Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

what will happen. You’ll lose your throne and your life, too, if you’re not careful.’

      Singh persisted, however. He refused to meet officially with Mountbatten again during the Viceroy’s visit. Independence Day came and went and still Hari Singh vacillated, making no official decision on Kashmir’s future. When tribesmen organized and armed by Pakistan descended on his capital, Srinagar, later that autumn, Singh sent out an SOS for help to New Delhi. At that point, it is true, Mountbatten, now Governor-General of the new Dominion of India, told Nehru that he could not legally order Indian troops into Kashmir unless the Maharaja signed a formal act acceding to India. An emissary was dispatched to Srinagar with an act of accession. Singh signed it in great haste and Indian troops were airlifted to Kashmir. They are still there today, and the problem born that autumn day continues to poison relations between the two nations.

      Many readers of Freedom at Midnight noted that we did not mention in its pages the oft-cited rumours of a love affair between Lady Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. Our decision not to invoke those rumours was deliberate. While there is absolutely no doubt that a special bond of affection united Nehru and Lady Mountbatten, there was no evidence then nor is there any now that their relationship was anything other than platonic. Nehru’s own sister, Mme V.L. Pandit, volunteered to us in a conversation that had no bearing whatsoever on the Nehru – Edwina relationship that her brother had become sexually impotent towards the end of his marriage. That condition, she said, caused the end of the marriage and plagued Nehru for the rest of his life. Given the premium then put on masculine sexuality in Indian society, we found it very difficult to imagine that a sister would lie about such a matter involving a beloved brother. Furthermore, the valet who cared for Nehru’s official bungalow during two visits Lady Mountbatten paid to India’s Prime Minister after independence swore he had seen no evidence whatsoever that the couple had shared a bedroom.

      Mountbatten did volunteer that he discussed with his wife the secrets of his continuing negotiations with India’s leaders and that, on occasion, he used her as a vehicle to pass information informally to Nehru which he could not transmit to him officially.

      In the years which followed the publication of Freedom at Midnight we, the authors, were on occasion accused of being pro-Mountbatten in its pages. To that charge we plead guilty. In general, there were two major criticisms levelled at the last Viceroy: that he moved too fast in handing over power to India and Pakistan in August 1947, and that he did not do enough to prevent the terrible slaughters which followed that event.

      No one, of course, will ever know how many people died in those awful weeks. Mountbatten preferred to use the figure 250,000 dead, an estimate undoubtedly tinged with some wishful thinking. Most historians of the period place the figure at half a million. Some put it as high as two million.

      Whatever that tragic toll, with one exception no one in authority in India at the time foresaw a calamity of such magnitude. In the course of our work, we read all the weekly reports submitted to the Viceroy by the governors of India’s provinces. Those officials, men like Sir Evan Jenkins in the Punjab and Sir Olaf Caroe in the North West Frontier Province, represented the best and wisest products of British rule in India, the mandarins of the Indian Civil Service. They were advising a man whose Indian experience was counted in months, not years. Yet none of their reports foresaw a wave of violence even remotely comparable to that which followed Partition.

      India and Pakistan’s political leaders – Nehru, Patel, Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan – urged Mountbatten with one voice to transfer power to their hands just as swiftly as possible. Those men had been agitating and preparing for the exercise of power for years. Nothing was going to delay them in getting their hands on that power. Whatever their innermost thoughts may have been, all of them minimized in their recorded conversations with Mountbatten the dangers of the coming Partition of India and vastly overstated their abilities to deal with any troubles which might break out. Only one voice foresaw the dimensions of the tragedy which was about to overwhelm the sub-continent. That was Gandhi’s, and no one in mid-summer 1947 was listening to the prophet of non-violence.

      ‘What went wrong’, Mountbatten admitted to us, ‘was this sheer, simultaneous reaction which nobody foresaw. No one predicted millions of people would pull up stakes and change sides. No one.’

      What, we asked him, would he have done differently had some authoritative voice made such a prediction?

      ‘I wouldn’t have done anything differently’ was his reply. ‘I couldn’t have. I would have got the leaders together and said: “We’re faced with this problem. What are we going to do?” I could have told them “We won’t transfer power” but that they would never have accepted.’

      Some suggest with the benefit of hindsight that Mountbatten, acting in concert with the leaders of the two new dominions, should have held up the publication of Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s boundary awards. That, they argue, would have fixed those migrating millions into place, at least temporarily. Perhaps. Or would the uncertainty have fuelled the already explosive situation and led to even more violence?

      There was one vital piece of knowledge denied to Mountbatten in the summer of 1947 which we uncovered during our work. This was the fact that Jinnah was dying of TB and had been told by his doctors with whom we spoke that he had less than six months to live. Had he known that, Mountbatten acknowledged, he would very probably have acted quite differently in India. Jinnah was the one overwhelming roadblock in his attempts to keep India united. Knowing Jinnah was dying, Mountbatten would have been sorely tempted, he admitted, to await his death. Then, perhaps, an independent Pakistan would never have come into being.

      As far as the accusation is concerned that he moved too fast, that he rushed India and Pakistan into independence, it must be remembered that a swift transfer of power was part of the brief Mountbatten was given by Clement Attlee when he was appointed Viceroy in January 1947. Both men knew that British power in India had become by that time a hollow shell. The proud Indian Civil Service had been allowed to run down during the war. The soldiers of England’s conscript army in India were no more anxious to die to keep India British than Russian conscripts have been to die to keep Chechnya Russian. Mountbatten was haunted by the spectre of Direct Action Day staged in Calcutta in July 1946 by the Moslem League in which 26,000 Hindus were killed in 72 hours. Another challenge to British authority like that would have exposed just how weak England’s power structure had become in 1947. Mountbatten’s first concern, therefore, was to see that the responsibility for administering and policing India was transferred to Indian hands as quickly as possible. It was a nationalistically determined ordering of his priorities, but it was also the one assigned to him by the men who sent him to India.

      One phrase in Chapter 13, entitled ‘Our People Have Gone Mad’, incensed a great number of our Indian readers and merits, perhaps, some comment from us here. It was Lord Mountbatten’s description of Nehru’s and Patel’s appearance when he met them in the study of his residence on Saturday 6 September 1947 on his return from Simla when the worst of the post-Partition violence was shaking India. The two leaders, he said, ‘looked like a pair of chastened school-boys’.

      One can certainly say that, at the very least, his was an insensitive turn of phrase. The fact is, however, that Mountbatten did employ exactly those words in talking to us on tape. A week later in a subsequent interview he employed a similar phrase to describe the scene. The two men ‘were like schoolboys, absolutely pole-axed. They didn’t know what had hit them.’

      The last Viceroy read the manuscript of Freedom at Midnight before its publication and made no reference to that phrase. Nor did he ask us to remove it following so many criticisms of its use by Indian readers. Was it up to us as the authors to censor his words, however injudicious they might have seemed? We thought not at the time of the book’s first publication and we feel the same way in regard to this new edition.

      In the years which followed the original publication of Freedom at Midnight, both of us remained close to Lord Mountbatten. He took great delight in the book’s success, offering copies to Her Majesty the Queen, Prince Charles, for whom he had a special affection, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson, insisting each put aside other concerns to turn