a Beretta pistol and fired three shots point-blank into the Mahatma's chest. "He Ram" (Oh Rama), Gandhi was heard to say as he sank to the ground.

Immediately, there was chaos. As Gandhi was cradled by his devotees and carried back to the house, the assassin was seized and pummeled by the thirty-two-year-old diplomatic officer Herbert Reiner of Springdale, Connecticut. A doctor was found within minutes, but he was no use. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was dead. [ . . . ]

The murderer was Nathuram Godse, a Bombay Brahmin and member of the fundamentalist Hindu Mahasabha, an organization linked to the same RSS that Patel had recently endorsed so glowingly. He and his coconspirator, Narayan Apte, had bonded over a shared hatred of Muslims and love of detective novels. Apte preferred Agatha Christie, while Godse's favorite was Earl Stanley Gardner. Godse was unpenitent for the murder of Gandhi and asked that no mercy be shown to him. After a trial a few months later, he would be hanged.

(pp. 270-271):

From the sorrow and tragedy of Gandhi's death, some hope emerged. Mountbatten took the opportunity to tell Patel and Nehru that Gandhi's last great wish had been to see the two of them brought together. Weeping, the two men embraced. Furthermore, though the long-anticipated final sacrifice had not been made by his own hand, ti had, nonetheless, achieved a little of what he had spent much of his life pleading for. After a small spate of attacks on Hindu Mahasabha members in Bombay, India calmed, and the harassment of the Muslim population of Delhi ceased. [ . . . ]

On 2 February, the Indian government outlawed all communal organizations and private armies, specifically the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, the Sikh Akali Dal and the Muslim League National Guard.

(p. 272):

Jinnah's strategy to achieve Pakistan by exploiting the extremes of identity politics had been extraordinarily successful. Unfortunately, his plan to run Pakistan as a progressive liberal democracy with a moderate Islamic flavor had been markedly less well worked out. Moreover, many of Jinnah's religious supporters had had a very different idea of what Pakistan might be. The maulvis, maulanas and pirs, whom he had spent two decades stirring up, would not return meekly to their boxes.

For all his strength and bluster, in private Jinnah was falling apart. He had suffered from tuberculosis for a decade, and his deterioration was obvious to the very few who were allowed to meet him.

(p. 275):

A Communist coup in Czechoslovakia at the end of February had sparked fears in Washington that Finland, Italy, Austria and France might be next to fall into the Russian embrace. By the beginning of March, there was at least some reassurance from India. Nehru informed the U.S. State Department that it would be "unthinkable" for India to side with Russia in another world war. West Bengal outlawed the Communist Party and arrested four hundred activists at the end of March, provoking an estrangement between Nehru and his American communist friend Paul Robeson, as well as a strike of fifteen thousand Bombay mill workers.

But the sticking point was still Kashmir. Some feared that Mountbatten's close friendship with Nehru might be holding him back from telling the prime minister just how hopeless the situation was. [ . . . ] Soon afterward Sir Hari Singh, now effectively an ex-maharaja and a wretched figure, arrived at Government House to stay with the Mountbattens. While he was there, news came through of the final UN Security Council resolution on Kashmir, requiring India to withdraw as well as Pakistan. It was a huge disappointment for Nehru, more so because it had the backing of the British government. Pakistan was disappointed, too, because under the new resolution it was required to call off the tribesmen before India withdrew. "Oh dear," wrote Horace Alexander to Edwina, "I sometimes think our greatest crime against India was to turn all her best sons into lawyers."

Mountbatten's term as governor-general was scheduled to end in June 1948 (p. 279):

Unable to leave behind him a settlement with Hyderabad or peace in Kashmir, Mountbatten bequeathed to Nehru, Patel, V.P. Menon and Rajagopalachari a memorandum on the future of India. Admitting up front that "it would be gross conceit if I were to try to continue to influence the Government of India after my departure," he then launched into nineteen pages of gross conceit. He covered everything: the progress of nationalization, being nice to the civil service, the establishment of an honors system, compulsory holidays for the prime minister and deputy prime minister, aircraft factories in Bangalore, training procedures for the Royal Indian Navy, the installation of air conditioning in all government offices. He was particularly concerned that India should become an oil-rich state. "Clearly the first requirement is to find the oil," he noted. "To me it seems quite incredible that there should be oil to the north and west of India and oil to the east of India, but no oil has been found in India apart from Assam." Geological surveys had previously drawn the conclusion that, incredible though it may have seemed, there really was none. No matter. Mountbatten recommended that they be redone. He further suggested that ambassadors and governors be chosen on the basis of their wives. "If there are two candidates available, one for a Governorship and one for an Ambassador's post," he explained, "and one has a wife really competent to help with the welfare services of her husband's province, then I suggest that the one with the wife should always be sent to the Governorship, and the one without to the Ambassadorial post. But of course where possible men appointed to posts of this standing should have wives, and, as I have said, their qualities are very nearly as important as their husbands!"

Part Four: Afterward

19. A Kiss Good-bye: The Mountbattens returned to England, welcomed by some, snubbed by Churchill; Kashmir and Hyderabad remained unresolved (pp. 289-290):

The circumstances changed quickly for, on 11 September 1948, Mohammad Ali Jinnah finally succumbed to his illness. He had been on his way to Karachi. Fatima remembered him speaking in delirium: "Kashmir . . . Give Them . . . the right . . . to decide . . . Constitution . . . I will complete it . . . soon . . . Refugees . . . give them . . . all assistance . . . Pakistan." According to his doctor, Jinnah saw Liaquat and told him that Pakistan was "the biggest blunder" of his life. Further yet, he declared, "If now I get an opportunity I will go to Delhi and tell Jawaharlal to forget about the follies of the past and become friends again." It is impossible to prove whether Jinnah actually said these words or not; either way, he was to have no further opportunity for a rapprochement. He was taken from the airport to the governor-general's house in an ambulance, which broke down after four miles on a main road in the middle of a refugee settlement with traffic honking by. The heat sizzled, flies buzzing around the Quaid-e-Azam's ashen face as Fatima attempted to fan them away. It was an hour before another ambulance could be found. Jinnah was taken back to Government House, where Fatima watched him sleep for about two hours. "Oh, Jin," she remembered thinking, "if they could pump out all my blood, and put it in you, so that you may live." He woke one final time and whispered to her, "Fati, khuda hafiz. . . . la ilaha il Allah . . . Mohammad . . . rasul . . . Allah." His head slumped to the right. He had died with the confession of faith just past his lips.

Two days after Jinnah's death, India swooped on Hyderabad, the only contentious princely state other than Kashmir that still remained outside India or Pakistan. The nizam appealed to the UN but soon dropped his resistance. "There is still the most wide-spread misunderstanding over here about the action taken in Hyderabad," Mountbatten reported back to Rajagopalachari a week later, "since even quite intelligent people seem to regard it as an act of military aggression and conquest."

The book has a lot on the relationship between Nehru and Edwina, much of it rather unspecific, as well as more general things about the Mountbattens' marriage and working arrangements -- little of it quoted above. (pp. 293-295):

Edwina and Jawahar wrote every day at first. Inevitably, this tailed off to once a week and finally once a fortnight, but the letters remained intimate until the end. Jawahar sent Edwina presents from wherever he was in the world: sugar from the United States (when it was rationed in Britain), cigarettes from Egypt, pressed ferns from Sikkim, a book of photographs of erotic sculptures from the Temple of the Sun in Orissa. "I must say they took my breath away for an instant," he wrote. "There was no sense of shame or of hiding anything." Edwina replied that she had found the sculptures fascinating. "I am not interested in sex as sex," she wrote. "There must be so much more to it, beauty of spirit and form and in its conception. But I think you and I are in the minority! Yet another treasured bond."

Whenever possible, they spent time with each other. Edwina went to India every year, a fact that did not escape criticism. [ . . . ] Once, at a reception for commonwealth leaders in London, Jawahar upset the other delegates by spending all evening deep in conversation with Edwina and then conspicuously leaving with her. On another occasion, when Jawahar and Edwina were staying together at Nainital in the Himalayan foothills, the governor's son was sent to summon the guests for dinner. Unwittingly, he opened the door of the prime minister's suite and was confronted by the sight of Jawahar and Edwina in an embrace. He tactfully retreated, and nothing was ever said about the incident. These were the days of discretion in political life. [ . . . ]

Several times in the 1950s, Edwina threatened divorce. Each time, Dickie responded with tolerant dignity which melted her heart and brought her back. "I've never attempted to stop you or hold you and I never shall," he wrote; "I'm not that selfish." The Mountbatens achieved a sort of harmony and mutual affection. It was to her husband Edwina entrusted her love letters from Jawahar in 1952. Following a hemorrhage, she had to undergo dangerous surgery. She presented Dickie with a sealed letter before the doctors gave her the anesthetic, telling him where they were. "You will realize that they are a mixture of typical Jawaha [sic] letters, full of interest and facts and really historic documents," she had written. "Some of them have no 'personal' remarks at all. Others are love letters in a sense, though you yourself will realize the strange relationship -- most of it spiritual -- which exists between us. J. has obviously meant a very great deal in my life in these last years and I think I in his. Our meetings have been rare and always fleeting but I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever understand each other."

(p. 296):

Edwina's politics caused increasing friction with the British government. She was criticized in the media and in the Admiralty for allowing the Communist Yugoslav leader, Tito, to entertain her in 1952. The oft-married Tito had invited her to lunch at his villa, and she had been charmed by his "fine physique, good looks and vital personality." The Admiralty warned the Mountbattens that they were close to the line, prompting Dickie to write an aggrieved letter to Churchill. "You know how strongly I feel that no serving officer should involve himself in politics in any way," he wrote. Yet the archives reveal that he continued actively to advise Nehru throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s, after he became chief of defense staff for the British government. On matters of foreign policy -- Goa, Kashmir, China -- the two wrote often. As a serving officer in the British navy, it was injudicious of Mountbatten to advise the prime minister of another dominion; to set about selling him arms, on the other hand, was downright reckless. When Nehru stayed with the Mountbattens in 1955, Dickie suggested that he might buy the Gnat, an aircraft manufactured by Follands, and that he could transfer production of it to India. A factory was set up in Bangalore, with parts supplied from England. Gnats would be used extensively in the 1965 war with Pakistan.

(pp. 296-297):

When King George VI died in 1952, Elizabeth became queen. Quick off the mark as ever, Dickie held a dinner party at Broadlands only days after his cousin's death. He called for champagne, to celebrate the fact that the "House of Mountbatten" now reigned. Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover was among the guests; he reported the anecdote to the late king's mother, Queen Mary, and it precipitated an explosive reaction. Winston Churchill had returned to office as prime minister the previous year. His private secretary was summoned and sent back to his master with explicit instructions to reverse this coup d'état. The secretary remembered that Philip argued not for the name Mountbatten but for Edinburgh, after his dukedom. Neither option appealed to Queen Mary; Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; the royal household or the cabinet. The last of these august bodies came down hard in favor of a reversion to the unadorned Windsor.

(pp. 297-298):

[Nehru] took Indira to the party, but, as usual, ended up with Edwina. Things went badly. The pair of them got into a fight with Oliver Lyttelton, the colonial secretary, over the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Lyttelton commented on the rebellion's "terrible savagery," to which Edwina rejoined: "on both sides." Jawahar added curtly that the British would achieve nothing by shooting Africans. Lyttelton was outraged at both of them. [ . . . ]

When Nehru emerged from Buckingham Palace with Indira in tow, he saw Churchill waiting for his car and went to greet him. Afterward, Churchill said to Indira, "I didn't expect it. This man whom I have jailed so many times has conquered hate. He acts without a trace of rancour." Indira noticed that there were tears in Churchill's eyes as he spoke.

(p. 299):

After forty years of effort, Mountbatten finally stepped into his father's shoes and became First Sea Lord in 1955. The following year came the Suez crisis, that last and most foolhardy flourish of British imperial delusion. "Thank goodness Philip isn't here," remarked the queen, on being told that the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal. Dickie Mountbatten was around, and he opposed Britain's invasion wholeheartedly, as did his wife and Jawaharlal Nehru. Mountbatten was told by the Ministry of Defense that he had no right to give political advice. Immediately, he offered his resignation to Eden; it was refused.

There were other ways to make his views heard. In his unique position of confidant to the monarch, Mountbatten was heard to whisper in her ear, "I think they are being absolutely lunatic." Acting on Mountbatten's word, Elizabeth exercised her constitutional right to advise Eden not to invade. He exercised his constitutional right to ignore her. Britain invaded; the United States cut off its credit; and Eden was forced into a humiliating withdrawal. He resigned the following year. Mountbatten was promoted to chief of the defense staff.

(pp. 301-302):

On the day after her daughter's wedding [17 January 1960], [Edwina] left for Delhi. There she met Jawahar again: seventy now, to her fifty-eight, but still looking remarkably young. The same could not be said for her. Edwina's face was lined, but her delight at seeing Jawahar illuminated it. The effect was clear to everyone. On 26 January, the pair of them attended the Indian Republic Day parade and a reception afterward in the Mughal Gardens. [ . . . ]

Soon afterward, Edwina left Delhi for Malaya and hopped from there to Singapore, Brunei, and finally Borneo, arriving on 18 February. She was driven to the house of Robert Noel Turner, chief secretary of North Borneo, and his wife, Evelyn, After only a brief rest, she went to the St. John Ambulance headquarters. That night, Turner was impressed with her vivacity at their dinner party. [ . . . ]

When Edwina returned to the house that evening, she complained of tiredness. The Turners' secretary suggesting calling a doctor, but Edwina would not have it. She got herself up again and went to the St. John dinner that evening. When she arrived back at the house, she almost collapsed; but, righting herself, she dismissed it as only a headache and went to bed, refusing even an aspirin. The next day, Edwina grudgingly submitted to a medical examination. The doctor thought she had influenza or early-stage malaria; but she would not be put off her program and continued on to two hospital visits and a coffee party before finally allowing Mrs. Turner to send her to bed with an egg flip. She insisted on attending a St. John parade and an official reception that evening. Guests noticed that she looked pale and drawn despite her efforts to smile,a nd that she left after only twenty minutes.

At 7:30 the next morning, the Turners' secretary knocked on Edwina's door. There was no reply. She opened it to see the Countess Mountbatten of Burma lying on the bed. Her body was already cold. She had suffered heart failure a few hours before. Still one of the world's richest women, she had had no splendid possessions with her; only a pile of old letters on the bedside table. She must have been reading them when she died, for a few, having fluttered from her hands, were strewn across the bed. They were all from Jawaharlal Nehru.

20. Echoes (pp. 306-307):

The British high commissioner in Delhi reported back to London on 3 January 1964 that the succession was "sewn up" for Indira Gandhi, "the one thing in which the Prime Minister was now really interested." Overall, the signs were that Nehru had not groomed Indira for the succession. He had supported her when she turned down government jobs, though he had not stood in her way when she took them. But as his friends and colleagues melted away, she remained a constant companion, and his clarity of democratic vision seemed to blur. There was by no means universal support for her in government circles. When Mountbatten visited India shortly after the British high commissioner had made his report, he and the president, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, agreed that Indira should not be given the external affairs portfolio that her father was apparently thinking of granting her.

Jawahar had a minor stroke in January at the annual Congress session in Bhubaneswar. Dickie visited again and found his old friend "shockingly weak and uncomprehending." He urged him not to keep working flat out. "That is what Edwina did to the great distress of all who loved her whom she left behind," he wrote. On 27 May, Jawahar rose at dawn and suffered a second stroke and a heart attack. He lost consciousness, and, a few hours later, he died. [ . . . ]

Soon, Nehru's house was filled with uninvited guests -- Hindu pandits, Buddhist lamas, Muslim maulvis and Christian priests -- who sat by his body and recited prayers. Nehru's will had stated, "I wish to declare with an earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in any such ceremonies and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy." His daughter and his government had seen fit to disregard this unambiguous wish. The crowds at his funeral were said to exceed even those who had turned out for Gandhi's, most clad in the traditional white of Indian mourning. Hundreds of thousands -- some reports said millions -- stood in a mile-long crescent around Delhi's ridge. There was an atmosphere of quiet reflection, rather than grief, that impressed all the foreign observers.

(p. 310):

Unlike Jawahar, Indira found the process of democratic government irritating and cumbersome. Soon she started to act without recourse to it. "My position among the people is uncontested," she declared. When she attacked the princes for their privy purses, Mountbatten was shocked and upset. "I do hope Indu will do nothing that could in any way dishonour her father's word," he wrote to Nan Pandit, "and I have written to her to this effect in as friendly a way as possible."

(p. 313):

Indira Gandhi won a massive victory in the 1971 elections. That year, East Pakistan rebelled against West Pakistan. Indira sent troops to aid the rebels, and following a horrific civil war East Pakistan seceded from Jinnah's dream to become Bangladesh.

In June 1975, Nan Pandit was in London for a wedding. She was waiting in line for breakfast at the Indian Students' Hostel when she heard that, following accusations of electoral malpractice, an "emergency" had been declared in India. Indira had suspended all human rights: property could not be owned, professions could not be pursued, and there was no freedom of movement, association or speech. Total censorship had been imposed, especially on quotations about freedom from the writings of Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore. "It was reminiscent of the midnight knock of forty years ago in Hitler's Germany," Nan remembered.

The emergency was a time of terror. Bulldozers cleared deprived areas, whose inhabitants were given as little as forty-five minutes' notice to vacate them, in order to make way for property developers under the slogan "Make Delhi Beautiful." Indira's son Sanjay ran a program to tackle overpopulation. His sterilization campaign put so much pressure on provincial officials to show results that stories became common of men being kidnapped and forcibly castrated, and the same men being operated upon two or even three times to make up the figures. Indira had her favorite slogan -- "Indira is India, and India is Indira" -- displayed in colossal letters around the arcades of Connaught Circus. [ . . . ]

Indira canceled the emergency on 18 January 1977 and called an election, in the belief that she would win it. She did not, and a rickety coalition of Hindu nationalists, Sikhs, farmers and the extreme right took over. Indira was shocked and hurt, even more so when the new government imprisoned her. For all her "Indira is India" rhetoric, she had badly misjudged the popular temperature.

(pp. 314-315):

In the summer of 1979, Mountbatten set off for his usual August holiday at Cliffoney in Eire. He had been warned about the threat of terrorism from the Irish Republican Army, then active on both sides of the border. "The I.R.A. are not looking for an old man like me," he told his valet. On the morning of 27 August, Mountbatten was up early and bustling around Classiebawn Castle, a Victorian gothic house in Sligo that had been inherited many years before by Edwina. Meanwhile, down at the nearby harbor of Mullaghmore, one or more Provisional IRA operatives levered up the green-painted planks at the center aft of the Mountbatten family's fishing boast, the Shadow V. They packed fifty-five pounds of ammonium nitrate and nitroglycerine, mixed to form a gelignite explosive, into the hull and attached a remote detonator before withdrawing to the hillside by the quay.1

Mountbatten was to spend the day aboard the Shadow V with his daughter Patricia and her husband, Lord Brabourne, along with their teenage twin sons, Nicholas and Timothy Knatchbull. Lord Brabourne's mother, Doreen, and a local lad called Paul Maxwell, completed the party. Shortly before lunchtime they motored into Donegal Bay. As they got into open water Lord Brabourne turned to his father-in-law and said, "You are having fun today, aren't you?" At that moment, the terrorists pressed their button, and a massive explosion blasted the Shadow V into wood chips. Paul Maxwell, Nick Knatchbull and Earl Mountbatten of Burma were killed instantly, the others seriously injured -- in the dowager Lady Brabourne's case, fatally. Patricia remembered thinking about how her father had been sunk on the Kelly thirty-eight years before, and how he had told her he covered his nose and mouth to prevent himself from drowning. She was very nearly killed as well and was to spend weeks on a life-support machine. "My father had always been particular that the boat should be fully painted," she remembered years later. "I've still got some in my eyes, which is rather nice. I like having a souvenir of the boat." Mountbatten was found floating facedown in the water. He had told friends he wished to die at sea.

posted 2009-10-29

Indian Summer

Alex von Tunzelmann's book on the partition of India and Pakistan, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007, Henry Holt), looks to be an interesting read, both for its coverage of a critical moment in world history and for whatever light it spreads on the decay and demise of British and European (or Euroamerican) imperialism. I hope to get to it before too long. Meanwhile, Pankaj Mishra's review in The New Yorker has some interesting things to say.

Von Tunzelmann goes on a bit too much about the Mountbattens' open marriage and their connections to various British royals, toffs, and fops, but her account, unlike those of some of her fellow British historians, isn't filtered by nostalgia. She summarizes bluntly the economic record of the British overlords, who, though never as rapacious and destructive as the Belgians in the Congo, damaged agriculture and retarded industrial growth in India through a blind faith in the "invisible hand" that supposedly regulated markets. [ . . . ] she reminds readers that, in 1877, the year that Queen Victoria officially became Empress of India, a famine in the south killed five million people even as the Queen's viceroy remained adamant that famine relief was a misguided policy. [ . . . ]

Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority's right to rule. The British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity, and made partition inevitable. [ . . . ] The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: "Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged."

Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries. As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain "a bulwark of British rule in India." [ . . . ] In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Churchill had been loudest among the reactionaries who were determined not to lose India, "the jewel in the crown," and, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he tried every tactic to thwart Indian independence. "I hate Indians," he declared. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." [ . . . ] According to his own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, Churchill knew "as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies." [ . . . ]

Von Tunzelmann judges that Churchill, hoping to forestall independence by opportunistically supporting Muslim separatism, instead became "instrumental in creating the world's first modern Islamic state." [ . . . ]

What Leopold Amery denounced as Churchill's "Hitler-like attitude" to India manifested itself most starkly during a famine, caused by a combination of war and mismanagement, that claimed between one and two million lives in Bengal in 1943. Urgently beseeched by Amery and the Indian viceroy to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn't died yet. [ . . . ]

As von Tunzelmann writes, "By 1946 the subcontinent was a mess, with British civil and military officers desperate to leave, and a growing hostility to their presence among Indians." In an authoritative recent two-volume account of the end of the British Empire in Asia -- Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars -- the Cambridge University historians Tim Harper and Christopher Bayly describe how quickly the Japanese had humiliated the British in Malaya and Burma, threatening their hold over India. With their mystique of power gone, Asia's British masters depended on what Bayly and Harper term the "temporary sufferance of Asians." Although Churchill had rejected the Congress Party's offer of military support in exchange for independence, Bayley and Harper write that, ultimately, "it was Indian soldiers, civilian laborers and businessmen who made possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of India."

The British could not now rely on brute force without imperilling their own sense of legitimacy. Besides, however much they "preferred the illusion of imperial might to the admission of imperial failure," as von Tunzelmann puts it, the country, deep in wartime debt, simply couldn't afford to hold on to its increasingly unstable empire. Imperial disengagement appeared not just inevitable but urgent.

But Churchill's divisive policies had already produced a disastrous effect on the Indian political scene. Congress Party leaders had refused to share power with Jinnah, confident that they did not need Muslim support in order to win a majority vote in elections. These attitudes stoked Muslim fears that the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru was a cover for Hindu dominance. While the Congress leaders were in prison, Jinnah, with Churchill's encouragement, steadily consolidated Muslim opinion behind him. By 1946, this secularist politician had managed to present himself as the best defender of Muslim interests in a Hindu-dominated India. Religion was never so deeply and enduringly politicized in India as it was in the last years of imperial rule. [ . . . ]

Meeting Mountbatten a few months after partition, Churchill assailed him for helping Britain's "enemies," "Hindustan," against "Britain's friends," the Muslims. Little did Churchill know what his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades.

The relevance of these quotes to what Britain did in Palestine, and to what first Britain and now the US has and is still doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, should be obvious.

As for Churchill, it's possible that one can see his hand in every war in a century of war, from the British assault on the Sudan, which he witnessed, and the Boer War, where he first made his political mark, up to the present War on Terror. Churchill has at least this much in common with Bush: he never recognized making a fundamental error, and realize that there was anything in the world beyond his competency. Paul Woodward made a note recently where he suggested that Bush reflect on the following quote from the Tao Te Ching:

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

Of course, it's not just Churchill, nor just Bush. The British, to the extent one can generalize, still cling to the notion that their empire was good for all concerned, and they reiterate this by trying to help the Americans follow in their footsteps. That those footsteps lead to ruin is something they all will deny as long as possible. Only by recognizing Churchill as one of the true monsters of the 20th century will we start to become "centered in the Tao."

posted 2007-08-16