The World

The couple frequently invited Nehru and Indira to the Viceroy’s House in Delhi. Indira was Nehru’s indispensable companion in the vertiginous months ahead. Mountbatten became ‘real friends with Nehru’. Mountbatten’s daughters sometimes burst in to find Nehru on his head doing yoga. Gradually, an intimate friendship, all the more touching for its maturity, developed between the widowed Nehru and the married vicereine Edwina. ‘Suddenly I realized (and perhaps you did also),’ wrote Nehru later to Edwina, ‘that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force of which I was only dimly aware, drew us to one another. I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery.’ She agreed: ‘You left me a strange sense of peace and happiness. Perhaps I brought you the same?’ Mountbatten noticed, telling his daughter, ‘Please keep this to yourself but she and Jawaharlal are so sweet together. They really dote on each other … Mummy’s been incredibly sweet lately.’

Mountbatten leaned strongly towards Nehru, and both mocked Jinnah: ‘a psychopathic case’, said Mountbatten; ‘a paranoid’, said Nehru. ‘Hitlerian.’ Yet Jinnah’s landslide had exposed the myth of Nehru’s one nation.

Mountbatten could have explored a federation, which as the US demonstrated could be powerful and democratic. Gandhi proposed Jinnah as premier of a united India. It was just such a federal compromise that might have avoided bloodshed. But a federation would take time to forge. Instead Nehru accepted Jinnah’s demand for a partition in which Congress would receive the larger part of British India – its capital, army, bureaucracy – in return for Dominion status for both of the new countries. ‘We were tired men,’ he admitted later. ‘Partition offered a way out and we took it.’

Mountbatten embraced the plan for two states, India and Muslim Pakistan.^* Gandhi knew this would provoke violence. ‘The only alternatives,’ he told Mountbatten, ‘are a continuation of British rule to keep law and order or an Indian bloodbath. The bloodbath must be faced and accepted.’

On 3 June 1947, accompanied by Nehru and Jinnah, Mountbatten announced ‘the transfer of power to a fifth of the human race’ and partition, creating Pakistan in two unconnected parts. This pleased no one: Jinnah wanted the whole of Punjab and Bengal along with Kashmir, and requested a strip of India to link the two. The exact maps, to be drawn up by a British judge who had never been to India, would be announced just after independence, stoking up tension.

Then Mountbatten announced Britain would leave in ten weeks, a breakneck departure, unveiled with Mountbattenesque showmanship. It is a reality of all power that the moment departure is decided, the magnet of new power exerts its own visceral attraction and repulsion. The speed and uncertainty were likely to cause a bloody cataclysm, the only excuses being that British power was diminishing by the second; that he was unwilling to allow British troops to die keeping order; and that no ruler of India had ever voluntarily handed the subcontinent to another power before. Millions of people started to panic, anxious not just about what country they would live in but for their safety. ‘We’re living in the midst of crises,’ said Nehru. A further complication was that the princes still ruled 40 per cent of India: the Croesan nizam of Hyderabad, Sir Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII, sixty-year-old descendant of the paladin of Aurangzeb, saw himself as a Muslim monarch and had married his son to the daughter of the last Ottoman caliph. Now he refused to join India and planned his own independence.

On 14 August 1947, in Karachi, Jinnah, aged seventy-one and already suffering from TB, announced Pakistani independence, becoming premier and governor-general and hailed as supreme leader. The next day, Nehru announced India’s ‘tryst with destiny … at the stroke of the midnight hour’, his Britannic rhetoric underlining how much he, the Harrovian Brahmin for all his socialism, was the successor and heir of the British Raj. India took possession of three-quarters of the Raj and the colonial administration, always overwhelmingly run by Indians, was transferred to the new state, just without the British. A vast crowd watched the raising of the Indian flag, which used the dharmachakra, symbol of Ashoka. Nehru had to rescue the viceregal daughter, Pamela, who almost got crushed by the crowds. ‘He was very nimble with his sandals,’ she recalled. ‘He said, “Come on.” I said, “I can’t, I’ve got high heels.” “Well, take them off,” he said’ – and the two of them were passed by hand over the crowd.