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

in the words of his physician, had been living for three years on ‘will-power, whisky and cigarettes’.

      It was the first of those that was the key to the character and achievements of Jinnah. His rivals accused him of many a sin, his friends of many a slight. But no one, friend or foe, would ever accuse Mohammed Ali Jinnah of a lack of will-power.

      Mountbatten and Jinnah held six critical meetings during the first fortnight of April 1947. They were the vital conversations – not quite ten hours in length – which ultimately determined the resolution of the Indian dilemma. Mountbatten went into them armed with ‘the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right thing, not because I am persuasive so much as because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favourable light’. As he would later recall, he ‘tried every trick I could play, used every appeal I could imagine’, to shake Jinnah’s resolve to have partition. Nothing would. There was no argument that could move him from his consuming determination to realize the impossible dream of Pakistan.

      Jinnah owed his commanding position to two things. He had made himself absolute dictator of the Moslem League. There were men below him who might have been prepared to negotiate a compromise but, so long as Mohammed Ali Jinnah was alive, they would hold their silence. Second, more important, was the memory of the blood spilled in the streets of Calcutta a year before.

      Mountbatten and Jinnah did agree on one point at the outset – the need for speed. India, Jinnah declared, had gone beyond the stage at which a compromise solution was possible. There was only one solution, a speedy ‘surgical operation’. Otherwise, he warned, India would perish.

      When Mountbatten expressed concern lest partition might produce bloodshed and violence, Jinnah reassured him. Once his ‘surgical operation’ had taken place, all troubles would cease and India’s two halves would live in harmony and happiness. It was, Jinnah told Mountbatten, like a court case he’d handled between two brothers embittered by the shares assigned them under their father’s will. Yet, two years after the court had adjudicated their dispute, they were the greatest friends. That, he promised the Viceroy, would be the case in India.

      The Moslems of India, Jinnah insisted, were a nation with a ‘distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions’.

      ‘India has never been a true nation,’ Jinnah asserted. ‘It only looks that way on the map. The cows I want to eat, the Hindu stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me he has to wash his hands. The only thing the Moslem has in common with the Hindu is his slavery to the British.’

      Their arguments became, the Viceroy would later recall, an ‘amusing and rather tragic game of round and round the mulberry bush‘; Jinnah, the March Hare of Alice in Wonderland, never conceding a point; Mountbatten, the determined advocate of unity, driving at Jinnah from every angle, until he was afraid lest, as he noted at the time, ‘I drove the old gentleman quite mad.’

      For Jinnah, the division he proposed was the natural course. That division, however, would have to produce a viable state and that, Jinnah argued, meant that two of India’s great provinces, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to go into his Pakistan, despite the fact that each contained enormous Hindu populations.

      Mountbatten could not agree. The basis of Jinnah’s argument for Pakistan was that India’s Moslem minority should not be ruled by its Hindu majority. How then justify taking the Hindu minorities of Bengal and the Punjab into a Moslem state? If Jinnah insisted on dividing India to get his Islamic state, then the very logic he’d used to get it would compel Mountbatten to divide the Punjab and Bengal as part of the bargain.

      Jinnah protested. That would give him an economically unviable, ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’. Mountbatten, who didn’t want to give him any Pakistan at all, told the Moslem leader, that if he felt the nation he was to receive was as ‘moth-eaten’ as all that, he’d prefer he didn’t take it.

      ‘Ah,’ Jinnah would counter, ‘Your Excellency doesn’t understand. A man is a Punjabi or a Bengali before he is Hindu or Moslem. They share a common history, language, culture and economy. You must not divide them. You will cause endless bloodshed and trouble.’

      ‘Mr Jinnah, I entirely agree.’

      ‘You do?’

      ‘Of course,’ Mountbatten would continue. ‘A man is not only a Punjabi or Bengali before he is a Hindu or a Moslem, he is an Indian before all else. You have presented the unanswerable argument for Indian unity.’

      ‘But you don’t understand at all,’ Jinnah would counter, and the discussions would start around the mulberry bush again.

      Mountbatten was stunned by the rigidity of Jinnah’s position. ‘I never would have believed,’ he later recalled, ‘that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in the Inns of Court, was capable of simply closing his mind as Jinnah did. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the point. He did, but a kind of shutter came down. He was the evil genius in the whole thing. The others could be persuaded, but not Jinnah. While he was alive nothing could be done.’

      The climax to their talks came on 10 April, less than three weeks after Mountbatten’s arrival in India. For two hours he begged, cajoled, argued, and pleaded with Jinnah to keep India united. With all the eloquence he could command, he painted a picture of the greatness India could achieve, 400 million people of different races and creeds, bound together by a Central Union Government, with all the economic strength that would accrue to them from increased industrialization, playing a great part in world affairs as the most progressive, single entity in the Far East. Surely, Mr Jinnah did not want to destroy all that, to condemn the sub-continent to the existence of a third-rate power?

      Jinnah remained unmoved. He was, Mountbatten sadly concluded, ‘a psychopathic case, hell bent on this Pakistan.’

      Meditating alone in his study after Jinnah’s departure, Mountbatten realized he was probably going to have to give him what he wanted. His first obligation in New Delhi was to the nation that had sent him there, Britain. He longed to preserve India’s unity, but not at the expense of his country becoming hopelessly entrapped in an India collapsing in chaos and violence.

      He had to have a solution, he had to have it fast, and he could not impose it by force. Military command had given Mountbatten a penchant for rapid, decisive actions, such as the one he now took. In future years, his critics would assail him for having reached it too quickly, for acting like an impetuous sailor and not a statesman. Mountbatten, however, was not going to waste any more time on what he was certain would be futile arguments. He could argue with Jinnah, he concluded, until hell froze over, and hell in India would be the only consequence.

      He was prepared to acknowledge with blunt realism that Operation Seduction had failed to make an impact on the Moslem leader. The partition of India seemed increasingly the only escape. It now remained for Mountbatten to get Nehru and Patel to accept the principle and to find a plan for it which could win their support.

      The following morning he reviewed his talk with Jinnah for his staff. Then, sadly, he turned to his Chief of Staff, Lord Ismay. The time had come, he said, to begin drawing up a plan for the partition of India.

      Inevitably, Mountbatten’s decision would lead to one of the great dramas of modern history. Whatever the manner in which it was executed, it was bound to end in the mutilation of a great nation whose unity was the most imposing result of three and a half centuries of British colonization. To satisfy the exigent demands of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, two of India’s most distinctive entities, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to be carved up. The result would make Pakistan a geographic aberration, a nation of two heads separated by 970 miles of Himalayan peaks and Indian territory. Twenty days, more time than was required to sail from Karachi to Marseilles, would be needed to make the sea trip around the sub-continent from one half of Pakistan to the other. A non-stop flight between its two parts would require a four-engined aircraft, machines which would prove expensive luxuries for the new state.

      If the geographical distance dividing the two halves of Pakistan would be