Freedom at Midnight (16 page)

Now his prophecy had been realized. It was to his position as prime minister of India's interim government that Nehru owed the honor of being the first of India's four leaders to enter Mountbatten's study.

For Jawaharlal Nehru, the conversation beginning in the Viceroy's study was just the latest episode in a continuing, lifelong dialogue with his country's colonizers. Nehru had been a pampered guest in the best country homes in England. He had dined off the gold service of Buckingham Palace and the tin plates of a British prison. His interlocutors had included Cambridge dons, prime ministers, viceroys, the King-Emperor—and jailkeepers.

Born into an Eastern aristocracy as old and as proud as any produced by India's British rulers, that of the Kashmiri Brahmans, Nehru had been sent to England at sixteen to finish his education. He spent seven gloriously happy years there, learning Latin verbs and cricket at Harrow, studying science, Nietzsche and Chaucer at Cambridge, admiring the reasoning of Blackstone at the Inns of Court With his gentle charm, his elegant manners, his culture, he had enjoyed an extraordinary social success wherever he went. He moved easily through the drawing rooms of English society, absorbing the values and mannerisms he found there. So complete was the transformation wrought by those seven years in England that on his return to his native Allahabad, his family and friends found him completely de-Indianized.

The young Nehru soon discovered the limits of his de-Indianization. He was blackballed when he applied for membership in the local British Club. He may have been a product of Harrow and Cambridge, but to the all-white, all-British—and devoutly middle-class—membership of the club, he was still a black Indian.

The bitterness of that rejection haunted Nehru for years

and hastened him toward the cause that became his life's work, the struggle for Indian independence. He joined the Congress Party, and his agitation on its behalf soon qualified him for admission to the finest political training school in the British Empire, British jails, where Nehru spent nine years of his life.

In the solitude of his cell, in prison courtyards with his fellow Congress leaders, he had shaped his vision of the India of tomorrow. An idealist immersed in the doctrines of social revolution, Nehru dreamed of reconciling on the soil of India his two political passions: the parliamentary democracy of England and the economic socialism of Karl Marx. He dreamed of an India freed of the shackles of both poverty and superstition, unburdened of capitalism, an India in which the smokestacks of factories reached out from her cities, an India enjoying the plentitude of that Industrial Revolution to which her colonizers had denied her access.

No one might have seemed a more unlikely candidate to lead India toward that vision than Jawaharial Nehru. Under the cotton khadi that he wore in deference to the dictates of Congress, he remained the quintessential English gentleman. In a land of mystics, he was a cool rationalist. The mind that had exulted in the discovery of science at Cambridge never ceased to be appalled by his fellow Indians, who refused to stir from their homes on days proclaimed inauspicious by their favorite astrologers. He was a publicly declared agnostic in the most intensely spiritual area in the world, and he never ceased to express the horror that the word "religion" inspired in him. Nehru despised India's priests, her sadhus, her chanting monks and her pious sheikhs. They had only served, he felt, to impede her progress, deepen her divisions and ease the task of her foreign rulers.

And yet, the India of those sadhus and the superstition-haunted masses had accepted Nehru. For thirty years, he had traveled across India haranguing the multitudes. Clinging to the roofs and sides of tramways to escape the slums of India's cities, on foot and by bullock cart in the countrysides, his countrymen had come by the hundreds of thousands to see and hear him. Many in those crowds could not hear his words or understand them when they did. For them, it had been enough, however, just to see, over the ocean of heads around them, his frail and gesticu-

lating silhouette. They had taken darshan, a kind of spiritual communion received from being in the presence of a great man, and that had sufficed.

He was a superb orator and writer, a man who treasured words as a courtesan treasures jewels. Anointed early by Gandhi, he had advanced steadily through the ranks of Congress to preside over it three times. The Mahatma had made it clear that it was on Nehru's shoulders that he wished his mantle to fall.

For Nehru, Gandhi was a genius. Nehru's cool, pragmatic mind had rejected almost all of Gandhi's great moves: civil disobedience, the Salt March, Quit India. But his heart had told him to follow the Mahatma; and his heart, he would later admit, had been right.

Gandhi had been, in a sense, Nehru's guru. It was Gandhi who had re-Indianized Nehru, sending him into the villages to find the real face of his homeland, to let the fingers of his soul touch India's sufferings. Whenever the two men were in the same place, Nehru would spend at least half an hour sitting at Bapuji's feet, sometimes talking, sometimes listening, sometimes just looking and thinking. Those were, for Nehru, moments of intense spiritual satisfaction, perhaps the closest brush his agnostic heart would ever have with religion.

Between the two a fascinating father-son relationship had grown up, animated by all the tensions, the affections and repressed sentiments of guilt such a relationship implied. All his life, Nehru had had an instinctive need for a strong, dominant personality near him, some steadying influence to whom he could turn in the crises engendered by his volatile nature. His father, a bluff, jovial barrister with a penchant for good Scotch and Bordeaux, had first filled that role. Since his death, it had been Gandhi's.

Nehru's devotion to Gandhi remained total, but a subtle change was overtaking their relationship. A phase in Nehru's life was drawing to a close. The son was ready to leave his father's house for the new world that he saw beyond its gates. In that new world, he would need a new guru, a guru more sensitive to the complex problems that would assail him there.

Much had changed in the world, in their own lives, since Nehru and Mountbatten had met for the first time, but the

undercurrent of mutual sympathy that had warmed their earlier encounter soon made itself felt in the Viceroy's study. It was not surprising that it should. Although Mountbatten did not know it, Nehru was partly responsible for his being in that room.

Besides, there was a great deal to bind the scion of a three-thousand-year-old line of Kashmiri Brahmans and the man who claimed descent from the oldest ruling family in Protestantism. They both loved to talk, and they expanded in each other's company. Nehru, the abstract thinker, admired Mountbatten's practical dynamism, the capacity for decisive action that wartime command had given him. Mountbatten was stimulated by the subtlety of Nehru's thought. He quickly understood that the only Indian politician who would share and understand his desire to maintain a link between Britain and a new India was Jawaharlal Nehru.

With his usual candor, the Viceroy told Nehru that he had been given an appalling responsibility and he intended to approach the Indian problem in a mood of stark realism.

As they talked, the two men rapidly agreed on two major points: a quick decision was essential to avoid a bloodbath; and the division of India would be a tragedy.

Then Nehru turned to the actions of the next Indian leader who would enter Mountbatten's study, the penitent marching his lonely path through Noakhali and Bihar. The man to whom he had been so long devoted was, Nehru said, "going around with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India instead of diagnosing the cause of the eruption of the sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole."

In offering a glimpse into the growing gulf separating the Liberator of India and his closest companions, Nehru's words provided Mountbatten with a vital insight into the form that his actions in Delhi should take. If he could not persuade India's leaders to keep their country united, he was going to have to persuade them to divide it. Gandhi's unremitting hostility to partition could place an insurmountable barrier in his path and confront him with a catastrophe. His only hope, then, would be to divorce the leaders of Congress from their aging leader. Nehru would be the key if that happened. He was the one ally Mount-

batten must have; only he might have the authority to stand up against the Mahatma.

Now his words had revealed the discord between Gandhi and his party chiefs. Mountbatten might be forced to widen and exploit that gap to succeed. He needed Nehru, and he spared no effort to win his support. On none of India's leaders would Operation Seduction have more impact than on the realistic Kashmiri Brahman. A friendship that would bind Louis and Edwina Mountbatten and prove decisive in the months to come was beginning that afternoon in the Viceroy's study.

Taking Nehru to the door, Mountbatten told him: "Mr. Nehru, I want you to regard me not as the last British viceroy winding up the raj, but as the first to lead the way to a new India." Nehru turned and looked at the man he had wanted to see on the viceregal throne. "Ah," he said, a faint smile creasing his face, "now I know what they mean when they speak of your charm as being so danger-

ous."

Once again, Churchill's half-naked fakir was sitting in the viceregal study, there "to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor."

He's rather like a little bird, Louis Mountbatten thought, as he contemplated that famous figure at his side, a kind of "sweet, sad sparrow perched on my armchair."*

They made an odd couple: the royal sailor who loved to dress up in uniformed splendor and the elderly Indian who refused to cover his nakedness with anything more than a sheet of rough cotton. Mountbatten handsome, the vitality surging from his athlete's body, and Gandhi, whose little frame almost disappeared into his armchair; the advocate of nonviolence and the professional warrior who had authorized his subordinates to take ten thousand dead if necessary to get the airfields he needed to assault Rangoon on schedule; the aristocrat and the man who had chosen to

* As a young man accompanying his cousin the Prince of Wales on his royal tour of India in 1921, Mountbatten had tried, unsuccessfully, to arrange a meeting between Gandhi and the heir to the imperial crown. He had no difficulty convincing his adventurous cousin; Gandhi, however, had organized a boycott of the royal visit and the Viceroy, Lord Reading, had no intention of allowing a meeting between the two to take place. Nor would he allow Mountbatten to see him alone.

live his life immersed in the poverty of the most destitute masses on the globe; Mountbatten, the wartime master of the technology of communications, forever searching for some new electronic gadget to enhance the complex radio net that linked him to the millions of his command, and Gandhi, the fragile messiah who mistrusted all that paraphernalia and had still communicated with his public as few figures in his century had been able to.

All of those elements, almost everything in their backgrounds seemed to destine the two men to disagreement. And yet, in the months ahead, Gandhi the pacifist would, according to one of his intimates, find in the soul of the professional warrior "the echo of certain of the moral values that stirred in his own soul." For his part, Mount-batten would become so attached to Gandhi that on his death he would predict that "Mahatma Gandhi will go down in history on a par with Christ and Buddha."

So important had Mountbatten considered this first meeting with Gandhi that he had written the Mahatma inviting him to Delhi before the ceremony enthroning him as viceroy. Gandhi had drafted his reply immediately, then, with a chuckle, told an aide, "Wait a couple of days before putting it in the mail. I don't want that young man to think I'm dying for his invitation."

That "young man" had accompanied his invitation with one of those gestures for which he was becoming noted and which sometimes infuriated his fellow Englishmen. He had offered to send his personal aircraft to Bihar to fly Gandhi to Delhi. Gandhi had declined the offer. He had insisted on traveling, as he always did, in a third-class railway car.

To give their meeting a special cordiality, Mountbatten had asked his wife to be present. Now, with the famous figure opposite them, worry and concern swept over the viceregal couple. The Mahatma, they both immediately sensed, was profoundly unhappy, trapped in the grip of some mysterious remorse. Had they done something wrong? Neglected some arcane law of protocol?

Mountbatten gave his wife an anxious glance. God, he thought, what a terrible way to start things off! As politely as he could, he asked Gandhi if something was troubling him.

A slow, sorrowful sigh escaped the Indian leader. "You know," he replied, "all my life, since I was in South Af-

rica, I've renounced physical possessions." He owned virtually nothing, he explained—his Gita, the tin utensils from which he ate, mementos of his stay in Yeravda prison, his three "gurus." And his watch, the old eight-shilling Inger-soll that he hung from a string around his waist because, if he was going to devote every minute of his day to God's work, he had to know what time it was.

"Do you know what?" he asked sadly. "They stole it. Someone in my railway compartment coming down to Delhi stole the watch." As the frail figure lost in his armchair spoke those words, Mountbatten saw tears shining in his eyes. In an instant, the Viceroy understood. It was not the loss of his watch that so pained Gandhi. What hurt was that they had not understood. It was not an eight-shilling watch an unknown hand had plucked from him in that congested railway car, but a particle of his faith.*

Finally, after a long silence, Gandhi began to talk of India's current dilemma. Mountbatten interrupted with a friendly wave of his hand.

"Mr. Gandhi," he said, "first, I want to know who you are."

The Viceroy's words reflected a deliberate tactic. He was determined to get to know these Indian leaders before allowing them to begin assailing him with their minimum demands and final conditions. By putting them at ease, by getting them to confide in him, he hoped to create an atmosphere of mutual confidence and sympathy in which his own dynamic personality could have greater impact.