The rhetoric lost nothing by repetition; a moment so ‘solemn’ positively invited a rambling retrospective. The ‘pledge’ was to ‘the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity’, while that quaint idea of a ‘tryst’, a prearranged meeting at an appointed hour, was intended to evoke a sense of common progression. History had ordained it, struggle had confirmed it. For Nehru, a formidable intellect and an ardent socialist whose moods could be attributed to his excessive workload, 15 August 1947 marked the nation’s longed-for epiphany. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ he intoned. Out with the Old; in with the New.
Jinnah, a minaret of a man compared to Nehru, erect and impeccable with corbel-like cheekbones and a coiffed cupola of silver hair, was both more cautious and more cautionary. Addressing Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August, he seemed scarcely able to believe that his call for a sovereign Muslim nation was being realised. Only what he called ‘an unprecedented cyclonic revolution’ could have brought about the birth of Pakistan; it was the consummation of a scheme so ‘titanic’, so ‘unknown’, that it had ‘no parallel in the history of the world’. Yet for Pakistan to function, grievances like those voiced by Malcolm Darling’s anxious informants must be quickly addressed. Bribery and corruption would be put down ‘with an iron hand’, he warned, jobbery and nepotism would never be tolerated, and ‘black-marketing’ in foodstuffs was the greatest crime of all.
No less important was the suppression of what Jinnah now called ‘the angularities of the majority and minority communities’. In an outspoken assertion of cross-communal equality – one that would come to haunt the new nation – the man already hailed as Quaid-i-Azam (‘Supreme Leader’) announced to the Pakistan Assembly that:
You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another … [If] we keep that in front of us as our ideal … you will find that in the course of time Hindus … cease to be Hindus, and Muslims … cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.3
Nehru, the champion of secularism, could not have put it better. For Jinnah too, freedom meant casting off not just the bonds of foreign rule but those of communal rivalry. The ‘Muslim nation’ must be all-inclusive. To a state predicated and won on the uncompromising basis of a shared religion he now offered as its guiding principles ‘justice and complete impartiality’. The success of the Pakistan movement was down to ‘an evolution of the greatest possible character’, plus those vaguely ‘cyclonic’ forces. In keeping with this unspecified agency, Pakistan might ‘become one of the greatest nations of the world’, provided it demonstrated neither ‘prejudice or ill will’, neither ‘partiality or favouritism’. Islam received not a single mention in the speech. Its unacknowledged presence was like that of a no-longer-welcome guest. Evidently the advent of nationhood heralded a new departure in national definition.
Mountbatten, too, milked the moment for all it was worth. Where so many of his countrymen had floundered over the last three decades, he had triumphed in a matter of weeks. The nettle of Congress–League distrust had been grasped, the Gordian knot of irreconcilable claims and counter-claims summarily severed. Not a single British life had been lost in the act of disengagement; and though about to be anything but peaceful, the bisection of the subcontinent was deemed to be unmarred by actual war. In British eyes, Mountbatten made the loss of empire almost palatable. The manner of its surrender was portrayed as a credit to all concerned, and the abiding friendship of the successor states was construed as a benediction on the whole two-hundred-year Raj. Individually, each of the successor states had opted to join the British Commonwealth; each was pledged to liberal values and democratic government; neither felt inclined to humiliate the ex-imperialists; and both retained the services of some senior British personnel. It was a more amicable parting of the ways than had seemed possible during the previous decades of acrimonious struggle.
Like the monsoonal cloudbursts, the plaudits rained down on the beaming Mountbatten from all sides. New Delhi invited him to stay on as Governor-General. Prime Minister Attlee noted that ‘broadly speaking the thing went off well’, and ‘we left behind so much good will’. Churchill, defender of the empire and inveterate opponent of Indian independence, was greatly reassured by India’s and Pakistan’s willingness to join the Commonwealth. And to the already impressive royal connections of his last ever Viceroy, King George VI added an earldom. While modestly deflecting the praise, Mountbatten yet lapped it up. His showmanship had paid off; a career that might so easily have been tarnished by failure or tarred by the shame of retreat had in fact been burnished. Yet, looking back many years later, he would be less sanguine about his achievement and a lot less delicate. ‘I fucked it up,’ he told John Osman, a BBC journalist, in 1965.4
Wrong-footing critics with outrageous volte-faces was all part of the famous Mountbatten charm, yet this disclaimer was not insincere. At the time his main regret had been his failure to secure an invitation to become Governor-General of Pakistan as well as India; for, much to his fury, Jinnah insisted that he himself would be Governor-General of Pakistan. Jinnah was deeply suspicious of the cosy relationship between Nehru and the Mountbattens – especially that between Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten – and he didn’t trust the ex-Viceroy to act as an impartial arbitrator in the division of the spoils between the two dominions, principal among these being the army. Nor, unlike Nehru, could Jinnah afford to relinquish even the trappings of his authority to a post-imperial pawnbroker. From the Chittagong Hills to the North-West Frontier fissiparous tendencies already menaced the bipolar Pakistan. The new India could be expected to exploit them.
To share a common Governor-General with Hindustan [i.e. the new India] would have given Congress an excuse to use this joint office to make terms separately with the Muslim areas [i.e. Pakistan] in the event that the Pakistan constituent assembly fell to pieces. It was to avoid this disaster, that Jinnah had to exercise the powers of a Governor-General himself and in the process consolidate the [Muslim] League’s authority over the Muslim [majority] areas.5
Mountbatten blamed himself for not having secured a prior understanding. As he told his daughter at the time, ‘Your poor Daddy has finally and irretrievably “boobed” … made a mess of things through overconfidence and overtiredness.’6 He ought to have foreseen Jinnah’s move and, but for the pressure of his own deadline, he thought he would have. But much later he seems to have had second thoughts not about the governor-generalship but about the deadline itself. In retrospect it was this more than anything that had ‘fucked it up’.
Bringing forward Attlee’s cut-off date of June 1948 to his own of August 1947 has often been supposed Mountbatten’s masterstroke. Yet at the time it had appalled his staff and confounded those who had habitually complained of Britain’s procrastination. Nehru had thought the new timetable ‘too much of a rush’, the princes needed all the time – and more – that they could possibly get, and the Muslim League doubted whether such a schedule, however agreeable to the prospects of Pakistan, was actually feasible.7 Announcing his plan on 3 June 1947, Mountbatten had allowed just over ten weeks for its implementation. There was to be no time for second thoughts, and precious little for negotiation. That was the point. As he advised London, speed – one might almost say panic – was of the essence.
For Mountbatten this urgency was tactical: it would concentrate minds, demonstrate good faith, and narrow the options. It was not a sine qua non of the terms of transfer. It was not even an immediate imperative. The threat of civil war had in fact receded. Calcutta