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

He dismissed his visions of a brave new Socialist world as ‘this parrot cry of Socialism’. Capitalist society worked, he maintained, the problem was to Indianize it, to make it work better, not jettison it for an impracticable ideal.

      ‘Patel,’ one of his aides noted, ‘came from an industrial town, a centre for machines, factories and textiles. Nehru came from a place where they grew flowers and fruit.’

      He scorned Nehru’s fascination with foreign affairs, the great debates of the world. He knew where power was to be found and that was where he was, in the Home Ministry, developing the loyalty of what would be independent India’s police, security, and information services, as he had developed the loyalty of the Congress machine. Nehru might wear Gandhi’s mantle but he walked with an uneasy tread, because he knew the legions behind him longed for another Caesar. Like Jinnah, with whom his relations were cordial, Patel was underestimated, his importance undervalued by a world whose regards were riveted on Gandhi and Nehru. It was an error. Patel, one of his aides said, ‘was India’s last Moghul’.

      The Viceroy looked at the note which had offended him, then passed it across his desk to Patel. Quietly he asked him to withdraw it. Patel brusquely refused.

      Mountbatten studied the Indian leader. He was going to need the support of this man and the machinery he represented. But he was sure he would never get it if he did not face him down now.

      ‘Very well,’ said Mountbatten, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to order my plane.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Patel, ‘why?’

      ‘Because I’m leaving,’ Mountbatten replied. ‘I didn’t want this job in the first place. I’ve just been looking for someone like you to give me an excuse to throw it up and get out of an impossible situation.’

      ‘You don’t mean it!’ exclaimed Patel.

      ‘Mean it?’ replied Mountbatten. ‘You don’t think I am going to stay here and be bullied by a chap like you, do you? If you think you can be rude to me and push me around, you’re wrong. You’ll either withdraw that minute or one of us is going to resign. And let me tell you that if I go, I shall first explain to your Prime Minister and to Mr Jinnah why I am leaving. The breakdown in India which will follow, the blood that will be shed, will be on your shoulders and no one else’s.’

      Patel stared at Mountbatten in disbelief.

      Come, come, he declared, Mountbatten wasn’t going to throw over the Viceroyalty after only a month on the job.

      ‘Mr Patel,’ Mountbatten answered, ‘you evidently don’t know me. Either you withdraw your minute here and now, or I shall summon the Prime Minister and announce my resignation.’

      A long silence followed. ‘You know,’ Patel finally sighed, ‘the awful part is I think you mean it.’

      ‘You’re damned right I do,’ answered Mountbatten.

      Patel reached out, took the offending minute off Mountbatten’s desk and slowly tore it up.

      A lone light bulb, its contours speckled with carbonized insects, hung from the hut’s ceiling. Naked to the waist, Gandhi squatted on a straw mattress on the cement floor. The others, talking excitedly, were gathered around him. Dark eyes sparkling with awe and glee, the urchins of the Bhangi sweepers’ colony, the foetid slum of the Untouchables who swept Delhi’s streets and cleaned out her toilets, stared through the window at their prophet.

      The men crowded about Gandhi would be the leaders of a free India. They were there in that blighted slum, its air reeking from the stench of the human excrement rotting in its open sewers, its inhabitants’ faces crusted with the sores of a hundred diseases, because Gandhi had decided to pass his Delhi sojourn there. The struggle for the oppressed of Hindu society, its Untouchables whom he called Harijans – Children of God – had rivalled the struggle for national freedom in Gandhi’s heart.

      Untouchables constituted a sixth of India’s population. Supposedly condemned by their sins in a previous incarnation to a casteless existence, they were readily identifiable by the darkness of their skin, their cringing submissiveness, their ragged dress. Their name expressed the contamination which stained a caste Hindu at the slightest contact with them, a stain which had to be removed by a ritual, purifying bath. Even their footprints in the soil could defile some Brahmim neighbourhoods. An Untouchable was obliged to shrink from the path of an approaching caste Hindu lest his shadow fall across his route and soil him. In some parts of India, Untouchables were allowed to leave their shacks only at night. There, they were known as Invisibles.

      No Hindu could eat in the presence of an Untouchable, drink water drawn from a well by his hands, use utensils he’d soiled by his touch. Many Hindu temples were closed to them. Their children were not accepted in schools. Even in death they remained pariahs. Untouchables were not allowed to use the common cremation ground. Invariably too poor to buy logs for their own funeral pyres, their corpses were usually consumed by vultures rather than flames.

      In some parts of India they were still bought and sold like serfs along with the estates they worked. A young Untouchable was generally assigned the same value as an ox. In a country of social progress, they enjoyed only one privilege. Whenever an epidemic struck down a sacred cow, the Untouchable who carted off the rotten carcass was allowed to sell the meat to his fellow outcasts.

      Since his return from South Africa, Gandhi had made their cause his. His first Indian ashram had nearly failed, because he had welcomed them into its folds. He massaged them, nursed them. He had even insisted on publicly performing the most demeaning act a caste Hindu could accomplish to demonstrate his loathing of Untouchability; he had cleaned out an Untouchable’s toilet. In 1932, he had nearly died for them, fasting to thwart a political reform which he feared would institutionalize their separation from Indian society. By always moving around India as they did, when they were able to travel, in third-class railway carriages, by living in their slums, Gandhi was trying to force them to remain conscious of their misery.^*

      In a few months, weeks even, most of the men around Gandhi would be government ministers occupying the enormous offices from which the British had run India, crossing Delhi in chauffeur-driven American cars. He had deliberately obliged them to make this pilgrimage to one of India’s worst slums to give them a Gandhian reminder of the realities of the nation they would soon govern.

      It was India’s political realities, however, that occupied those men this evening. It was suffocatingly hot and to ease its miseries Gandhi was using his air-conditioner, a wet towel wrapped like a turban around his bald head. To his distress, the tempers of his followers were as warm as the night around them.

      When, a few days earlier, Gandhi had fervently assured Mountbatten that the Congress Party was prepared to do anything to prevent partition, he had been wrong. His error was the measure of the slowly widening gulf between the ageing Mahatma and the men around him, the men he had developed as the leaders of the Congress Party.

      For a quarter of a century, those men had followed Gandhi. They had thrown off their western suits for his khadi, moved their fingers to the unfamiliar rhythms of the spinning-wheel. In his name they had marched into the flailing lathis of the police and the gates of British jails. Quelling occasional doubts, they had followed him on his improbable crusades to the improbable triumph now beckoning: independence wrested from the British by Gandhian non-violence.

      They had followed him for many reasons, but above all because they saw that his unique genius for communicating with the soul of India could draw mass support to their banner. The potential differences between them had been submerged in the common struggle with the British. Now, in that hot Delhi night, those differences began to emerge as they debated Gandhi’s plan to make Jinnah Prime Minister. If they refused to endorse his scheme, Gandhi argued, the new Viceroy might find himself driven into a corner from which the only escape would be partition. Walking from village to village in Noakhali and later Bihar, applying his ‘ointment’ to India’s sore spots, Gandhi had understood infinitely better than those political leaders in Delhi the tragedy partition