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

had helped thwart Wavell’s efforts to untie the Indian knot. His tactics had done much to frustrate the most recent British attempts to solve the problem, that of the Cabinet Mission whose plan was supposed to serve as Mountbatten’s point of departure. Only the evening before, Gandhi had reiterated to his prayer meeting that India would be divided, ‘over my dead body. So long as I am alive, I will never agree to the partition of India.’

      If a reluctant Mountbatten was driven to the decision to partition India, he would find himself in the distasteful position of having to impose his will on Gandhi. It was not the elderly Mahatma’s body he would have to break, but his heart.

      It had always been British policy not to yield to force, he told Gandhi, to open their talks on the right note, but his non-violent crusade had won and, come what may, Britain was going to leave India. Only one thing mattered in that coming departure, Gandhi replied. ‘Don’t partition India,’ he begged. Don’t divide India, the prophet of non-violence pleaded, even if refusing to do so meant shedding ‘rivers of blood’.

      Dividing India, Mountbatten assured Gandhi, was the last solution he wished to adopt. But what alternatives were open to him?

      Gandhi had one. So desperate was he to avoid partition that he was prepared for a Solomonic judgment. Give the Moslems the baby instead of cutting it in half. Place three hundred million Hindus under Moslem rule by asking his rival Jinnah and his Moslem League to form a government. Then hand over power to that government. Give Jinnah all India instead of just the part he wanted.

      Mountbatten was ready to grasp at any straw to avoid partition. The suggestion had an Alice in Wonderland ring to it, but then so had some of Gandhi’s other ideas and they had worked.

      ‘Whatever makes you think your own Congress Party will accept?’ he asked Gandhi.

      ‘Congress,’ Gandhi replied, ‘wants above all else to avoid partition. They will do anything to prevent it.’

      What, Mountbatten asked, would Jinnah’s reaction be?

      ‘If you tell him I am its author his reply will be: “Wily Gandhi”,’ the Mahatma said, laughing.

      Mountbatten was silent for a moment. There was much in Gandhi’s proposal that seemed unworkable. He was not prepared to commit his own prestige to it at this early juncture. But neither was he going lightly to dismiss any idea that might hold India together.

      ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you can bring me formal assurance that Congress will accept your scheme, that they’ll try sincerely to make it work, then I’m prepared to entertain the idea.’

      Gandhi fairly flew out of his chair at his words. ‘I am entirely sincere,’ he assured Mountbatten. ‘I will tour the length and breadth of India to get the people to accept if that is your decision.’

      A few hours later, an Indian journalist spoke to Gandhi as he walked towards his evening prayer meeting. The Mahatma, he thought, seemed ‘to bubble with happiness’. As they approached the prayer ground, he suddenly turned to the newsman. With a gleeful smile, he whispered: ‘I think I’ve turned the tide.’

      ‘Why, this man is trying to bully me!’ an unbelieving Louis Mountbatten thought. Operation Seduction had come to a sudden halt at the rock-like figure planted opposite him. With his khadi dhoti whirled about his shoulders like a toga, his bald head glowing, his scowling demeanour, the man jammed into that chair looked to the Viceroy more like a Roman senator than an Indian politician.

      Vallabhbhai Patel, however, was India’s quintessential politician. He was an Oriental Tammany Hall boss who ran the machinery of the Congress Party with a firm and ruthless hand. He should have been the easiest member of the Indian quartet for Mountbatten to deal with. Like the Viceroy, he was a practical, pragmatic man, a hard but realistic bargainer. Yet the tension between them was so real, so palpable, that it seemed to Mountbatten he could reach out and touch it.

      Its cause was in no way related to the great issues facing India. It was a slip of paper, a routine government minute issued by Patel’s Home Ministry, dealing with an appointment. Mountbatten, however, had read in its tone, in the way Patel had put it out, a calculated challenge to his authority.

      Patel had a well-earned reputation for toughness. He had an instinctive need to take the measure of a new interlocutor, to see how far he could push him. That piece of paper on his desk, Mountbatten was convinced, was a test, a little examination he had to go through with Patel before he could get down to serious matters.

      Vallabhbhai Patel was passed a cable announcing his wife’s death as he was pacing the floor of a Bombay court-room summing up his case for the jury. He glanced at it, thrust it into his pocket, and continued his peroration without breaking off his sentence.

      That incident formed part of the legend of Vallabhbhai Patel and was a measure of the man. Emotion, one of his associates once observed, formed no part of his character. The remark was not wholly exact. Patel was an emotional man, but he never let those emotions break through the composed façade he turned to the world. If he gave off one salient impression, it was that of a man wholly in control of himself.

      In a land in which men threw their words around like sailors their money after three months at sea, Patel hoarded his phrases the way a miser hoards coins. His daughter, who had been his constant companion since his wife’s death, rarely exchanged ten sentences with him a day. When Patel did talk, however, people listened.

      Patel was Indian from the uppermost lump of his bald head to the calluses on the soles of his feet. His Delhi home was filled with books but every one of them was written by an Indian author about India. He was the only Indian leader who sprang from the soil of India. His father had been a peasant farmer in Gujerat province near Bombay and Patel still lived his life at a peasant’s rhythm. He rose faithfully at 4 a.m. and was in bed just as regularly each night at 9.30. The first waking hours of each day Patel spent on his toilet, doing the bulk of his reading, 30 newspapers sent to him daily from every part of India. His life was watched over with jealous vigilance by his daughter and only child, Maniben. For two decades, she had been his secretary, his ADC, his confidante, the mistress of his household. So close was their relationship they even shared the same bedroom.

      Patel’s vocation for Indian nationalism had come from his father who’d gone off to fight the British at the side of a local warlord in the 1857 Mutiny. He’d spent the winter nights of his boyhood around the dung fire of their peasants’ hut, listening to his old soldier’s tales. Soon after, he left the land for good to work in the great textile mills of Ahmedabad where Gandhi was to found his first Indian ashram. He studied at night, saved almost every rupee he earned until, at 33, he was able to send himself to London to study the law.

      He never saw the London of the Mayfair drawing-rooms where Nehru had been an admired guest. The London he knew best was the library of the Inns of Court. He walked twice a day the ten miles separating the courts from his lodging to save the bus fare. The day he was called to the bar, he took another walk, to the docks, to book a passage home. Once he returned, he never left India again.

      He settled in Ahmedabad, practising law with brilliant effect for the mill owners whose wage slave he’d once been. Patel had not even looked up from his nightly bridge game the first time he’d heard Gandhi speak in the Ahmedabad Club. Someone, however, brought him a text of the Mahatma’s speech and as he read its lines a vision rose from its pages: the vision his father had inspired around a dung fire in the winter nights of his boyhood.

      He sought Gandhi out and offered him his services. In 1922 Gandhi, anxious to see what civil disobedience might achieve, asked Patel to organize an experimental campaign among 87,000 people in 137 villages in the county of Bardoli outside Bombay. His organization was so comprehensive, so complete, that the campaign succeeded beyond even Gandhi’s hopes. From that moment on, Patel had shared with Nehru the place just below Gandhi’s in the independence movement. Employing his special genius he had assembled the Congress Party’s machine, thrusting its tentacles into the remotest corners of India.

      Patel had always been profoundly wary of his brother in Congress khadi, Nehru. The two men were natural rivals and