The World

The only one of the aggressors to remain in office became the figurehead of a thriving democracy, reigning until 1989 (his grandson, Naruhito, succeeded in 2019 as 126th tenno of the most ancient dynasty). In the west, the victors agreed to put the Nazis on trial at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, a partnership between democratic and Stalinist judges. Ribbentrop was sentenced to hang; Göring killed himself; and Speer charmed his way off the gallows. The chief murderers of the Einsatzgruppen and the killing camps were hanged – Himmler had committed suicide – but few lower ranks were punished. Krupp was tried and sentenced to twelve years. Antonescu was shot. Chastened by these horrors, a more rules-based world, created by a combination of a court of human rights and the authority of the United Nations, fostered supranational law, a measure of civilized conduct and a legal definition of genocide.

^* Antisemitism became morally unacceptable; the Enlightenment was restored.

By the time the Bombs were dropped, Churchill was no longer prime minister, a victor’s defeat that surprised Stalin. ‘One party,’ he said, ‘is much better.’

‘A blessing in disguise,’ said Clementine Churchill.

‘At the moment,’ replied Churchill, ‘it seems very effectively disguised.’ The defeat was soothed partly by George VI’s offer of the dukedom of Dover, a title he refused. The Labour prime minister Clement Attlee (‘a modest man’, quipped Churchill, ‘with much to be modest about’) created a system that paid unemployed people and offered free healthcare, the prototype of an ambitious vision of the state as guarantor of comfort that western citizens came to regard as more important than its traditional roles of order and security. Previously only revolution could redistribute wealth and protect the poor: the British achievement was to do it peacefully. At home, Attlee offered what he called a ‘New Jerusalem’; abroad, his vision would spark war for the old Jerusalem – and sanguinary independence for India. In December 1945, Indians voted for a legislative assembly.

The problem was: there were two winners.

THE DEATH OF ONE INDIA: NEHRU, JINNAH AND THE VICEREINE

Nehru and Congress won the election. But so did Jinnah and the Muslim League who, campaigning on one issue – the creation of Pakistan – won every seat reserved for Muslims. Nehru formed the first Indian government, an interim one, in tense coalition with the League.

Freed from prison in 1944, Nehru aspired to inherit the entire British Raj, the first time in history India had ever been united. The British agreed, keen to hand over the Raj complete to a single leader, Nehru, which would embellish the Anglosphere as a British dominion.

Nehru was a romantic who had embraced a vision of gorgeous India that this lover of women always compared to a beautiful girl. ‘India was in my blood,’ he wrote, like a romantic novelist; ‘she is very lovable and none of her children can forget her … for she is part of them in her greatness and failings and they are mirrored in those deep eyes of hers …’ Overlooking much of Indian history (Gandhi disdained history as ‘an interruption of nature’, an instant in the cycles of life and reincarnation) as well as the differences between Hindus and Muslims, he believed in a single secular liberal democracy represented by Congress. ‘There is no cultural conflict in India,’ he insisted. There was just one India and Nehru dismissed the prospect of a Muslim challenge. ‘The idea is absurd,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘hardly worth considering.’ But the decline of British power and the new electoral politics promoted a new ethnic and religious nationalism: the electoral results undeniably revealed two visions of India.

Attlee proposed an Indian federation that might have prevented partition. Initially both sides accepted the idea, but then Nehru rejected it, believing Congress could receive the Raj complete. Jinnah in revenge called a Direct Action Day in Kolkata, where Muslims slaughtered Hindus, unrestrained by Bengal’s Muslim League government. Gandhi rushed to Kolkata to fast for peace.

In March 1946, Nehru travelled to Singapore to review Indian troops. When the soldiers mobbed him, the forty-four-year-old Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the Allied supremo in East Asia, Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, was knocked over in the excitement. Nehru and Mountbatten helped her up. The three got on so well that when Attlee sought a viceroy to oversee independence, Nehru probably suggested Mountbatten. Attlee appointed Viscount Mountbatten of Burma (as he had become) as the last viceroy – ‘the most powerful man on earth’ in his own words. He was debonair, capable and vain. Edwina was a sharp-tongued, free-spirited heiress, combining an exciting extramarital sex life (her lovers included women and men, a favourite being Hutch the Grenadian cabaret star) with intelligent public service. Mountbatten admired her as a force of nature.^*