(excerpts taken from Freedom at Midnight, possibly one of the best books to have a detailed account of the event of dominion status being granted to India)
Soon after Independence, Louis Mountbatten had slipped discreetly out of Delhi to that Olympiad paradise of the now dead Raj, Shimla when suddenly the telephone rand in his library in the old vice regal lodge at 10 pm on Thursday 4 September 1947. His caller was V.P.Menon. There was no one in India for whose advice Mountbatten had more respect.
‘Your Excellency,’ Menon said, ‘you must return to Delhi.’
‘But, V.P.,’ Mountbatten protested, ‘I’ve just come away. If my cabinet wishes me to countersign something just send it up here and I’ll countersign it.’
That was not it at all, Menon said. ‘The situation has got very bad since Your Excellency left. Trouble has broken out here in Delhi. We just don’t know how far it’s going to go. The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are both very worried. They think it’s essential for Your Excellency to come back.’
‘Why?’ Mountbatten asked.
‘They need more than your advice now,’ Menon said. ‘They need your help.’
‘V.P.,’ Mountbatten said, ‘I don’t think that’s what they want at all. They’ve just got their Independence. The last thing they want is the constitutional chief of the state coming back and putting his fingers in the pie. I’m not coming. Tell them.’
‘Very well,’ replied Menon, ‘I will. But there’s no sense in changing your mind later. If your Excellency doesn’t come down in twenty-four hours, don’t bother to come at all. It will be too late. We’ll have lost India.’
There was a long stunned silence at the other end of the phone. Then Mountbatten said, very calmly: ‘All right, V.P., you old swine, you win. I’ll come down.
For the next quarter of a century the results of the meeting beginning in Louis Mountbatten’s study on the morning of Saturday,6 September 1947 would be the most closely guarded secret of the last Viceroy’s life. Had the decisions taken at it became known, the knowledge could have destroyed the career of the charismatic Indian statesman who would emerge in the years to come as one of the world’s major figures.
Three people were present: Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel. The two Indian leaders were somber, visibly depressed men; they looked to the Governor General ‘like a pair of chastened schoolboys.’ The situation in the Punjab was out of control. The migration was exceeding their worst fears. Now violence in Delhi threatened to bring down the capital itself.
‘We don’t know how to hold it,’ Nehru admitted.
‘You have to grip it,’ Mountbatten told him.
‘How can we grip it?’ Nehru replied. ‘We have no experience. We have spent the best of our lives in your British Jails. Our experience is in the art of agitation and not administration. We can barely manage to run a well organized government in normal circumstances. We are not just up to facing an absolute collapse of law and order.’
Nehru then made an almost unbelievable request. ‘While you were exercising the highest command in war, we were in a British prison,’ he said. ‘You are a professional, high-level administrator. You have commanded millions of men. You have the experience and knowledge colonialism had denied us. You English can’t just turn this country over to us after being here all our lives and simply walk away. We’re in an emergency and we need your help. Will you run the country?’
‘Yes,’ seconded Patel, the rough realist at Nehru’s side, ‘he’s right. You’ve got to take over.’
Mountbatten was aghast. ‘My God’, he said, ‘I’ve just got through giving you the country and here you two are asking me to take it back!’
‘You must understand,’ Nehru said. “You’ve got to take it. We’ll pledge ourselves to do whatever you say.’
‘But this is terrible,’ Mountbatten said. ‘If anyone ever finds out you have turned the country back to my hands, you will be finished politically. The Indian’s keep the British Viceroy and then put him back in change? Out of the question.’
‘Well,’ said Nehru, ‘we will have to find a way to disguise it, but if you don’t do it we can’t manage.’
Mount batten thought a moment. He loved a challenge and this was a formidable one. His personal esteem for Nehru, his affection for India, his sense of responsibility, left him no way of escape.
‘All right,’ he said, the admiral is back on his bridge, ‘I’ll do it, and I can pull the thing together because I do know how to do it. But, we must agree that no body finds out about this. Nobody must know that you have made this request. You two will ask me to set up an Emergency Committee of the Cabinet and I will agree. Will you do that?’
‘Yes,’ replied Nehru and Patel.
‘All right,’ said Mountbatten. ‘You have asked me. Now, will you invite me to take the chair?’
‘Yes,’ replied the two Indians, already dazed by the pace at which Mountbatten was moving, ‘we invite you’.
‘The Emergency Committee,’ Mountbatten continued, ‘must consist of the people I nominate.’
‘Oh,’ protested Nehru, ‘you can have the whole cabinet.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mountbatten, ‘that would be a disaster. I want the key people, the people who really do things, the Director of Civil Aviation, The Director of Railways, and the Head of the Indian Medical Services. My wife will take on the volunteer organizations and the Red Cross. The committee’s secretary will be General Erskine-Crum, my conference secretary. The minutes will be typed in relay by British typists so they’ll be ready when the meeting is over. You invite me to do all this?’
‘Yes,’ replied Nehru and Patel, ‘we invite you.’
‘At the meetings,’ Mountbatten continued, ‘the Prime Minister will sit on my right and the Deputy Prime Minister on my left. I’ll always go through the motions of consulting you, but what ever I say you’re not to argue with me. We haven’t got time. I’ll say: “I’m sure you’d wish me to do this,” and you’ll say: “Yes, please do.” That’s all I want, I don’t want you to say any thing else.’
‘Well can’t we…’ Patel began to protest.
‘Not if it’s going to delay things,’ Mountbatten said. ‘Do you want me to run the country or not?’
‘Ah, all right,’ growled the old politician, ‘you run the county.’
In the next fifteen minutes the two men put together the list of members of the Emergency Committee.
‘Gentlemen,’ Mountbatten said, ‘we will hold our first meeting at five o’clock this afternoon.’
After three decades of struggle, after years of strikes, mass movements, after all the bonfires of British cloths; above all after barely three weeks of Independence, India was once again for one last moment being run by an Englishman.
January 1st, 2012 at 9:46 pm
V P Menon played a critical role during this period. More information on him can be found in the article V P Menon – Forgotten Architect of Modern India which is available on http://www.forgotten-raj.org.
January 6th, 2012 at 5:50 pm
Thank you Sir
Regards