India, at that time, was suspended between two eras, between an imperial past accomplishing its own death and an independent future striving to be born, between an imposed unity and a self-caused partition. In men and arms and supplies it was making an immense contribution to fighting a war which it had not chosen to enter, and which many of its political leaders wanted to end. With a ruthless enemy at its gates it was riven by internal political warfare over its long-term destiny. It was the keystone of a world of empires that was to collapse into fragments within the lifetime of most of its people. Its political history in the decade between the start of a new constitution that shed much internal power to democracy and its achievement of a total democratic autonomy, can be seen as an inevitable product of worldwide historical forces which neither the governing powers nor the anonymous masses could control. On this view, it mattered little who did what at any particular time; the Gandhis and Jinnahs, the burra lat sahibs in Viceroy’s House, were alike frail craft on a storm-tossed tide.
There is some truth in that retrospect, but far from the whole truth. Men of historical stature are not mere passengers on a vehicle of predestined direction and overpowering momentum. Their personalities, from which their words and deeds derive, leave their stamp upon the fate of nations. No excuse is needed for drawing here pictures of six figures from the Indian story as I saw them—two Viceroys of India and four figures from the sub-continent itself. With Lord Linlithgow and Lord Mountbatten I had close personal relations; Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah I saw mainly from afar, though I conversed with them all; VP Menon was one of the best friends I have had. I have no hesitation in calling them all great men in their several ways.
The Marquess of Linlithgow.
It was easy to misjudge Lord Linlithgow, second Marquess and Viceroy. His public persona belied the private man. Though impressive in stature and manner, he was neither handsome nor graceful, nor had he any gift for light conversation or emotional oratory, for the words that disarm hostility, move crowds or sway assemblies. He was forbidding to many, not easy with strangers, nor given to bonhomie or quick friendships. Viceregal state, which he maintained as much from personal inclination as from belief that it served the prestige of the sircar—that magnificent bluff whereby Britain ruled ten times its own numbers in India—enlarged his distance from the ordinary man. He had naught in him of the popular politician, the brilliant improvisor or the self-assured intellectual. Shallow observers might see him as an elephantine plodder. Yet, neither a Dalhousie nor a Curson, still less a Mountbatten, on the roll of British proconsuls in India he was in achievement one of the greatest, and the achievement stemmed from qualities which the public neither in Britain nor in India fully recognised.
He was a formidable-looking man. Very tall, ungainly in motion, with a long solemn face like a sad clown that belied his rich humour, he displayed the deterrent reserve of a naturally shy man. As if this were not enough to awe an official caller at Viceroy’s House, he always sat on a big throne-like chair raised several inches on a daïs behind a massive desk. But the façade concealed a humanity and almost boyish levity which could suddenly break through, when the cheerful youth he had once been escaped from the careworn potentate that he had become. At my first official interview with him, when I was very much the new boy submitting to instruction in school traditions by the headmaster, he suddenly said: “They are thinking of sending Sam Hoare to succeed me—what do you think of him?” And there followed a discussion of political personalities as frank as he might have had with a contemporary friend. Rab Butler’s name came up, so too did Duff Cooper’s and Archie Sinclair’s. As candidates for Viceroyalty I answered dubiously about them all.
The custom of appointing Viceroys for only four years was sound, but its application would have meant Linlithgow’s leaving in 1940, at the first crisis of the war. His term was repeatedly renewed for a further three years, partly because of the difficulty of agreeing upon a successor. Of the Indian presidency governors, Sir Roger Lumley (later Earl of Scarbrough) of Bombay was the only possible contender; though able, popular and experienced, and attuned to Indian aspirations, he was not of Linlithgow’s calibre. The untimely death of Lord Brabourne, Governor of Bengal, with whom I had stayed in that monumental replica of Kedleston Hall in Calcutta, was a great misfortune, for he had much more qualities than lively charm and was certainly of Viceregal timber. But there were better reasons for keeping Linlithgow in office: his unsurpassed knowledge of contemporary India and its political leaders, his impregnable authority and the grave risk entailed in handing a crucial wartime responsibility to an untried man. The mind shrinks from imagining what might have happened in India under a less courageous, less determined, less experienced Viceroy through the Far Eastern disasters of 1941 to 1943, the approach of Japan to India’s soil, the Quit India campaign and Gandhi’s blackmailing fast.
Linlithgow had the best traits of the aristocrat: fearlessness, directness, the public spirit of one born to lead, an adamanthine refusal to be budged from a right course, and a profound feeling for continuity, no one being more conscious that we are but life-tenants of our inheritance, whether of rank, estates or power, than the landed nobleman. Such qualities make a man conservative, a protector rather than an innovator, more practical than speculative, never shirking fences but looking before he leaps. But they do not bar a readiness for considered change when that seems necessary, nor prevent a just appraisal of others of different mind. Linlithgow’s judgment of character was severe but unprejudiced. Though he warred against Gandhi’s campaigns, defied the Mahatma’s threat to fast unto death, and abominated his twists and turns, Linlithgow admired him as a Wellington might admire a Napoleon, or a Montgomery a Rommel, and was pleased to call him a friend.
“I once said to Gandhi,” he told me, “it is the greatest mistake to think of me as thwarting or frustrating India’s moves to self-government. I do my best, but it is you who are checking her advance by denying political experience to younger men. Where are your younger men in Congress?” Gandhi answered something about India’s being an old man’s country. “An old man’s country!” Linlithgow himself said to me: “If you find me slow in taking to new ideas, remember that I am getting to be an old man.” He was not in years an old man—he was in his early fifties—but he was weary in the saddle.
At the heart of Linlithgow’s qualities was his devotion to public duty. He shirked neither work nor responsibility nor public criticism in pursuit of that duty as he saw it. His duty as Viceroy turned out to be above all that of carrying India through the worst years of the second World War with the least turmoil and the greatest contribution to its own defence and Allied victory. At the outset of his Viceroyalty his paramount purpose had been different, to bring into full effect the new constitution embodied in the Government of India Act 1935. It had emerged from two round table conferences and a long parliamentary struggle, in which he had taken a key part as chairman of the Joint Select Committee on the Bill. Its authors, and Linlithgow himself, saw the Act as a decisive step towards enabling India to assume Dominion Status—already synonymous with national independence under the Crown.
In this endeavour he failed; for he never succeeded in bringing the princely states into the All-India federation which was the frame of the whole edifice. For his handling of the Indian princes he has been criticised, not unreasonably, since as Crown Representative he must take responsibility for the failure; but far less than the princes themselves could he be charged with throwing away their last chance of saving their thrones and the identity of their states in partnership with Indian democracy. They tried to make unconscionable terms for entering the federation, demanding pecuniary and fiscal benefits, and the protection of privileges which were destined to be totally lost a decade later. Linlithgow’s native caution allowed these bargaining parleys to go on too long, while he withheld the decisive pressure that he could command. One must remember that he was subject to a Conservative Secretary of State (Lord Zetland) and a large Tory majority in Parliament for whom the princes were a bulwark against the mischief of seditious Indian politicians. The rest of the new constitution, embodying a great advance in provincial democratic self-government and some loosening of British control at the Centre, went successfully into effect under Linlithgow’s regime. Without it, neither he nor any successor Viceroy could have steered political India through the turbulence of war with so little damage to the ship of state, nor could India have been able so simply and smoothly to accept the transfer of power soon after the war.
Linlithgow’s opinion of Indian character and political sense was not high. The new Indian members of his own recently-expanded Council, he told me, were beginning to act together on some matters, and he had told them that he welcomed this. They wanted to extend the practice to constitutional issues. I said I thought it would be fatal to tell them they must not discuss such things in concert. “Of course,” said Linlithgow in a snubbing tone: “I have other ways of stymieing them if need be. You see,” he went on, “it’s always the same with these Indians. Take a decision, give them something to work, and they will work it with skill. But they can’t construct.”
Professor (later Sir) Reggie Coupland was in India in the early months of 1942, gathering material for a book on the constitutional problem. Linlithgow said of him: “He has an interesting mind, but he strikes me now as a man who has a return ticket in one pocket and his ready-made solution for the Indian problem in the other, and he can’t change either. You and I know how much harder it is than he thinks to get the different communities and parties to work together.” I had told Coupland, I replied, that in my view it was a question of what you hoped to win by any political move; the price in risks must be weighed against the probable reward. For my part I did not believe that the great wave of Indian cooperation in the war for which the British press was calling, was there to be won. “That was a very wise remark,” said the Viceroy: “If I thought I could bring Hindus and Muslims together behind the war effort I would do anything to achieve it. But it’s the same old story—you can’t make an elephant canter.”
At the end of January 1942, Linlithgow was talking with me about the bad news from Burma. “The trouble,” he said, “is that if the Indian troops have to retreat and retreat they lose their morale. A defeat demoralises them—otherwise we British would not have been where we are... If their guts fail, that’s where our guts come in,” and he set his long jaw. He thought that India’s constitutional future might be settled by events. I had reached the conclusion, I told him, that the initiative would always have to come from the British: Indian politicians would never agree unless we gave them something to agree on. (How right that proved to be in 1947!) Linlithgow replied that he felt there was a lot to be said for Jinnah, who insisted that although he was called an extremist and obstructionist, he spoke for a nation of 90 million people. “You can’t just ignore him.” The solution, I felt, might prove to be: “Pakistan within a single India.” “I fear,” said the Viceroy, “that there will be a blood-bath here sooner or later.”
On a later occasion we were talking about long-term policy after the Cripps Mission’s failure. “We can carry on easily enough,” said Linlithgow, “so long as the war lasts and people are afraid of stirring up too much trouble. But after the war it will be different. Our system here is like a blown eggshell. Our old idea for defence, that India should have her own army for internal defence and emergencies, while a British army kept the Frontier, won’t work any longer.”
“The whole Thin Red Line empire won’t work any longer,” I said, “whether it is a military or an administrative line.” Then the Viceroy told me of the great difficulty he had in getting Indian public figures to take representative posts abroad. “There’s no all-India spirit, that’s the trouble. The only all-India spirit is hatred of the British, which is purely negative.” “Do you think,” he asked, “that we are witnessing the end of the phase of parliamentary government in India?” (He was thinking, as a later conversation made clear, of party-majority government in a communally divided country.) “I think perhaps we ought to change our policy to working towards a different system of government, away from the unity of India, which is unreal. I don’t mean Pakistan, but a series of natural units.” If that was to be our policy, I replied, the less we said about it the better. “Somehow,” said Linlithgow, “I don’t see Parliament at Westminster facing its responsibilities in India after the war. Can you see the political centre in Parliament, when the war is over, being ready to vote for giving India twenty years of firm government?” I said I certainly could not.
Those fragments of conversation show better than any descriptive words of mine the kind of man Lord Linlithgow was. They are lightened by humour and a gift for metaphor, especially of a sporting kind. They reveal how in contrast with his orthodox, deliberate and even ponderous public utterance he could be devastatingly blunt and frank in private. He was basically realistic, and sceptical of enthusiastic ideas for change, which to him had no value in itself, yet he was always ready to consider practical ways of advancing India’s welfare and autonomy, provided that they did not jeopardise her security and sound government. His caution was in no way nervous, nor was it obtuse. Through all the trials of his wartime viceroyalty he displayed an imperturbable courage. India and Britain owe him a heavy debt.
Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi died, by an assassin’s hand, in 1948. Among British and Indian people alike, private memories of his forty years of agitation in India are fading. Millions all over the world see him entirely as portrayed in Richard Attenborough’s splendid film. So my own judgment of the Mahatma can usefully begin with some comments on the film’s depiction of him. Its oddest error was the robust athleticism of the famous Salt March, which in fact was not a rapid walk but the slow progress of a thin little man, not all the way on foot. But that is of little importance. Since a film has to have a central theme, “Gandhi” naturally concentrates on the Mahatma’s unrelenting campaign for India’s freedom from British rule by means of non-violent protest, non-cooperation and obstruction—which, as it fairly shows, sometimes led to dreadful violence. But this selectivity greatly over-simplifies his character and his action. His first satyagraha campaign was not political but was on behalf of underpaid workers on the indigo plantations of northern Bihar. All his life he was as much concerned for the poor, especially the untouchables whom he called Harijans, people of God, as for the cause of national self-government. He was a sort of anarchist; for he believed that of its nature government was violent and oppressed the weak. In his eyes British government in India was particularly oppressive because it was not identified with the masses of the people, but served an alien interest. He did not blame the British for that; he respected them, and as human beings liked them, a fact which you would scarcely gather from the film. For him, India’s political liberation was a means to an end, the end of a better, fairer Indian society, one in which untouchability would be abolished, along with other evils of the caste system, and the economic life of the nation would be based not on big factories and big cities, but on rural industries and village sufficiency. His emblem was the spinning-wheel, of cottage industry and self-help.
Many disciples adopted his social ideals, to which the Congress leaders paid lip-service without binding their hearts and wills. They were, above all, political nationalists, and many of them believed that one of the crimes of British rule had been the prevention of India’s industrial growth, in the interest of British exporters. As power-hunger came nearer to having its appetite fulfilled, other causes than that of ousting the British faded into the background, and Gandhi’s influence over the Congress waned. The film shows him as still a key figure in the 1947 negotiations for the transfer of power; he was not. Although his appeal to the masses meant that both Lord Mountbatten and the Congress leaders had to keep him sweet if they could, his own part in the negotiations was eccentric and ineffectual, not least in his proposal (made direct to the Viceroy, not, as in the film, at a meeting with Jinnah, Patel, Nehru and others which never took place) that the reins of government be handed to Jinnah and the minority Muslim League rather than the Congress-Hindu majority, a plan that could not have survived a week in practice.
In his eyes the Indian National Congress had been not a sectional party but the voice of the Indian people. He could not bear to acknowledge that it did not speak for them all, including in particular the Muslims. His lack of political realism actually impeded the transfer of power. When independence was imminent and Gandhi had almost reconciled himself to partition—which he saw despairingly as the vivisection of Mother India—he hoped that the Congress as a national movement would become, in self-governing India, the voice of the oppressed, the poor and the underdogs, the non-party engine of social reform, while a new party would form the government and pursue its own legislative and administrative policies. Jawaharlal Nehru was obviously cut out to lead such a parliamentary party; to head the non-partisan movement Gandhi tried in vain to persuade, of all people, Vallabhbhai Patel, the pragmatic, ruthless “strong man of Congress.” (All this was told me long afterwards by Acharya Kripalani, who had been president of the Congress in 1947, and who also revealed to me that the majority of the Congress Working Committee had accepted, as early as December 1946, the inevitability of partition, which Gandhi fought almost to the last hour.) Thus the actual events at the transfer of power represented a double defeat for the Mahatma, both in the partition of India, followed by the Hindu-Sikh-Muslim blood-bath, and in the disappointment of his lifelong hopes of a socially-idealistic Congress opposed to all that was big and capitalist economic and social life. He died at a moment, not—as the simplicities of the film would have us believe—of triumph in securing India’s political independence, but of failure in causes to which he had devoted most of his life.
Nevertheless I have no doubt that Gandhi was one of the half-dozen great world figures of my lifetime. CP Snow, the novelist and scientist, and I were once discussing whom we would rank among those half dozen or so men or women who had changed the world in the twentieth century, but for whom the cast of men’s thoughts and the structure of society would certainly have been different. Great political leaders and war heroes might come to mind, but they were as much made by events as makers of them, nor was their achievement as creative and fundamental as that which Snow and I were thinking of. Let Winston Churchill stand as a benchmark for all: Stalin scores equally with him as a governmental and war leader, Roosevelt above him as a political innovator, de Gaulle as a nation-changer, Hitler as a political ideologist. The characters we sought must be, in a real sense, revolutionaries, either in ideas or in action. In the field of ideas, one must clearly count Freud and Einstein, nineteenth-century men whose theories entered into common knowledge and parlance in the twentieth. We added Rutherford as a scientist, Keynes as an economist. Lenin stood out as the political revolutionary, both theorist and actor: Mao Tse-Tung fell into the same class. Alone among Western politicians we put Lloyd George, the initiator in action (though for analysis and invention he drew upon others) of the welfare state and redistributive taxation. Neither Snow nor I hesitated to include Mahatma Gandhi.
“A sort of doubt has always hung round the character of Tolstoy, as round the character of Gandhi. He was not a vulgar hypocrite, as some people declared him to be... On the other hand, it is dangerous to take such men at their disciples’ valuation. There is always the possibility—the probability indeed—that they have done no more than exchange one form of egoism for another... The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power.” George Orwell wrote that (in “Polemic”, March 1947) and I have often thought about it, inverting the comparison between Tolstoy and Gandhi. The Mahatma was not a hypocrite, as some people declared him to be, but it is dangerous to take him at his disciples’ valuation. Whether or not an appetite for power went along with his renunciation of violence as the means to power, is the key question about his life and character. Certainly he sought no political office—for which he must have known that he was wholly unfitted—but while not seeking power he won and enjoyed it, in the sense of swaying those who would exercise power to his satisfaction. His oft-reiterated claim that he was not even a ten-anna member of the Congress rings like false coin, but it did express his reluctance to assume any place in the hierarchy of power in Indian politics.
The inescapable paradox of Gandhi is that he could not achieve his ends, save in the limited orbit of personal example, without using means which contradicted them. The champion of self-abasement cannot always be humble, or he ceases to be a champion. The apostle of non-violence, if he is to succeed on a grand scale, must excite the masses, and mass excitement is a violent force.
As a government official, when I was Reforms Commissioner, I had no opportunity of meeting the Mahatma, because he was regarded as the head and front of opposition to the Government and to India’s war effort. My only close personal contact with him had been in 1938, when I was travelling as editor of The Round Table. I journeyed to see him, in response to one of his famous postcards, beginning: “Dear Friend,” at his ashram (retreat) at Segaon near Wardha in Central India. In Wardha, a big railway town, I spent the night at a small hotel, whose Indian proprietor was thrilled to know that I was a friend of Lord Lothian. Lothian’s frank and open personality had obviously impressed itself upon the Indian mind, accustomed to British people who were either instruments of government, inquisitive journalists, one-track businessmen or aloof visitors: his informal intervention had helped to persuade the Congress to take provincial office under the 1935 constitution. Anyway, my host at Wardha obviously thought that some of his merit as a good friend of India had rubbed off on me.
The next morning I hired a car and was driven through the hot dusty Indian landscape to Segaon. The ten-mile journey was so slow, the road so bumpy, the dust so pervasive, the sun-parched scene changed so little, that I feel myself in recollection travelling in a bullock-cart or tonga, but reason tells me it was a rattle-trap taxi. The journey was a good taste of immemorial rural India, matching the occasion. What I had expected the Mahatma’s ashram to be like I do not precisely recall—perhaps a sort of rustic monastery, a cloister in the jungle, certainly something more distinctive and romantic than the nondescript huddle of buildings that it turned out to be. One entered through an untidy, hen-haunted farmyard, and met no formal reception. After a few minutes I was shown into a very small bare room where the Mahatma lay on a charpoy, wrapped in a homespun shawl, with his eyes closed. He explained that it was his day, not of silence, which would have been unfortunate, but of blindness, when he shut out the visible world from his thoughts. Though I was dubious of his saintliness, there was a faintly holy atmosphere about the cell of this frail prophet, enhanced by the ministrations of an acolyte, in the person of Miss Slade (Mira Ben). I felt unhappy at not having removed my dusty shoes.
Gandhi had an extraordinary presence, as anyone could testify who attended any of his evening prayer-meetings, as I had done on an earlier visit to India. His voice was low-pitched and melodious, with a sibilant whistle or lisp. Like most Englishmen I found him very agreeable to talk with, though his line of thought was often elusive. He did not pontificate, and an occasional chuckle revelled a natural sense of humour. The main topic of our conversation may seem dated, but it throws an interesting light upon events a decade later. At that moment, Hitler and Mussolini bestrode the European stage, and minds everywhere were attuned to the dangers of dictatorship and the one-party state. I asked Gandhi how he reconciled his own denunciation of dictators with his call for all Indians to support one monopoly party, the Congress. He denied that he or any Congress leader had any ambitions of dictatorship; a single party, he said, uniting and speaking for all Indians, was necessary in order to get rid of the British and achieve freedom; once that was done, there would be room for competing parties based on economic or other policies. In reply I spoke of misgivings about the control being exercised over Congress Governments in the provinces by the party’s central command; was not this a denial of democracy and a breach of responsible Cabinet government? Gandhi answered that India’s call for freedom must have priority over everything else, for until she was free she could never be herself nor do the best for her people: provincial governments might be able to make some useful reforms, but the unity and authority of the national party must come first. Obvious answers, perhaps, but they cast shadows of coming events.
The profusion of grand purposes in Gandhi’s mind—non-violence, defence of the poor and oppressed, village self-help, Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, freedom from British rule, some being means elevated into ends—may account for the self-contradictions and waywardness of his utterances and actions at different times. In all this, British people were apt to see evidence of hypocrisy, deviousness and cunning manoeuvre. Political consistency was certainly not Gandhi’s prime virtue. But it is a mistake to judge him by the standards of our own culture and preconceived values. He was, as I have said, fundamentally an anarchist, who pronounced upon matters of government rather as a Calvinist might lecture on papal authority. And although he admired Christianity, on whose bible and liturgy his vocabulary drew freely, he was profoundly Hindu, steeped in a culture whose multiple array of gods reflects its belief in the manysidedness of truth.
Britain as well as India owes a great deal to Mahatma Gandhi. His preaching of non-violence, however formidable some of its repercussions might be, dulled the revolutionary zeal of the nationalist movement through decades which might otherwise have seen far more bloody insurrection. The guru of the Indian National Congress might well have been not an ascetic Gujerati bania, but a mob-rousing demagogue preaching death to imperialists and harnessing not the quietist but the violent side of Indian character, a Muslim Mussolini or a Hindu Hitler. All that is past, and the India of the 1980s is not the India that Gandhi longed to create, but his mark on the history of mankind will take long to erase.
Mohamed Ali Jinnah.
When I joined the Government of India in Narch 1941, Mr MA Jinnah, as President of the Muslim League and a formidable member of the central legislature, was an important politician among others; when I left in October 1942 he had become the most powerful figure in the sub-continent. The virtual submission of Sikander Hyat Khan and Fazl ul Huq, Chief Ministers of the Punjab and Bengal, had confirmed him in unassailable command of the League; the emasculation of the Congress leadership by the Government’s counter-moves against the Quit India campaign had left him an open field for promotion of his own political and communal line. How he used his power is a matter of history, which salutes him as a man who almost single-handed made two nations grow where one had been before.
In 1976 I was invited by the Government of Pakistan to take part in an international symposium at the University of Islamabad, commemorating the centenary of Jinnah’s birth. The subject I chose for the address I gave as song for my supper was “Jinnah and the British,” an enjoyable theme and a large one, for his life was intertwined with the British raj, its law courts, its parliamentary institutions and its proconsuls, yet without his ever being absorbed by it; keeping his cool distance he used it for his purposes more than it used him for its own. The supper was generous, in the shape of air flights for my wife and myself and our entertainment at a four-star hotel, where nevertheless I contracted a disagreeable stomach upset. “Is it true,” asked a Pakistani friend who visited me in our hotel bedroom, “that you have had to go to the lavatory twelve times in a day, while you kept going at the conference?” “Sixteen times, Zaidi.” “Now I know why you British could rule India for two hundred years.”
In the same year I was commissioned to contribute a political biography of the Qaid-i-Azam (“great leader”) to a massive book on Pakistan by over 80 authors, lavishly produced and of coffee-table size. This book, though composed and made by a British publisher, Tom Stacey, was promoted by the Pakistan Government, and it strikes me as interesting that the writing of the first and one of the longest of its items, on the life of the nation’s founder and hero, should have been entrusted to an Englishman. My opening paragraph was printed in huge type on the first page of the contents proper:
Of Mohamed Ali Jinnah it can be said, as of very few other men in modern history, that without him—him alone—the map of the world, the destiny of a nation, could not have been as they became. Had there been no Mahatma Gandhi, there would still have been Indian independence: had there been no Lenin or Mao Tse-Tung, the Russian and Chinese revolutions would still have happened, though differently. But had there been no Jinnah there would have been no Pakistan, certainly not in 1947, though it conceivably might have emerged by bloody revolt from an Indian republic. His life and character are therefore of the highest interest to every historian and student of mankind.
That was not mere centennial rhetoric but plain truth.
Because Jinnah’s will split India, because in the negotiations for independence in 1945, 1946 and 1947, he was the adamant rock on which waves of effort for compromise broke in vain, and because he denied Lord Mountbatten’s cherished hope of becoming Governor-General of both successor Dominions, Indian and many British commentators have cast him as the villain of the piece, obstinate, haughty, aloof, rude, unreasoning and self-important. In a measure, he deserved all those epithets, but a man who was no more than that could never have wielded such authority and attracted such loyalty as Jinnah did in the Indian Muslim community. To begin with, he was one of the most experienced politicians in all India. He first appeared in national politics in 1906, as secretary to the president of the Indian National Congress; by the time he was forty, in 1916, he had been a member of the Imperial Legislative Council for ten years and was an outstanding national figure both in the Muslim League, which he had helped to found, and in the Congress, which he did not quit until it had fallen under Gandhi’s sway and embraced non-cooperation, in 1920. All this time, and indeed later, he had been a champion not only of working the democratic elements in the Indian constitution but also of concord between Muslims and Hindus, based on constitutional protection of the religious minority’s rights and interests. Only after the Congress had spurned his call for inbuilt safeguards for the Muslims, including separate electorates, did he become primarily a communal leader, devoting his energy and talents to the exclusive service of his fellow-religionists, and of the Muslim League as their voice.
His critics proclaimed that he was a bad Muslim, neglecting the observances enjoined by Islam, and having inconspicuous religious faith. This may have been to his advantage, however, as national leader of the Muslims, since it absolved him both of sectarianism (Shia or Sunni) and of any charge of religious fanaticism. No Ayatollah Khomeini he! Likewise he had the advantage of coming from a province (Bombay) where the Muslims were a quite small minority, so that their party was not tainted with the compromises and shortcomings inherent in political power. A still greater advantage was his unquestioned personal integrity in a venal political world. Grown rich, from poor beginnings, as a powerful advocate in the courts, he was financially as well as morally above suspicion of corruption, whether by money or titles or patronage or executive pressure. His personality was indeed reserved and solitary; he had innumerable admirers but few close friends; he was most affable among young people, who could not challenge his dominance. Always immaculately dressed in Western style, master of English but of no Indian tongue, a stranger to convivial comradeship though an exponent of formal good manners, he was the least populist of Indian public figures, but his distance from the masses seemed only to enhance his appeal to his followers. He was also a most formidable debater, whether in the courts, in the legislative chamber, in party councils or in argument with the governing powers, from Edwin Montagu and Lord Chelmsford (whom he “tied in knots”) to Cripps and Mountbatten, who found his arguments with Jinnah going round and round in circles of steely logic.
His political tactics, in the last decade of British India, were founded on three rules. Stick implacably to one central proposition or aim—“the Indian Muslims are a nation and must have nationhood, and the Muslim League is their sole voice.” Give nothing away: let the Congress make the mistakes, and profit from them. But watch the Congress intently, and never let them get ahead in the obstacle race for succession to power. Again and again one can see those rules in action as Jinnah led his Muslim forces in the long political battle. He was decisively aided by gross errors on the part of Congress, of which one can count at least four between 1937 and 1946. “But for the Congress there would be no Jinnah,” Lord Linlithgow once said to me.
Jinnah also profited greatly from elements in British policy which emanated paradoxically not from the pro-Muslim right of the War Cabinet but from the pro-Hindi left, and were disliked by the Viceroy’s Government of India, often accused of over-favouring the Muslims and cultivating their leader. The inclusion in the Cripps Offer of the right of provinces to opt out of the future independent constitution conceded the substance of the claim for Pakistan; the final gift to Jinnah was the time-limit embedded in Mountbatten’s instructions, for Jinnah and the Muslim League had only to hold out as the time expired to make certain that power would be demitted not to one but to two or more successor states. Almost all the non-Congress Hindu political pundits with whom I discussed India’s constitutional future in 1941 and 1942 urged that Britain should declare a date—say, a fixed period after the end of the war—by which they would depart, as a necessary proof of genuine intent to give India independence. But people with responsibility for government saw—none more clearly than Linlithgow—that this would only intensify the internecine struggle meanwhile, a consequence fatal for the conduct of the war.
The Viceroy told me of an exchange he had once had with Jinnah. “We Muslims,” their leader had said, “are not going to let you,” (the British) “go from India.” “Will you say that in public?” “No. Why should we do your dirty work for you?” “Very well. What price will you pay to keep us?” “None. I know you well enough to be sure you will exact your own price. You are in India for your own advantage: why should we pay you anything?” That anecdote, reproduced exactly as Linlithgow told it, admirably displays the realism and directness of both men.
Yet despite Jinnah’s steadfast and uncompromising demand for Muslim national autonomy—for Pakistan—I believe it would have been possible in the early 1940s, even up to 1946 though not in 1947, so to manoeuvre that Jinnah and the League would have accepted something less than complete national separation. I had a long private talk with him in November 1941. Its content must be judged in the light of the fact that I was a government official, close to the Viceroy, to whom Jinnah well knew I would relay what he said to me. The views he expressed must therefore be read not necessarily as his own frank thoughts but rather as the policies that he wanted to be known on high as his. He set the background at once. The situation was very simple, he said. The Hindus wanted a central government for independent India; so, too, did the British—or at least their statements assumed it. But for the Muslims no such central government was possible. Things had changed since the last constitutional reforms. At the Round Table Conference of 1931 it had been assumed that the final control, especially in foreign affairs and defence, would remain with Britain. Now the Muslims knew from experience that the Hindus wanted to rule over them and keep them in permanent subjection. The Muslims were never going to submit to Hindu Raj.
Saying that I was interested in Pakistan from a practical point of view, I questioned Jinnah about defence: could Pakistan sustain alone the burden that would fall on it? “Who will attack us in the North-West?” he retorted; “Afghanistan? Iran?” Pakistan would be able to defend itself against those. “We cannot foresee,” I said, “how the world will emerge from the war, but what about the possibility of an attack on India?” By which of course I meant the sub-continent—“by a major power?” “That is another problem which does not concern us alone.” Next we talked about the position of minorities in the two nations that he envisaged: would they not need special and reciprocal protection in the two constitutions? Not at all, said Jinnah: once the Hindus and Muslims had their separate homelands, communal tension would immediately be relaxed. To him, a Government of Pakistan without a Hindu member and a Sikh member was inconceivable. He was even prepared to guarantee them their places—and let them be genuine representatives, having the confidence of their communities. “Of course the Hindus would have to accept that they were a minority and could not dictate policy.”
“Remember,” Jinnah continued, “that we would not follow existing boundaries but would set up these zones so as to have substantial Muslim majorities in the North-East and North-West.” This, of course, was quite contrary to the demand which he adamantly maintained before Lord Wavell, the Cabinet Mission and Lord Mountbatten that Pakistan must comprise the whole of the Muslim-majority provinces unimpaired. Even in respect of a central all-India government the attitude he displayed to me in 1941 was much more equivocal than it became when the submission of his chief Muslim critics in Bengal, the Punjab and Sind, and the Muslim League’s triumph at the 1945 elections, had immensely strengthened his hand. “If,” he said to me, “you can show me how a central government would work I will look at it.” We talked about the princely states, with which Jinnah said he wanted nothing to do. I found it difficult, I replied, to see how an Indian Dominion, or two Dominions, could exist as fully autonomous international units without the states. “I am not asking for that status,” Jinnah answered: “let the final authority in foreign affairs and defence remain in the hands of a representative of the Crown, to be handed over in the future as and when this should become possible.” I reminded him that Hindu opinion at least was demanding full independence. “That is their affair,” he replied. In his view large powers should remain for the time being with the Governor-General, acting in responsibility on the one hand to the British Parliament and on the other to the peoples of the different parts of the sub-continent. No doubt he would call meetings of the Prime Ministers or other representatives of the different zones, but these would be small businesslike bodies, not a parliament. No central legislature or government would be possible because the Hindus and Muslims simply did not trust each other. How far would their mutual invigilation have to go, Jinnah asked; would there be a Muslim Minister to check on every Hindu Minister, and vice versa?
The transfer of the governing power in India, he said, was like the partition of an Indian estate, when the whole exercise was entrusted to a commission, who acted as a receiver and drew up a scheme of partition, under which some assets might remain undistributed for a long time. Anyone reading between the lines of that account could see that within the hard shell of commitment to the principle of two nations lay soft areas where compromise was possible. It was not Jinnah’s habit to offer compromise until he was forced to do so.
Rigorously defined and relentlessly pursued as Jinnah’s case was, there were flaws and inconsistencies in its detail which British Viceroys and Ministers perceived but in argument with him failed to pin down. Mountbatten confided to Jinnah’s henchman Liaqat Ali Khan how completely unpractical he and his staff thought Jinnah was, to which Liaqat replied: “If you present the full difficulties to Mr Jinnah he will of course understand them even though he has not worked them out for himself.” That accords with my own experience of him. Before I had the above-mentioned long talk with him I told Sir Roger Lumley, Governor of Bombay, that I hoped to see Jinnah, if only to ask how he really perceived Pakistan; surely, I said, a man with his brains must have thought out what it meant. Lumley did not think this necessarily followed. He had always found Jinnah, though a shrewd bargainer and a clever advocate in court, subject to definite intellectual limits, capable of being quite content with a general theme which he had not thought out in any detail.
That was probably true, but my own judgment of Jinnah is that he avoided any discussion of the practical detail of his major policy not from intellectual deficiency but deliberately, because any detail would have been contentious within the Muslim community, which he was resolved to keep united, and because at the back of his mind, concealed from his friends and followers, was the thought that some compromise might have to be made at a final showdown, when the fewer the precise pledges or prospects that had to be discarded the better. I have been fortified in that contemporary judgment by later knowledge of the struggle that Jinnah waged with himself over acceptance of the Cabinet Mission’s three-tier plan, before the Congress leadership (Nehru above all) again played into his hands, resolved his secret doubts and sealed the fate of a united Indian sub-continent. Jinnah was the supreme political tactician. No other man, and perhaps no other method, starting from a weak and fragmented political base, could so have changed the map of nations and the destiny of a great portion of the world of Islam.
Jawaharlal Nehru.
My first sight of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is etched into my memory. The time was 1931, and the occasion one of Mahatma Gandhi’s evening prayer meetings, held in the garden of Dr Asaf Ali’s house not far from Shah Jehan’s Red Fort in Old Delhi. The normally hostile relations between the Congress and the Government had lately been tempered, after a period of civil disobedience and mass arrests, by Gandhi’s famous interview with the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, which had drawn Churchill’s sneer about the King-Emperor’s vicegerent parleying with “a half-naked fakir.” Nehru sat on the edge of the terrace from which the Mahatma led the gathering in prayer and chant. Darkness had fallen, a couple of lamps threw deep shadows, there was an atmosphere of tranquillity and peace; but Nehru was not in tune with it. His brow was knotted, his visage wrathful, and his hands unceasingly twisted the cord that belted his waist, as if strangling some imagined enemy. I could only suppose it to be the British raj, and felt myself included, though I was then no part of it, merely a visiting Englishman.
Powerful emotion was always latent in Nehru, and would burst out now and again. Even when, much more matured by time and experience, he became Prime Minister of India, he would suffer spasms of choler which overcame reason. When emotionally heated he was a difficult man to deal with: witness his rash intention to visit Kashmir in June-July 1947, when Mountbatten had the utmost difficulty in persuading him of the harm his mission would do. There were many in his own political circle, both before and after the transfer of power, who distrusted his judgment. The statesmanship that he developed when he took political command of his nation surprised many who had watched his earlier career. Indian as well as British officials in India had often said of him that the responsibilities of office would uncover the weakness of a man who had never held an administrative post (except for a short time that of chairman of the Allahabad municipal council) and had never had to earn his living, who was a thinker, an orator, an agitator, rather then a statesman fit to rule a nation and take charge of a great governmental machine.
It was said, too, that he needed someone to dilute his defects and stop him from flying off at a tangent—a Gandhi, to whom he had always deferred, often against his own opinion, or a Vallabhbhai Patel, who as his Minister of State and Cabinet Number 2 wielded almost independent power. Both of those had great influence on him and on the course of events; but Gandhi was assassinated, and Patel died only two years after independence, whereas Nehru remained Prime Minister of India for fourteen years. In office he succeeded both in keeping undisputed control of his Government and party and in directing India’s social and economic advance. There was a certain conflict between his orthodox socialism and his democratic principles, but in that he was not unique among left-inclined leaders of the Western-patterned world.
Nevertheless his defects remained, not least a certain naïvété in face of the realities of power politics, which Patel understood far better. During a long talk I had with him in September 1961 he spoke of China’s already menacing border claims as regrettable but not dangerous because of the Panch Lila (five points of peaceful relationship) that he had agreed with Mao Tse-Tung; he even suggested that the building of China’s new strategic road through Indian territory in Ladakh had been due to “a mistake.” A year later China had broken through the North-East frontier, invaded Assam and humiliated India. Nehru’s Defence Minister Krishna Menon, though loyally defended by his master, was forced to resign, and the affair encumbered the political legacy that he bequeathed to his successor, the mild Lal Bahadur Sastri.
It was Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi who cleared off two of the chief liabilities that he had incurred, though her means were repudiation rather than redemption. Nehru’s India had been committed to a socialism in which its leaders only half-believed. He had always proclaimed himself a socialist, and he pursued the Stalinist policy of building major industry as the foundation of economic advance, but he had no consistent theory of socialism nor ideal of a wholly socialist society applicable to a largely peasant country like India: Maoism, which might have been his Asian model, had no charm for him. His measures of agrarian reform, nationalisation of heavy industry and pinpricking of the capitalist system left India with a mixed economy closer to that of comparable western countries than to the Soviet example that he professed to admire. His Cabinets included strong anti-socialists. This ambivalence Mrs Gandhi resolved in draconian fashion, primarily by the nationalisation of the banks. She was equally drastic in destroying another dichotomy in the structure and consequently the ideology of the Congress party, the inherent conflict between the national Congress organisation and the parliamentary leadership, which so long as Nehru lived had been obscured by his personal status as founding father of independence and a lifelong Congress stalwart. His daughter Indira resolved it by flatly defying the Congress “High Command” and forming her own Congress (I) as the dominant party of India. Nevertheless, it to Jawaharlal Nehru more than anyone else that India owes its continuance as a parliamentary democracy. He, like his father, adhered to the tradition which, taught by the British and encouraged by British constitutional reforms in India, accepted government by majority in parliament, and periodic electoral contests to achieve that majority, as the norm of democratic self-rule. India also owes it to him above all that it is a secular state. In the aftermath of partition and the triumphal achievement of supreme national power the country’s political future might have been very different. Indian patriot and nationalist insurrectionary as he was, Nehru was intellectually a Westerner. He was also a Brahmin of high sub-caste, born to self-confident superiority, a mandarin. When the time came for power to pass from British hands, he was the man for the hour.
Rao Bahadur Vapal Pangunni Menon.
When I came to Simla in 1941 as Reforms Commissioner I found in the office a dedicated small staff, all Indians, with a strong Madrassi element, headed by a remarkable man, VP Menon. To VP—no one outside his family called him by any other forename—both Britain and India owe more than was realised in either country for the orderly and amicable transfer of power in 1947. Of modest height, baldheaded, bespectacled and plain, he is the figure few people can name in photographs of lord Mountbatten’s staff. To the Indian public he was almost unknown before he became Secretary of the Ministry of States shortly before independence. As right-hand man to the Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, largely through his own endeavours, sometimes confessedly highhanded, all but a few of the princely states were integrated into the new constitutional order.
Brought up in a matriarchal extended family in that part of Madras province which is now Mysore state, VP did well at school, learning English as all secondary pupils did in Madras; but when he overheard a family conversation about the cost of his further education he decided not to be a burden, but to leave home and make his own way in the world. An Englishman gave him a clerical job in Bangalore, where, he told me, he sat under a crimson gohlmor tree and pondered his future. He decided to move towards the centre of government of India. On his way north, he was offered a job teaching English in a small Muslim-ruled state. “There is one little condition,” they said; “you will have to become a Mussulman.” The agnostic young Menon thought this no fatal obstacle, until he learnt that virtually the only requirement for conversion was circumcision: permanent amputation for a temporary job he thought too high a price. In Simla the “Madras connection” helped him to a post in a government office. Thence his ability and industry alone took him up the ladder of promotion to become deputy to my predecessor as Reforms Commissioner, Sir Hawthorne Lewis. Menon was lucky to be drafted to the Reforms office, for merit could shine more effectively there than in a large hierarchical department manned in all its upper ranks by ICS men. He had the opportunity to show his brains, assiduity and sound sense in the arduous work of serving the Round Table Conferences on Indian constitutional reform (for which the Reforms Office had indeed been created) and implementing the new constitution, the Government of India Act 1935.
On his first visit to England as part of the secretariat of the first Round Table Conference he had an unforgettable experience. When he had just joined the government service and was under training in his home province he was horribly bullied by a junior ICS officer, Lancaster by name. Later, when working in the Home Department he had to deal with the file on this same man’s compulsory retirement for arbitrary behaviour and general unsuitability. Arriving in London with very few personal contacts, and somewhat bewildered, he was agreeably surprised when an Englishman came up to him on Victoria station and asked did he not come from Madras, whereabouts, and so on, explaining that he himself was a former Madras civilian. He turned out to be none other than Mr Lancaster, unrecognisable with a beard. He insisted that for the rest of Menon’s stay in England he should spend every weekend in his house. When their friendship had become close enough to allow it, VP asked Lancaster why he had behaved as he had. He replied: “Imagine a young man of 23, without much training or background, suddenly finding himself with almost absolute power over a large number of subject people. Can you wonder that he forgets his discretion, his balance, his manners? People exclaim at the wickedness of some rajahs: I am surprised that any of them are good.” He had realised how wrong he had been and was trying to make amends for his misbehaviour by befriending lonely Indians. That encounter was one of the foundations of VP’s undying affection and loyalty towards the British—sentiments which in no way trammelled his Indian-ness or his aspirations for his country’s freedom.
To me he was the best of friends and colleagues. It must have been a wretched disappointment to him not to move up to the Reforms Commissionership when Lewis became Governor of Orissa, but he never showed the slightest sign of jealousy or coolness towards the young ignorant Englishman who had been appointed instead. I think he craved the post as much because it had been a job for the ICS, who had looked down on him as an uncovenanted civil servant, as for its rank and emoluments. There was a natural reluctance to appoint an Indian, however well qualified, to a position of intimate trust on political and constitutional affairs, but Lord Linlithgow had been impressed by Menon’s loyalty as well as his judgment and technical knowledge, and he duly succeeded me as constitutional adviser. He had the full confidence of Lord Wavell, though he was not at one with the Viceroy over the conduct of the Simla conference in 1945 (his memorandum on the alternatives open after the failure of the conference, printed in an appendix to the last volume of the Transfer of Power documents, is a monument of good sense); but in the earlier weeks of the last viceroyalty he was neglected by Mountbatten, who had brought eminent advisers from England to reinforce the Viceroy’s private secretariat and who no doubt felt that an Indian, a Hindu, could not avoid being partisan in the tense inter-party and inter-communal negotiations for independence.
However, Mountbatten realised before long what an invaluable counsellor he had in Menon, who brought not only unrivalled knowledge of Indian constitutional matters but also confidential personal contacts with important Indian figures, including top civil servants like Mahomed Ali, administrative architect of Pakistan and BN Rau, draftsman of the new Indian constitution. And at the moment of crisis, when Nehru spurned Mountbatten’s first plan for the transfer of power, it was to Menon that the Viceroy turned. In a matter of hours Menon devised, and secretly negotiated with Patel, the plan for an early demission of power to two Dominions under the existing constitution, altered to eliminate British control, which proved the key to the whole problem. It was a masterly effort, drawing upon the deep thought that VP had given over many years to India’s constitutional progress, which he and his predecessors in the Reforms Office believed could be best advanced on the historical pattern already set in the British Commonwealth. In all this, Menon was the devoted servant both of the regime to which he had given his working life, and to his own country whose constitutional freedom he had perceived as his ultimate professional goal. Yet he died, in retirement in Bangalore, where I spent many hours with him recording on tape his recollections both of the run-up to independence and of the integration of the princely states, a disappointed man; for Nehru, who was not temperamentally in tune with him, denied him the promotion to a provincial governorship which was his final ambition and which his great services before and after independence had made his due. I salute his memory.
Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
My close association with Lord Mountbatten came about in this way. Before 1963 I had met him only twice, at a meeting with London newspaper editors after his return from India, and at a big Lancaster House evening party: neither occasion left him with any cause for liking me, because on each I asked him an awkward question, one about his treatment of the Indian princes, the other about a doubtful aspect of his naval building plans when he was Chief of the Staff. Then, not long after I had become Provost of Ditchley, Lord Ismay came over to see me from his home in Gloucestershire. I hardly knew him, though we had both worked in the old Cabinet Office at 2 Whitehall Gardens, when I was a junior in the secretariat of the Economic Advisory Council and he was a colonel on the staff of the Committee of Imperial Defence. He had been Mountbatten’s right-hand man in New Delhi in 1947. His message was that Mountbatten was anxious to have the history of the transfer of power written by an impartial scholar but with the benefit of his own papers and his personal help; he, Ismay and VP Menon all thought that I was the man to do it.
After a short conversation I agreed, subject to several conditions. First, Mountbatten must allow me access to all his India papers, without reserve. Secondly, the book and the judgments in it would be mine; I would be under no obligation whatever, in return for Mountbatten’s help, to favour him on any controversial issue. Thirdly, my book would not be confined to the events of 1947 but would go back in time to give the historical background I thought necessary. Fourthly, I would have to take my time; I had a full-time job at Ditchley, and the research and writing would take me not months but years. (In fact, eight years elapsed between that conversation and publication of ‘The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan’.)
To all those conditions Mountbatten agreed, and in due course five packing-cases of his documents, from Attlee’s first approach to him to become Viceroy, to his final departure from India, arrived at Ditchley and were in my possession for five years. They included such secret papers as his confidential letters to the King as constitutional Governor-General (the like of which had never before been published) and Minutes of the Indian Cabinet, the use of which in my book was eventually to cause problems from which only a Mountbatten could have extricated me. I also had a number of personal talks with him, at his flat in Kinnerton Street and at Broadlands, filling up gaps in the record and answering my questions, many of which began with ‘Why?’ In all this, Mountbatten was entirely forthcoming. I honour him for his trust in one whom he had no reason to believe was an admirer of his.
In this regard the most important of my conditions was of course my complete freedom of judgment. The problem—if there was a problem—was lightened by my determination to tell the story on the basis of documented facts and to eschew verdicts as far as possible, but of course all history, however drained of bias, has to be written from a point of view. It transpired that, as I researched the history of the transfer of power, my judgment was generally favourable to the last Viceroy. I have my doubts about his actions or inactions on certain occasions: for instance, his early neglect of the problem of the princely states, his failure to pay enough regard to the Sikhs, his choice of the precise date for the transfer of Power, his acceptance of virtually a prime ministerial role in regard to defence when he was Governor-General of independent India, which drew him into much too partisan a posture over Kashmir. But I conceived it to be my business as a historian to let the facts speak for themselves, not to say who was right and who wrong, and in what measure—a particularly important rule when the history is that of recent events.
There were, indeed, a few points where the facts seemed to me adverse to Mountbatten, as their recounting should make clear. He never tried to persuade me to amend my account of them. An instance was my story of the events in the North-West Frontier Province and the removal—unjust, if politically defensible—of Sir Olaf Caroe as Governor. I sent Sir Olaf, an old friend, a final draft of that chapter. He said: “Do you tell me that Mountbatten has passed this?” I replied that there was no question of his “passing” it, since in no way could he censor my writing, but that I had sent him the draft, and he had made no comment. “I take off my hat to him,” said Sir Olaf.
It must not, however, be thought from this that Mountbatten easily accepted criticism or acknowledged faults. He always wanted to be thought right, at least in the end and on all important issues, if not all along the line. I was well aware of this when he asked me, as he frequently did in the last ten years of his life, to advise him how to reply to correspondents (mostly unknown to him, but nevertheless always treated with courtesy and given a full response) who wrote from India or Pakistan questioning him about his conduct as Viceroy or Governor-General, often challenging him on charges still being bitterly levied against him by Pakistanis. To bat on his side in this way was not hard, for my impartiality was not at stake, most of the direct or implied criticism was misconceived and I knew the answers better than he did. Only a few days before he was murdered he wrote to thank me for one such effort, and added in his own hand: “I don’t know what I should do without you.”
Mountbatten had the kind of egoism that is best described as superlative self-confidence. It was the quality of a monarch, or of a military commander, bred in his bone but nurtured and fortified by his training and experience as a naval officer. The commander of a warship, or of a force in the field, has to take vital and often instant decisions, for which he alone must take responsibility. Self-doubt and hesitation are weaknesses that he must shed; questioning afterthoughts are valueless. Mountbatten had the innate self-assurance of royalty, but he had also commanded ships, indeed forces of all arms, and his whole career had taught him to take decisions which once taken had to be seen as right. He claimed, and craved, acclamation of their rightness and success.
In this sense, Mountbatten was a proud man, and he was certainly proud of his achievements and not keen on sharing credit for them; but his pride had no element in it of haughtiness or condescension. (Unlike that predecessor of his on the viceregal throne, the Marquess Curzon! Clement Jones, who had worked under that ‘most superior person’, and greatly admired him, told me quite seriously, as proof of Curzon’s democratic affability, that he had seen the noble lord unbending so far as to shake hands with a golf club secretary.) Mountbatten was completely open and friendly with people, like myself, far junior in years, rank and distinction. It was the essence of his immense charm and persuasive power that he could—to invert Kipling—“talk with the common man, nor lose the kingly touch.” He broke off from a Garter procession from the Chapel Royal at Windsor to exchange a few words with me and my wife in the watching crowd. All but a very few of those who worked with him in the Royal Navy, in Combined Operations and South-East Asia Command and in India loved him.
That egoistic trait of his could be better called vanity than pride. Mountbatten was not vain in the dandy sense, though he was always impeccably orthodox in dress and appearance, but he liked to be admired. In his rising years he had been intensely competitive; he always wanted to be first. His thirst for admiration may be one reason for his failure to get on friendly terms with Mahomet Ali Jinnah. Jinnah did indeed admire him, but he never wore his heart on his sleeve, and rarely praised even his closest supporters. He monopolised the admiration of his Muslim followers and could no more share it than a king can share his anointed state. The self-made monarch of the Indian Muslims and the proxy monarch of all India could not fill the roles of admirer and admired. Jawaharlal Nehru, on the other hand, was open in his admiration of Lord and Lady Mountbatten, and the Viceroy’s conversations with him, though as often as not they were opposed in argument, were quite different in atmosphere from those with the Muslim leader. With Jinnah, Mountbatten’s charm simply did not work; it was the wrong weapon for assaulting an obstinate redoubt of principle. With the Indian princes it worked with enormous success. He was the kind of man whom they, with their own regal traditions, most respected. Some critics think he beguiled them too much, wooing them to a policy which eventually led to the extinction of their privileges and powers and the total absorption of their states; but that denouement seems to me to have been historically inevitable, and at least Mountbatten won them a respite, which however few of them knew how to use.
A product of Mountbatten’s self-confidence was his irresistible dynamism. It created around him an emotional draught, all the more powerful for being unseen, which swept all who served him, even those who strove with him, into the orbit of his own purposes. It was much more than physical energy, though he had plenty of that—and physical courage too. His death at the hands of a mindless terrorist was a terrible tragedy, but its suddenness was somehow right. A long declining old age, given less to action by a vigorous mind than to reminiscence from a failing memory, could well have dulled the public perception of a man who in his prime dictated the pages of history.
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