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

Partition, he argued, risked unleashing those passions, not dampening them. Desperately he begged his followers to accept his idea as perhaps their last chance to keep India united and to prevent that tragedy.

      He could not budge Nehru and Patel. There was a limit to the price they were prepared to pay to keep India united and handing over power to their foe, Jinnah, transgressed it. They did not share Gandhi’s conviction that partition would inevitably lead to terrible violence. Broken-hearted, Gandhi would have to report to the Viceroy that he had not been able to carry his colleagues with him. The real break was still some distance ahead, but Gandhi and those men he’d so patiently groomed were fast approaching a parting of the ways. The culmination of Gandhi’s crusade was now drawing near, and it would end as it had begun, in the stillness of his soul.

      There was no need for the air-conditioner whirring in the viceregal study that April afternoon. The chill emanating from the austere and distant leader of the Moslem League was quite sufficient to cool its atmosphere. From the instant he’d arrived, Mountbatten had found Mohammed Ali Jinnah in a most frigid, haughty and disdainful frame of mind.

      The key member of the Indian quartet, the man who would ultimately hold the solution to the sub-continent’s dilemma in his hands, had been the last of the Indian leaders to enter the Viceroy’s study. A quarter of a century later, an echo of his distant anguish still haunting his voice, Louis Mountbatten would recall, ‘I did not realize how utterly impossible my task in India was going to be until I met Mohammed Ali Jinnah for the first time.’

      Their meeting had begun with an unhappy gaffe, a gaffe poignantly revealing of the meticulous, calculating Jinnah to whom no gesture could be spontaneous. Realizing he would be photographed with the Mountbattens, Jinnah had carefully memorized a pleasant little line to flatter Edwina Mountbatten, who he was sure would be posed between the Viceroy and himself.

      Alas, poor Jinnah! It was he and not Edwina who wound up in the middle. But he couldn’t help himself. He was programmed like a computer, and his carefully rehearsed line just had to come out. ‘Ah,’ he beamed, ‘a rose between two thorns.’

      Inside the study, he began by informing Mountbatten he had come to tell him exactly what he was prepared to accept. As he had with Gandhi, Mountbatten interrupted with a wave of his hand. ‘Mr Jinnah,’ he said, ‘I am not prepared to discuss conditions at this stage. First, let’s make each other’s acquaintance.’

      Then, with his legendary charm and verve, Mountbatten turned the focus of Operation Seduction on the Moslem leader. Jinnah froze. To that aloof and reserved man who never unbent with even his closest associates, the very idea of revealing the details of his life and personality to a perfect stranger must have seemed appalling.

      Gamely Mountbatten struggled on, summoning up all the reserves of his gregarious, engaging personality. For what seemed to him like hours, his only reward was a series of monosyllabic grunts from the man beside him. Finally, after almost two hours, Jinnah began to soften. As the Moslem leader left his study, Mountbatten sighed to Alan Campbell-Johnson, his press attaché: ‘My God, he was cold! It took most of the interview to unfreeze him.’

      The man who would one day be hailed as the father of Pakistan had first been exposed to the idea at a black-tie dinner at London’s Waldorf Hotel in the spring of 1933. His host was Rahmat Ali, the graduate student who had set the idea on paper. Rahmat Ali had arranged the banquet with its oysters and un-Islamic Chablis at his own expense hoping to persuade Jinnah, India’s leading Moslem politician, to take over his movement. He received a chilly rebuff. Pakistan, Jinnah told him, was ‘an impossible dream’.

      The man whom the unfortunate graduate student had sought to make into the leader of a Moslem separatist movement had, in fact, begun his political career by preaching Hindu-Moslem unity. His family came from Gandhi’s Kathiawar peninsula. Indeed, had not Jinnah’s grandfather for some obscure reason become a convert to Islam, the two political foes would have been born into the same caste. Like Gandhi, Jinnah had gone to London to dine in the Inns of Court and be called to the bar. Unlike Gandhi however, he had come back from London an Englishman.

      He wore a monocle and superbly cut linen suits which he changed three or four times a day so as to remain cool and unruffled in the soggy Bombay climate. He loved oysters and caviare, champagne, brandy and good claret. A man of unassailable personal honesty and financial integrity, his canons were sound law and sound procedure. He was, according to one intimate, ‘the last of the Victorians, a parliamentarian in the mode of Gladstone or Disraeli.’

      A brilliantly successful lawyer, Jinnah moved naturally to politics and for a decade worked to keep the Hindus and Moslems of Congress united in a common front against the British. His disenchantment with Congress dated from Gandhi’s accession to power. The impeccably dressed Jinnah was not going to be bundled off to some squalid British jail half naked in a dhoti wearing a silly little white cap. Civil disobedience, he told Gandhi, was for ‘the ignorant and the illiterate’.

      The turning point in Jinnah’s career came after the 1937 elections when Congress refused to share with him and his Moslem League the spoils of office in those Indian provinces where there was a substantial Moslem minority. Jinnah was a man of towering vanity and he took Congress’s action as a personal rebuke. It convinced him he and the Moslem League would never get a fair deal from a Congress-run India. The former apostle of Hindu-Moslem unity became the unyielding advocate of Pakistan, the project he had labelled an ‘impossible dream’ barely four years earlier.

      A more improbable leader of India’s Moslem masses could hardly be imagined. The only thing Moslem about Mohammed Ali Jinnah was his parents’ religion. He drank, ate pork, religiously shaved his beard each morning and just as religiously avoided the mosque each Friday. God and the Koran had no place in Jinnah’s vision of the world. His political foe, Gandhi, knew more verses of the Moslem Holy Book than he did. He had been able to achieve the remarkable feat of securing the allegiance of the vast majority of India’s Moslems without being able to articulate more than a few sentences in their traditional tongue, Urdu.

      Jinnah despised India’s masses. He detested the dirt, the heat, the crowds of India. Gandhi travelled India in filthy third-class railway carriages to be with the people. Jinnah rode first-class to avoid them.

      Where his rival made a fetish of simplicity, Jinnah revelled in pomp. He delighted in touring India’s Moslem cities in princely processions, riding under victory arches on a kind of Rosebowl style float, preceded by silver-harnessed elephants and a band booming out ‘God Save The King’ because, Jinnah observed, it was the only tune the crowd knew.

      His life was a model of order and discipline. Even the phlox and petunias of his gardens marched out from his mansion in straight, disciplined lines, and when the master of the house paused there it was not to contemplate the beauty of his plants but to verify the precision of their alignment. Law books and newspapers were his only reading. Indeed, newspapers seemed to be this strange man’s passion. He had them mailed to him from all over the world. He cut them up, scrawled notes in their margins, meticulously pasted them into scrapbooks that grew in dusty piles in his office cupboards.

      Jinnah had only scorn for his Hindu rivals. He labelled Nehru ‘a Peter Pan’, a ‘literary figure’ who ‘should have been an English professor, not a politician’, ‘an arrogant Brahmin who covers his Hindu trickiness under a veneer of Western education’. Gandhi, to Jinnah, was ‘a cunning fox’, ‘a Hindu revivalist.’

      The sight of the Mahatma, during an interval in a conversation in Jinnah’s mansion, stretched out on one of his priceless Persian carpets, his mudpack on his belly, was something Jinnah had never forgotten – or forgiven.

      Among his Moslems Jinnah had no friends, only followers. He had associates, not disciples and, with the exception of his sister, ignored his family. He lived alone with his dream of Pakistan. He was almost six feet tall but weighed barely one hundred and twenty pounds. The skin on his face was stretched so fine that his prominent cheekbones below seemed to emit a translucent glow. He had thick, silver-grey hair, and – curiously enough for a man whose sole companion for seventeen years had been a dentist, his sister – a mouthful of rotting yellow teeth. So stern, so rigorously composed