Freedom at Midnight (27 page)

The young naval officer and the unheeded politician calling for Britain's rearmament had become friendly in the months after Munich. Later, after Churchill had given him his first major wartime command at Combined Operations, a close relationship had grown up between the two men. Mountbatten had been a frequent visitor to Churchill's wartime command post at 10 Downing Street.*

* Mountbatten had, in fact, been ChurchuTs luncheon guest along with Max Beaverbrook, the newspaper publisher, on Saturday, June 21, 1941. The Prime Minister announced when he joined his guests, "I've got some very exciting news. Hitler is going to attack Russia tomorrow. We've spent all morning trying to evaluate what it means."

"Ill tell you whatll happen," Beaverbrook said. "They'll go through the Russians like a dose of salts. God, they'll wipe them up! They'll be through in a month or six weeks." "Well," said Churchill, "the Americans think it will take more like two months, and our own chiefs think at least that I myself think they may last

Churchill, Mountbatten knew, was very fond of him, but, he thought, "for all the wrong reasons. He thought I was a swashbuckler, a warrior. He had no idea what my political outlook was." The young admiral was certain he would "have been dropped like a shot" for his views on Southeast Asia's future had Churchill been re-elected in 1945.

Now he had come at Attlee's request to get Churchill to perform what would be one of the most painful acts of the old Tory's political career. He wanted his personal blessing on the plan which would begin the fatal, inevitable dismemberment of Churchill's beloved empire.

"Winston," Attlee had told Mountbatten in asking him to see Churchill, "holds the key in England. Neither I nor any of my government could possibly persuade him," Attlee had said, "but he's fond of you. He trusts you. You have a chance."

Their meeting began on a difficult note. Churchill, Mountbatten knew, thought the very idea that the Indians should ever be allowed to try to run themselves was a disaster, a concept wholly foreign to his outlook. "He was absolutely sincere," Mountbatten remembered, "in his belief that the worst thing that could happen to India would be to have its efficient British administration of proven in-

as long as three months, but then, they'll fold up and well be back where we started with our backs to the wall."

Mountbatten was forgotten for some time until Churchill turned to him and said, almost apologetically, "Ah, Dickie, do tell us about your battle in Crete."

"It's past history," Mountbatten replied, "but may I be allowed to give an opinion about what's going to happen in Russia?"

Somewhat reluctantly Churchill agreed.

"I disagree with Max," said Mountbatten, "I disagree with the Americans, our chiefs and, quite honestly, I disagree with you, Prime Minister. I don't think the Russians are going to fold up. I don't think they're going to be defeated. This is the end of Hitler. It's the turning point of the war."

"Well, now, Dickie," said Churchill, "why should your views be so different?"

"First," answered Mountbatten, "because Stalin's purge trials have eliminated much potential internal opposition to which the Nazis might have appealed. Second, and it's painful for me to say this, because my family ruled there for so long, but the people now feel they have a stake in the country. This time they'll fight. They feel they have something to lose."

Churchill was not impressed. "Well, Dickie," he said, "it's very nice to hear a young, enthusiastic voice like yours. But we'll see."

tegrity removed and replaced by a whole lot of "inexperienced, theoretical Indians."

As he reviewed his efforts in India, Mountbatten kept his eyes on the great bald head glaring at him from his bed. For half a century, Churchill had said no to every move to bring India along the road to independence. One last Churchillian "no" now would be a devastating blow to all Mountbatten's hopes. With his majority in the House of Lords, Churchill had the power to delay passage of India's independence bill for two full years.

That, the ambitious young viceroy knew, "would be absolutely fatal." Congress's agreement to his plan was conditioned on dominion status being offered immediately. His government, his administration, a subcontinent seething with communal passions, simply could not survive the two years that an irascible Churchill could, if he chose to, impose upon history.

Eyes half closed, Churchill listened to Mountbatten's arguments with the inscrutable air of a Buddha lost in transcendental meditation. Nothing, the perspective of India's collapse, chaos, civil disorder, awakened his impassive features.

Mountbatten had, however, brought back from Simla one argument that could arouse the old leader's emotions. It was Congress's promise to accept dominion status if it was offered immediately. As he skillfully opened the vista of the raj's most implacable foes agreeing to remain within the ranks of the British Commonwealth, Churchill's attitude altered perceptibly; his beloved empire might be dying, but here, at least, was the hope that something of it would remain. There would be something left of that old India where he had burned out his romantic youth. Much more important, some of those British links that Churchill sincerely believed indispensable to India's future well-being could now be maintained.

Suspiciously, he eyed Mountbatten. Did he have anything in writing? he asked. Mountbatten said he had a letter from Nehru, now with Attlee, indicating that Congress would accept, provided that dominion status was conferred without delay.

And what about his old foe, Gandhi?

Gandhi, Mountbatten admitted, was unpredictable. He was the one potentially grave danger. But with the help of

Nehru and Patel, he hoped he could contain him in a crisis.

Churchill glowered on his bed, thinking, his cigar clenched between his teeth.

Finally, he declared that if Mountbatten really could deliver the formal, public acceptance of all the Indian parties to his plan, then, "the whole country" would be behind him. He and his Conservative Party would join Labour in rushing through Parliament the historic legislation that Mountbatten needed before its summer recess. India could become independent not in years or months, but in weeks, even days.

New Delhi, Early June 1947

Dark, velvet pillars, the smoke of a series of funeral pyres crept into the Indian skies at points scattered across the subcontinent. No ghee or sandalwood stoked those hastily assembled bonfires. Their crackling flames were watched over, not by mantra-chanting mourners, but by impassive circles of British bureaucrats. It was paper that those flames were devouring, four tons of documents, reports and files. Lighted on the orders of Sir Conrad Cor-field, that series of bonfires was converting into ashes the lurid details of some of the most tumultuous and picturesque episodes in Indian history, the chronicles of the vices, peccadilloes and scandals of five generations of ma-harajas. Recorded and catalogued with meticulous care by successive representatives of the raj, those files could have become, in the hands of independent Indian and Pakistan administrations, sources of blackmail—a utilization not altogether unforeseen by the British themselves when the decision was made to accumulate them.

No longer able to guarantee the future of his maharajas, Corfield had been determined to protect at least their past. He had obtained the Attlee government's agreement to the destruction of these archives during his London visit. As soon as he had returned to Delhi, he ordered the systematic destruction of any files dealing with the private lives of his charges.

Sir Conrad lit the first fire himself under the windows of his office, nourishing it with the documents concealed in a two-foot-high safe to which he and one other man had the

key. A hundred and fifty years of reading, a select distillation of the most juicy of princely scandals went up in smoke in Sir Conrad's little bonfire, drifting off in ashes over the roofs and streets of Delhi. Alerted to what was happening, Nehru immediately protested the destruction of material that was in his eyes a precious part of India's patrimony.

It was too late. In Patiala, Hyderabad, Indore, Mysore, Baroda, at Porbandar, Gandhi's home on the shores of the Gulf of Arabia, at Chitral in the Himalayas, and in the sweltering rain forests of Cochin, British officials were already feeding the gossip of an era to the flames.

The accounts of the sexual eccentricities of some of India's princes were in themselves lengthy enough to stoke a good fire for hours. An early Nawab of Rampur had made a bet with a number of neighboring princes to see which ruler would be able to deflower the most virgins in a year. The proof of each conquest would be the thin gold ring worn by an imbedded girl in the nostril of her nose. Sending out his courtiers to comb the villages of his state like beaters scaring up pheasants, the Nawab won the bet handily. By the end of the year, his collection of rings, melted down, represented several pounds of pure gold.

The bonfire consuming the archives dealing with the Maharaja of Kashmir destroyed the traces of one of the more unsavory scandals of the world between the wars. The impetuous prince was trapped in flagrante delicto in London's Savoy Hotel by a man he assumed to be the husband of his ravishing bed companion. In fact, the prince had fallen into the net of a gang of blackmailers who proceeded to drain the state of Kashmir, via the prince's personal bank account, of a very considerable part of its revenues. The case finally broke when the young lady's real husband, persuaded that he had not been properly remunerated for the loan of his wife, went to the police. In the court case that followed, the unfortunate maharaja's identity was concealed under the pseudonym of "Mr. A." Disillusioned for good with women as a result of his tribulations, Hari Singh returned to Kashmir, where he discovered new sexual horizons in the company of the young men of his state. The accounts of his activities had been faithfully reported to the representatives of the Crown. Now, whipped by the fresh mountain breeze of Srinagar, they disappeared into the Himalayan sky.

The Nizam of Hyderabad combined his passions for photography and pornography to amass what was believed to be the most extensive collection of pornographic photographs in India. To assemble it, the aging Nizam had placed in the walls and ceilings of his guest quarters automatic cameras that faithfully recorded all his guests' activities in their rooms. The prince had even installed a camera behind the mirror in his palace's guest bathroom. The camera's harvest, a portrait gallery of the great and near-great of India relieving themselves on the Nizam's toilet, had pride of place in his collection.

The most recent report in the Nizam's file dealt with the British resident's efforts to make certain that the sexual proclivities of his son and heir were those befitting a future Nizam. As tactfully as he could, the worthy gentleman alluded to certain reports reaching his ears, which indicated that the young prince's tastes did not encompass princesses. The Nizam summoned his son. Then he ordered into their presence a particularly attractive inmate of his harem. Over the embarrassed protest of the resident, he instructed his son to give an immediate and public refutation of the dastardly insinuation that he might not be inclined to continue the family line.^

Of all the scandals disappearing in the flames of Conrad Corfield's bonfires, none had left a trace quite as distasteful as that of the forty-year reign of the prince of a small state of 800,000 people on the edges of the Rajasthan. The Maharaja of Alwar was a man of such charm and culture that he had been able to seduce a succession of viceroys into tolerating his activities. He happened to believe that he was a reincarnation of the god Rama. As a result he constantly wore black silk gloves to protect his divine fingers from the contaminating touch of mortal flesh, even refusing to remove them to shake the hand of the king of England. He engaged a number of Hindu theologians to calculate the exact size of the turban of Rama so he could make a copy for himself.

What with his temporal role as a prince and his conviction of his divine status, Alwar was not a man to restrain himself in the exercise of his power. One of the best shots in India, he delighted in using children as tiger bait in his hunts. Plucking them from any hut in his state, he assured their horrified parents that he was certain to get a shot into the beast before it could maul their offspring. A ho-

mosexual of particularly perverse taste, he made the royal bed the military academy qualifying young men for entry into the officer ranks of his army. Once there, they were expected to participate in his orgies, a number of which culminated in sadistic murders.

His abuses of authority were finally brought to a head by two incidents during the viceroyalty of Lord Willing-don. Invited to lunch at Viceroy's House, Alwar was seated next to Lady Willingdon, who admired rather effusively a large diamond ring on his finger. Slipping it off his hand, the prince passed it to the vicereine for her private contemplation.

Lady Willingdon's admiration had not been entirely disinterested. Tradition had it that a prince would offer a viceroy or vicereine any object he or she had admired with particular interest. Lady Willingdon, who had notably admiring eyes when it came to precious stones, had thus amassed during her stay in India a very considerable collection of jewelry. She slipped Alwar's ring onto her finger, regarded it with pleasure, then passed it back to its owner.

Alwar discreetly asked a waiter to bring him a finger bowl. When it arrived, the reincarnation of Rama proceeded, before the widening eyes of his fellow guests, to meticulously wash from the ring whatever traces the vicereine's finger may have left upon it before slipping it back onto his own hand.

The final, unpardonable crime of the depraved prince in the eyes of his British benefactors took place on a polo field. Furious at the disobedience of one of his ponies during a match, the prince had the poor beast drenched with kerosene between chukkers, then personally set a match to the animal. That flagrant public display of cruelty to animals weighed more heavily in the scales of justice than his more private, but equally terminal cruelty to a number of his sexual partners. The Maharaja was deposed and packed off into exile.