KASHMIR IS OFTEN CALLED THE LOVELIEST OF THE SUBCONTINENT’S landscapes. Iced Himalayan peaks soar up from lush green valleys, dark forests sweep around the shores of glassy lakes. Before 1947, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs had worked side by side in walnut groves and cherry orchards, saffron fields and lotus gardens. In ancient legends, Kashmir was supposed to have been an inland sea, from which a wicked demon emerged to terrorize the earth. The demon was finally quelled by the goddess Parvati, who dropped a mountain on him – one of those which now forms the backdrop to the regional capital, Srinagar. But, if a spirit of rage lived on beneath the mountain, the events of 1947 would awaken it.
Kashmir had come into existence as a princely state on 16 March 1846. The British had acquired the territory following the First Sikh War, but lacked the resources or the inclination to administer it. Instead they sold it under the Treaty of Amritsar to Gulab Singh, the Raja of Jammu, for 750,000 rupees. It is sometimes said that this sale was the root cause of the Kashmir conflict; either because Gulab Singh was a Dogra Hindu and most of the people were Muslims or because he was, in the words of the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, ‘the greatest rascal in Asia’.1 But Kashmir had hosted a religiously mixed population for centuries before the beginning of Dogra rule and, for 101 years following the Treaty of Amritsar, it remained comparatively peaceable. Successive maharajas had ruled despotically, and had discriminated to various degrees against Muslims, but the region did not see any major incidents of unrest except once. In 1931, there had been Muslim riots against the regime of Gulab Singh’s great-grandson, Maharaja Hari Singh; these were soon quashed, and did not inspire any widespread rebellion.2 Though around three-quarters Muslim, the population was neither homogeneous nor especially orthodox. Buddhists formed the majority in remote Ladakh, perched high among the slopes of the Himalayas; while most of the population of lower-lying Jammu was Hindu. The stripped-down, casteless Bhakti form of Hinduism found favour with many. Mystical traditions such as Islamic Sufism had extensive roots in the vale.3 When Jinnah had sent a Muslim League envoy to Kashmir in 1943 to assess its potential, the conclusion had been disheartening. ‘No important religious leader has ever made Kashmir … his home or even an ordinary centre of Islamic activities’, wrote the envoy. ‘It will require considerable effort, spread over a long period of time, to reform them and convert them into true Muslims.’4
All Kashmir’s diverse and agreeable ways of life had continued in relative stability until soon after the partition of the subcontinent. Unlike the partition holocausts, whose effect was localized in time and space, the Kashmir crisis continues to pose one of the most serious threats to international stability that the world has ever seen. Within the space of three months, one of the most enchanting places on earth was transformed into the eastern front of a slow-burning but devastating war, between Islam and kaffirs (non-Muslims) on either side of the Arabian lands, and between Islam and Islam in the centre. The western front was to erupt just weeks later, in Palestine; the central battleground, in Iraq, was already on the boil.
It is impossible to tell the story of what happened in Kashmir in 1947 without upsetting at least one or, more likely, all of the factions that remain involved. The following year, the Indian and Pakistani governments presented their cases to the United Nations: their irreconcilable accounts of what had happened each lasted six hours.5 Even at the time, international observers repeatedly complained that facts were hard to come by, and harder yet to prove. Sixty years of furious debate has fogged the view yet further.
It had always been assumed by the British, by the Muslim League, and indeed largely by Congress apart from Nehru himself, that Kashmir would eventually go to Pakistan.6 Kashmir was the ‘K’ in Pakistan. Its population was predominantly Muslim. Its lines of trade and communication ran into Pakistan. Around one quarter of Kashmir’s total revenue came from timber, which was floated down the Jhelum and Chenab Rivers and collected in towns in Pakistan. Other major exports were fruit and vegetables, also exported through Rawalpindi; and woollens, including the prized cashmere, pashmina and shahtoosh wools, which were sold through the West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province.7 There were only three roads running in and out of Kashmir. Two of them went into Pakistan, and one into India – but it was the Maharaja’s private route, a crumbling track described optimistically on the Ordnance Survey maps as ‘jeepable’, and snowbound for five months of each year.8
Nehru held out hope that Kashmir would come into India. On 27 September, he had written to Patel that he thought Pakistan would infiltrate Kashmir soon, with a view to a full annexation just before the snows of winter made the region impossible to defend; and that therefore its accession to India should be assured at the earliest possible minute.9 ‘Kashmir affects me in a peculiar way’, Nehru would write to Edwina Mountbatten a few months later; ‘it is a kind of mild intoxication – like music sometimes or the company of a beloved person’.10 His family’s descent from Kashmir is the first thing he describes on the first page of his 1936 autobiography. During the struggle for independence, he would often recuperate after his prison sentences with a vacation in the Kashmiri mountains. For a person who had never quite fitted in – too British for India, too Indian for Britain – he had a powerful sense of belonging in Kashmir. ‘I have a sense of coming back to my own’, he wrote to his daughter, Indira, in 1940; ‘it is curious how race memories persist, or perhaps it is all imagination’.11 His love for the state was about more than its beauty and harmony, though these were powerful pulls. The implication of some historians that India claimed Kashmir because Nehru liked going there for his holidays is a little unfair. Nehru had long been a passionate supporter of the Congress-aligned National Conference in Kashmir, an overwhelmingly Muslim political party led by his friend Sheikh Abdullah that constituted the effective opposition to the Maharaja. To him, the state was a powerful symbol of his belief that India could not become a Hindustan, that Congress was a party for all faiths, and that Muslims were no less Indian than Hindus. In the context of a subcontinent that had descended into all-out holy wars, it is easy to see why such principles might have become an obsession with the secular Nehru. Unfortunately, the same principles allowed him to be manipulated by Vallabhbhai Patel, who was by now talking along openly Islamophobic lines and eyeing an aggressively anti-Pakistan foreign policy. While Nehru thought in terms of high ideals, Patel was concerned with enlarging Hindu India at the expense of Pakistan.
The decision of the Maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, not to accede to Pakistan by 15 August had been based on what was generally seen as a whimsical notion of remaining independent. Both the British and Pakistani governments assumed that the Maharaja would soon enough come to his senses and throw his lot in with Pakistan. But the Maharaja was showing little sign of coming to his senses, and every sign of losing his grip. He was under pressure from his wife and her brother, who served as his Household Minister – both of whom were strongly in favour of joining India. Torn, he consulted his astrologer, who held out for independence in picturesque terms, telling him that the stars showed the flag of Gulab Singh flying from Lahore to Ladakh.12 The Maharaja consequently dismissed his moderate Prime Minister, who had apparently recommended accession to Pakistan, and the British officers who had remained in his armed and police forces.13 He restocked his ranks from among his own Dogra people. Noting a change in the wind, Muslim units swiftly began to desert the Kashmir Army.
During September and October 1947, the Maharaja’s Dogra-led troops carried out a campaign of sustained harassment, arson, physical violence, and genocide against Muslim Kashmiris in at least two areas – Poonch, right on the border with Pakistan, and pockets of southern Jammu.14 Just as in the Punjab, precise numbers were impossible to assess. According to some sources, more or less the entire Muslim population of Jammu, amounting to around half a million people, was displaced, with around 200,000 of those disappearing completely, ‘having presumably been butchered, or died from epidemics or exposure’, noted Ian Stephens, the editor of the Calcutta Statesman.15 The Maharaja meant to create a buffer zone of uninhabited land, approximately three miles wide, between Kashmir and Pakistan.16 Muslims were pushed into Pakistan, or killed. Hindus were sent the other way, deeper into Kashmir. India would deny that any holocaust had taken place, perhaps because it had secretly been providing arms to the Dogra side: the figures are open to question, but the fact that Muslim civilians were persecuted by the Maharaja’s troops is not.17 C.B. Duke, the British Deputy High Commissioner in Lahore, went to assess the situation in the third week of October. He saw around twenty burnt-out villages along the Chenab River inside the Kashmir border, and noted that many of them contained the ashes of a mosque – ‘it was the Muslims who were suffering,’ he concluded.18 The Maharaja had ordered ethnic cleansing under the guise of a defensive strategy.
Thousands of refugees, mostly Muslims from Jammu, began to pour into Pakistan’s Sialkot district, bringing with them sickening tales of atrocities. As it happened, Sialkot was on the frontier of Pathan tribal territory. In driving out the Muslims on his borders, the Maharaja had driven them straight into the arms of the most fearsome Islamic fighting force on earth. ‘This is a dangerous game for the Maharaja to play,’ noted Duke, ‘and is likely to lead to large-scale disturbances in Kashmir and incursion by neighbouring Muslim tribesmen.’19 He was right. The Pathans, who had for months been hearing tales of Sikh and Hindu outrages against their Muslim brothers and sisters in the Punjab, were already gearing up for what they did best: making war.20 Thousands of Pathan tribesmen were raised by former railway guard Khurshid Anwar, described by a British diplomat as ‘a complete adventurer’, who had made a fortune during the war, though no one was clear as to how.21 The tribesmen, mostly Afridis and Mahsuds from the North-West Frontier, tied a bright strip of cloth around their rifles, a sign of their oaths not to return home until they had avenged the deaths of Muslims in the Punjab.22 In tribal groups, the warriors swept down from the mountains and massed on the Kashmir border.
British observers were convinced that the government of the North-West Frontier Province was doing its best to hold Anwar’s tribesmen back, though without much success. Kashmir, warned Duke, ‘has always been regarded by the lean and hungry tribesmen of the North West Frontier as a land flowing with milk and honey, and if to the temptation of loot is added the merit of assisting oppressed Muslims the attractions will be well nigh irresistible’.23 Meanwhile, Pakistani officials on the borders stopped the supply of petrol, sugar and other goods to Kashmir. India would allege that the officials were acting with the knowledge and consent of the Pakistani government, a charge Pakistan hotly denied. Either way, according to the British High Commissioner to Pakistan, the responsibility on the ground lay with Rawalpindi’s District Commissioner, one Abdul Haq, who ‘appears to be conducting a private war of his own against Kashmir’ along with his brother, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence.24
By 20 October, a more public war seemed inevitable. The Maharaja’s troops crossed the border into Pakistan, and attacked four large villages with mortars, grenades and automatic fire. A British officer on the scene estimated the casualties at 1750, excluding those who had been taken to hospital.25 The following night, around 2000 of the massed tribesmen left Pakistan from the Hazara district of the North-West Frontier Province, and marched on Kashmir via the Jhelum Valley. Despite extensive research by the Indian government, the United Nations and independent researchers, no conclusive evidence has ever been found to confirm Indian suspicions that Jinnah was directing this invasion.26
The tribesmen headed for Srinagar, sacking towns and villages on the way, and recruiting local Muslim troops which had deserted from the Kashmir Army. They were held at Baramula by the Maharaja’s army on 25 October. The result was a massacre, during which the town was reduced to ashes by Mahsud tribesmen. In their frenzy, the Mahsuds failed to distinguish between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri kaffirs. Among the dead was a Muslim youth, nailed to a cross in the town square.27 Khurshid Anwar suggested that the tribesmen stop looting, and consequently lost control of them. The tribal council spent two days debating whether to have him killed and replaced. This gave the Maharaja, trembling in Srinagar, time to consider his next move.28
India’s top civil servant, V.P. Menon, was dispatched to Srinagar to speak to the Maharaja and his Prime Minister. According to the British High Commissioner, Menon ‘so alarmed them that they were convinced that accession to India offered the only hope of salvation’.29 The two of them packed up and bolted for Jammu in the small hours of 27 October in a fleet of American limousines, leaving no administration in the capital.30 Public order collapsed. In Delhi, pressure to send troops grew, led by the hawkish Vallabhbhai Patel. Mountbatten insisted that troops could not be sent in unless Kashmir formally acceded to India first. It was a curious condition to demand. Had the Maharaja, as head of an independent state, asked India to help defend against an invasion, his action would have been legal. Had India responded to such a call, its action would have been legal, too.31 Many in Pakistan smelled a rat.
Nehru cabled to Attlee in London: ‘I should like to make it clear that the question of aiding Kashmir in this emergency is not designed in any way to influence the state to accede to India.’32 The integrity of Nehru’s sentiments was undermined when, the very next day, the Maharaja wrote to Mountbatten agreeing to do just that.33 There is some muddiness in the evidence as to whether Indian troops were sent in before the instrument of accession was signed or delivered, and even as to whether it was signed or delivered at all.34 The original seems to have disappeared from the Indian archives. But the question of when exactly the Maharaja signed the instrument is a red herring. He had already deserted his capital by the time he even requested the instrument, and had lost control of his state. Under such circumstances, it is doubtful that he was still the Maharaja in any meaningful sense, and whether he had the authority to accede to either dominion.35 But Nehru’s mind was filled with visions of losing his ancestral state to a plague of murderous tribesmen. Their faith did not matter to him; their brutality did, and the thought of yet more destruction, rape and slaughter impelled him to act rashly. The British High Commissioner in Pakistan telegraphed urgently to London that India should not accept Kashmir’s accession without a plebiscite, but it was too late.36 Nehru and Mountbatten accepted the accession, and prepared to fly Indian troops to Kashmir.
The fact of the Maharaja’s personal involvement in genocide was not known in Delhi at this point, but this cannot entirely excuse Nehru’s action.37 Nehru had spent much of his adult life excoriating the British for defending ‘princely rights’. The Maharaja’s antecedents had purchased their territory from a regime that Nehru had long held illegitimate. He had ruled autocratically over a population, much of which was hostile to his authority. Nehru would have pointed out that his friend Sheikh Abdullah had also requested that Indian troops be sent. This is true, but held little weight with the Pakistani government, which believed Abdullah to be a Congress stooge. Moreover, Abdullah’s opinion had no impact on India’s legal case for Kashmir, which rested solely on the flimsy fact of the Maharaja’s acquiescence.
Sam Manekshaw, India’s Director of Military Operations, remembered the meeting that took place in Delhi at this time. Nehru, as usual, was attempting to contextualize the Kashmir situation, talking about it in relation to Russia, the United States, the United Nations and so on. Eventually, Patel exploded: ‘Jawaharlal, do you want Kashmir, or do you want to give it away?’
‘Of course I want Kashmir,’ replied Nehru.
Before he could add anything else, Patel turned to Manekshaw, and said: ‘You have your orders.’ It was Patel who went off to All-India Radio and ordered a command requisitioning private aircraft, and Patel who organized the fly-in of Indian troops to Kashmir the next day. Only later did Mountbatten realize that the Home Minister must have had the whole operation planned in advance.38
That evening, Ian Stephens dined with the Mountbattens, and ‘was startled by their one-sided verdicts on affairs’, he wrote. ‘They seemed to have become wholly pro-Hindu.’39 This statement was not fair. Neither Mountbatten nor Nehru saw the situation in terms of Hindu versus Muslim, but both were profoundly opposed to religious extremism in any form, and both suspected the worst of Jinnah. Mountbatten told Stephens that Jinnah was waiting in Abbottabad, ready to drive triumphantly into Srinagar, ‘where he had hoped to have his breakfast – quite in the fashion of the Kaiser at the beginning of World War No. 1’, according to the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan.40 It has since been shown that Jinnah spent all of late October in Karachi and Lahore.41
On 27 October, India flew numbers of its 1st Sikh battalion into Srinagar, and these quickly secured the Vale of Kashmir. ‘If we had vacillated and delayed even by a day, Srinagar might have been a smoking ruin’, Nehru wrote to his sister Nan, though a British pilot reporting on the situation in Srinagar that day described it as ‘complete calm’ when the Indian forces arrived.42 Jinnah took the greatest exception to his arch-rival Nehru’s actions. Incensed, he ordered Pakistan’s troops in to defend Kashmir against India, but was persuaded to cancel his order when Auchinleck threatened to withdraw all British officers from the Pakistan Army.43
The same day, Edwina Mountbatten arrived in Lahore for a tour of refugee camps in West Punjab. Crossing the Indus, she paused for five minutes to watch the river fishermen as the sun set. It was, according to her fellow relief worker Richard Symonds, ‘the only time she knocked off on our three day tour’.44 The rest of the time she spent visiting camps, talking to refugees, and planning further extractions of supplies from the government.
The following evening, her party was in Rawalpindi when she was called upon by General Gracey, acting Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army. Gracey warned Edwina that war between Pakistan and India might break out at any point. He confessed that he would probably be required to arrest her, but chivalrously offered to take her to dinner first. She accepted. The following day, she continued to Sialkot, to see camps where Hindu Kashmiri refugees waited with increasing anxiety to be evacuated to India. They recounted stories of Muslim atrocities, and a local Sikh official told her that he had seen Pakistani troops in civilian dress crossing into Kashmir.45 That afternoon, Edwina flew back to Delhi, taking with her a frightening and one-sided view of the situation to impart to Dickie and Jawahar.
Edwina’s story, based on hearsay, of Pakistani troops being sent into Kashmir would have confirmed all Jawahar’s worst suspicions. Now Dickie began to worry about the influence his wife and Jawahar had over each other. The Mountbattens were overheard having a row about it: ‘He’s very emotional, very emotional about Kashmir,’ Dickie had warned her.46 The Kashmir situation was profoundly worsened by the deep and personal loathing between Nehru and Jinnah. Both men suspected the worst possible motives in each other. Nehru became convinced that Jinnah had organized and directed the Pathan tribesmen to invade Kashmir. According to British officials on the scene, Jinnah was innocent – though they conceded that the Pakistani government had passively supported the invasion by keeping local supply routes open.47 But the fact was that Jinnah could not have stopped the tribesmen, even had he wanted to. To send Pakistan’s army to fight the Pathans would have provoked a civil war, and that might have excited the interest of the Afghans and potentially even the Russians. Nor did he have the resources. Most of the weapons and stocks owed to the Pakistan Army were still in India.48 The correct course of action would have been for Jinnah to warn Nehru of the tribesmen’s approach and explain frankly why they could not be stopped; because he did not do this, Nehru assumed there was a conspiracy.
Similarly, Nehru failed to inform Jinnah that the Maharaja had asked for help and that he was sending troops. As a result, Jinnah became convinced that Nehru had meant all along for Kashmir to be dragged into India by force.49 Yet as late as 28 October, Nehru wrote in a private letter to Nan: ‘For my part, I do not mind if Kashmir becomes more or less independent, but it would have been a cruel blow if it had become just an exploited part of Pakistan.’50
Mountbatten attempted to resolve this situation by arranging a meeting between himself, Nehru, Patel, Liaquat and Jinnah in Delhi. Edwina told a reporter over whiskies and ginger that, ‘You can solve any problem if you work as pals,’ and her husband agreed.51 But friendly sentiment was in short supply. Jinnah refused to come to Delhi; Patel refused to leave. Instead, it was agreed that Mountbatten and Nehru would go to Lahore – a concession which Mountbatten only managed to get the Indian cabinet to allow by not telling his ministers that Jinnah had forced it on to him.52 The talks were fixed for 1 November.
It was not to be. On the afternoon of 31 October, the Pakistani government issued a lengthy and provocative press release, accusing the Maharaja and Sheikh Abdullah of ‘conspiring’ with the Indians, while refusing its own overtures of ‘friendly co-operation’. Moreover, it alleged, the Indian government had deliberately used the tribesmen’s incursion to justify ‘the pre-planned scheme for the accession of Kashmir by India troops with the object of holding down the people of Kashmir who have been driven to rebellion by this well-calculated and carefully planned oppression.’53 Lord Ismay arrived at the British High Commission in Delhi at midnight to inform the High Commissioner, Sir Terence Shone, that Nehru would not be going to Lahore after all. Shone reported to the Commonwealth Relations Office that Mountbatten ‘has no doubt that this decision is right since [the] Indian Cabinet feel so strongly on this matter that if Nehru were to insist on going in the face of this gross defamation he would undoubtedly be thrown out.’54
At a more reasonable hour of that morning, Mountbatten telephoned Jinnah and told him that Nehru was unwell.55 Mountbatten turned up in Lahore alone, with no power to negotiate a settlement. Consequently, the talks were of little use, and the main result of them seems to have been that the rankling dislike of the Governors-General for each other increased. Both left the meeting with a new distrust of the other’s motives: Mountbatten believing that Jinnah was directing the raiders, and Jinnah believing that Mountbatten was directing the Indian Army.56
Just three days later, the Pakistan Times reported that Mountbatten – whom it described in an epithet both politically and factually incorrect as ‘conqueror of the Japs’ – was commanding operations for India in Kashmir. Any Pakistani officers familiar with Mountbatten’s record as an operational commander might well have started planning their victory party, but the implication was that Mountbatten represented Britain, and therefore that Britain was siding with India. ‘The military colossus of the Government of India and the best British Generals and Commanders are, therefore, cooperating to crush a tiny half-organised ill-equipped and General-less force of [sic] the people of Kashmir have mustered’, it said.57 Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith and Duke, the two most senior British diplomats in Pakistan, both worried that Mountbatten’s position and attitude were stirring up ‘anti-British feeling’.58
In all the calamities of Pakistan’s young life, the hand of Dickie could be detected: the mysterious delay in the publication of the Radcliffe award; the failure to arrest known Sikh troublemakers just before partition; and now the accession of Kashmir to India. The Pakistani Minister of Finance offered Grafftey-Smith his acid congratulations on Britain’s ‘latest victory over Pakistan’. More and more Pakistanis were beginning to believe that the British government ‘are led by the nose by Lord Mountbatten, who is himself led by the nose by Mr. Nehru, who in his turn, is frightened of Mr. Patel, Pakistan’s greatest individual enemy.’ He may as well have added, as plenty of commentators later would, an extra link in the chain: Lady Mountbatten, occupying an undefined position between her husband and the Prime Minister. ‘We have so long been the “Aunt Sally” of politics in India that our reappearance in that role is hardly surprising’, wrote Grafftey-Smith resignedly. ‘But it is regrettable.’59
In Kashmir, fighting had spread to Uri at the mouth of the valley, and into the south-west.60 On 5 November, 120 trucks mysteriously arrived in the city of Jammu. Local Muslims were rounded up and told that they would be taken to the Pakistan border, then released across it. Five thousand civilian men, women and children complied and got into the trucks. Instead of driving to the border, the trucks turned the other way, and took the Muslims further into the heart of Jammu. The convoy halted, the guards got out, and then, with machine guns and blades, massacred their charges. A few hundred escaped by hiding in fields or canals. The rest were killed.61
The physical temperature was steadily dropping. By December, the valley and surrounding hills would be icebound. Supplies to the Indian Army were already falling short. The Indian Army’s Sikh troops were becoming restive, and it was rumoured that they had demanded a Sikh state, to include Amritsar, Simla and the East Punjab. The Maharaja of Patiala was said to be encouraging the scheme.62 Against this Sikh objective was the similarly aggressive ambition of the Pathan tribesmen. Sydney Smith, a reporter for the Daily Express who had managed to get himself kidnapped by Pathans near Baramula, confirmed on his release that tribal leaders chanted prayers every night for the success of their jihad against the Sikhs. ‘Every tribal leader agrees on the war aims’, wrote Smith. ‘They are: To wipe out Sir Hari Singh’s minority rule in Kashmir; to march on and exterminate the chief Sikh State, Patiala; to capture Amritsar and try – one day – to reach New Delhi.’63
Kashmir was becoming another chapter in the centuries-long story of conflict between Sikhs and Pathans for control of the North-West Frontier. As a result, Nehru was being pushed into an ever more militant position by his cabinet’s fears that a soft response to Muslim incursions in Kashmir would trigger more communal riots across India. Mountbatten, though he did advise military operations, became increasingly desperate to rein Nehru in. At a defence committee meeting on 4 November, Mountbatten advised strongly against sending India’s Sikh troops into Muslim areas of Mirpur and Poonch, even for ‘liberation purposes’. He pointed out that, in such areas, it would be impossible to distinguish between hostile persons and friends, and that it was likely that the army would make mistakes and aggravate the situation. Instead, the Indian government should find a way of stopping the fighting through communication with the Pakistani government.64
But Mountbatten would not be around to supervise the Indian Army at this crucial point, for he had already accepted an invitation to fly back to Britain with Edwina for his nephew’s royal wedding. He had originally hoped to have Nehru come with them, though that was untenable now; Patel, on the other hand, had been conspicuously encouraging of the Governor General’s little break away from India.65 Edwina was appalled that they might leave India in a state of acute crisis. She hated the thought of being dragged away from her relief work and, as she confided to Alan Campbell-Johnson, was ‘concerned about the construction that might be put on their departure to London’. She suggested cancelling the trip, but Campbell-Johnson talked her out of it on the grounds that to do so would be to acknowledge that there was a problem.66
For some weeks, Edwina had been feeling that Dickie did not live up to the obsessive pace she set. She had been in Amritsar for a conference with the refugee commissioner and the military when news came through that her elder daughter, Patricia, had given birth to a baby boy. ‘I gathered that I was a Grandmama and that you were both flourishing and that Daddy was at the Chief’s House playing roulette!’ she wrote to her. ‘Very 1947!! Women work and men play!’67 The joke was not light-hearted. Edwina was now working an average of eighteen hours a day. Dickie still seemed to be able to fit in riding, exercise, genealogy and regular massages. Tension between the two of them ran high, and the fights grew more serious. On 10 November, they got back on their plane for the two-day journey to London, Edwina still full of misgivings.
With the Mountbattens out of the way, Nehru’s first action was to take his long-threatened trip to Kashmir. On 12 November, he addressed a meeting at Srinagar: ‘I pledge before you on behalf of myself and the people of India that we – India and Kashmir – shall ever remain together.’68 He wrote at length to Attlee of hospitals, convents and libraries ransacked. ‘I saw large numbers of Muslim women with their ears torn, because their earrings had been pulled out,’ he stated, implying that the raiders were responsible. ‘The population of Kashmir Valley, which is chiefly Muslim, complain bitterly of this outrageous behaviour and begged us to continue to protect them.’69
The Mountbattens arrived back in London that same day, and embarked upon a flurry of social and political events. In private Edwina was unable to disguise how furious she was with her husband, and they had a series of rows. She insisted on seeing her former lover, Malcolm Sargent, on one of the two nights they would have had together at Broadlands.70 Mountbatten went to see Churchill, and had a fight with him, too. Churchill patted him on the back, gave him a glass of port and a cigar, and then told him categorically that his sending British soldiers ‘to crush and oppress the Muslims in Kashmir’ was an act of gross betrayal. He described Nehru and Patel as ‘enemies of Britain’, and the Muslims as Britain’s allies; and accused Mountbatten of planning and organizing ‘the first victory of Hindustan’ (he refused to call it India) ‘against Pakistan’. Churchill told Mountbatten that he should leave India, ‘and not involve the King and my country in further backing traitors’.71
The King and Queen hosted pre-wedding parties, which the Mountbattens attended. ‘The most lovely sight I have ever seen’, wrote Noël Coward, enchanted by the sight of Buckingham Palace full of glittering celebrities in full evening dress and decorations. ‘Everyone looking shiny and happy; something indestructible.’72 The following day saw an afternoon party at St James’s Palace so that guests could view the thousands of wedding presents. Members of the public had already been permitted to admire them, at a shilling a peek; everything from a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from the Chiang Kai-sheks, to a gold tiara from Haile Selassie, to dozens of pairs of nylon stockings sent in by ordinary people. Mountbatten had brought the present that excited the most comment – a fringed piece of khadi spun by Gandhi on his own spinning wheel. ‘Such an indelicate gift,’ thundered Queen Mary, apparently under the impression that the Mahatma had sent Princess Elizabeth his loincloth.73
That evening, Dickie attended his nephew’s stag night at the Dorchester Hotel. The twelve men present drank sherry, champagne, port and beer, and afterwards cheerfully assaulted some photographers, ripping their cameras off them and throwing flashbulbs so that they exploded with loud bangs against the wall.74 The next morning, 20 November, 2000 people – and one Pekingese dog, hidden in Lady Munnings’s muff – packed into Westminster Abbey.75 The crowned heads of Europe sat in the sacrarium, with Dickie and Edwina in pride of place. They had arrived looking handsome, the full Mountbatten wattage disguising the frosty state of their private relationship. Churchill walked in, ‘his beaming smile almost as broad as his waistline’, according to Leo Amery; ‘rather looking as if the whole thing were his own show and he the genial parent or godparent of the Bride … The contrast between him and Attlee, trying to look as if he wasn’t there, very striking.’76
The bride, in ivory silk and 10,000 pearls, walked down the aisle to join her tall, blond and apparently not too hungover groom at the altar. A full traditional ceremony followed, during which the future Queen promised to obey her husband. He had been created Duke of Edinburgh the day before, so that his wife need not suffer the name Mrs Philip Mountbatten.77 It had been reported that the Edinburghs were thinking of joining Uncle Dickie in India for their honeymoon, though in view of the situation there by November 1947 it is probably fortunate that this came to nothing.78 Instead, they had a week at Broadlands, beleaguered by a phalanx of royal watchers, who followed them into the local town, lurked in the shrubbery, and even queued outside the church after services to have a go at sitting in the seats warmed by the royal couple.79
The Mountbattens flew back to India on 24 November. Much had happened during their vacation. Liaquat Ali Khan stated that Pakistan wanted to refer the Kashmir issue to the United Nations. Jawaharlal Nehru charged high Pakistani officials with inciting the tribesmen in Kashmir. A force of Afghans from Khost crossed the border into Kashmir, reportedly armed with Russian equipment.80 The President of the Congress Party, J.B. Kripalani, resigned in fear of an imminent war between India and Pakistan.
Mountbatten was horrified. Without his steadying hand, the Indian Army had moved into militant action; it did not stretch the imagination to work out that this might have been precisely the reason Patel was so keen for him to go away. Just before he had left for London, he had reluctantly authorized Indian columns to move to Mirpur and Poonch, for the sole purpose of relieving the garrisons already there. ‘During my absence in London this object changed’, he wrote to Nehru. ‘It then evidently became the purpose of the Government of India to attempt to impose their military will on the Poonch and Mirpur areas.’ He protested that the inhabitants were mostly Muslim, and reminded Nehru that it would be ‘morally unjustifiable’ to use force to coerce them into India.81
Immediately after stepping off the plane, Edwina, whose fears about leaving India had been proven right, went off to see Gandhi, and then Amrit Kaur. But there was no doubt about who she wanted to see most: it was Jawahar. More or less every day she saw or spoke to him now. The Government House diaries reveal the two of them meeting for dinner on 2 December, at his home on 3 December, at hers on 4 December, and so on throughout the winter. Soon, she was happy enough to be kind to Dickie again. ‘Thanks for being so sweet and understanding during these days in England’, she wrote, though she had the note sent round to his room by a servant rather than taking it to him herself.82 On her forty-sixth birthday, she took the afternoon off for a visit to the Taj Mahal, the world’s greatest monument to love in sparkling white marble and lapidary, built by the heartbroken Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, Mumtaz.83
At the end of November, Dickie flew his mistress, Yola Letellier, out to Delhi. Edwina invited Malcolm Sargent, and ignored him. ‘I fear I’ve hardly set eyes on them’, wrote Edwina of their guests.84 Her friendships with Jawahar and Gandhi cast her London friends in the shade. During her friends’ visits, she kept up the regular trips to Jawahar’s house in York Road. For both Edwina and Jawahar, it was the ideal relationship. Only in each other’s company could the two of them relax and lose themselves in endless conversations.85 Their talks were almost always about ideas rather than gossip, but were never dry or sterile. Ideas were what made them passionate. In their romantic lives, Jawahar and Edwina alike had always sought intimacy without suffocation. With each other, they found it.
According to Nehru’s secretary, M.O. Mathai, Nehru paid a brief visit to Lucknow in the winter of that year. Sarojini Naidu was then the Governor of the United Provinces, and a rumour spread that Nehru was in Lucknow to propose to his old girlfriend, Sarojini’s daughter Padmaja Naidu. Padmaja was ecstatic, and prepared herself to accept. When Jawahar turned up, he was with Edwina. Padmaja locked herself in a room and refused to meet the Governor General’s wife.86 Later, when Padmaja came to stay with him, Jawahar would find one of his framed photographs of Edwina smashed on the floor.87
On Kashmir, Nehru’s attitude was hardening, and he appeared to be losing interest in holding a plebiscite.88 On 6 December, he went again to the state and met the Maharaja’s son – ‘a very bright boy’, he told Indira.89 Mountbatten had desperately attempted to stop him from going.90 Edwina’s friends Richard Symonds and Horace Alexander, both relief workers, had paid a lengthy visit to Kashmir and afterwards sent Nehru a report. Symonds had described the conditions in Poonch, where the inhabitants had revolted against the Maharaja of Kashmir back in September or October, apparently before the Pathan raiders invaded. Nehru was furious, for the existence of a prior revolt would strengthen Pakistan’s argument that the raiders had responded to a cry for help from oppressed Kashmiri Muslims. ‘I don’t care a damn what happens to Poonch,’ he shouted. ‘They can go to Pakistan or Hell for all I care.’ Symonds and Alexander passed on suggestions made to them by Liaquat – that all non-Kashmiri troops should be removed from Kashmir, and replaced by a temporary United Nations government, pending a plebiscite. This made matters worse. ‘These people do not deserve to be listened to. They have behaved disgustingly and I will not have’ – as he banged on the table three times with his fist – ‘a single Pakistani soldier in Kashmir.’91
Mountbatten, too, was beginning to think about calling in the international arbitrator. When Liaquat and Nehru met on 8 December, they argued for five hours straight before a pained Mountbatten interrupted them and begged them to telegraph the United Nations Security Council and get a team sent over immediately.92 Nehru was reluctant to accept United Nations involvement. Just a week before, the UN had voted to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Trouble had flared immediately in Damascus, Jenin, Tel Aviv, Acre and Nablus. Nehru did not see that the UN’s roles of peacekeeping or supervising a plebiscite were relevant until there was a peace to keep; in the meantime, a reference to the UN would involve admitting that the situation was one of war between India and Pakistan.93 His attitude came in for much criticism. In a moment of irritation, the British High Commissioner in Karachi would write that ‘We seem to be faced with a choice between what may be loosely described as natural justice and the appeasement of one man who, since he is himself a Kashmiri pundit, is blinded to realities by emotions passionately involved.’ For this, he earned a swift reprimand from Attlee.94
On 12 December, India and Pakistan finally announced an agreement on the partition of their assets. Pakistan was to get 750 million rupees of British India’s sterling assets and cash balances (slightly less than one-fifth of the total), one-third of its military stocks, and 17.5 per cent of its liabilities. It was good news for the ailing dominion and its ailing leader. Just two weeks before, it had been reported that Jinnah had been bedridden secretly for a month. No details of his illness were disclosed.95 ‘I understand that he is now living on the edge of a nervous breakdown,’ reported the British High Commissioner to Pakistan.96 Nehru’s friend Sri Prakasa, the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, sent him a long report on the situation in Karachi. While Jinnah was ‘not quite a broken man as he was reported to be, he is not himself now and he has become extraordinarily sensitive’, Prakasa noted. The sensitivity was not surprising, bearing in mind that Prakasa had heard of three separate attempts to assassinate Jinnah, all of which had been kept from the press. Some said the plotters were Sikhs. Others said they were Punjabi Muslims, angry at what they perceived as Jinnah’s abandonment of them in the Indian Punjab. Either way, the last attempt had been ‘particularly nasty’. The would-be assassins had broken into Jinnah’s compound, killing one guard and seriously injuring another. Prakasa described Jinnah as increasingly isolated – not just by his illness, but also by his attitude. He took no advice, except from one person. ‘I am almost inclined to think that his sister, Miss Fatima, is his evil genius.’97
The British High Commissioner, Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith, went to see Jinnah shortly after this, and found that, though ‘wispily frail in body’, the ‘fire of his fanatical ardour is certainly in no way diminished’. Jinnah harangued him with regard to his bugbear, ‘which has now acquired the strength of an obsession’ – that the person most responsible for the disaster of partition was Dickie Mountbatten.98
Mountbatten, meanwhile, permitted himself a brief escape from the vicissitudes of Delhi life. On 12 December, he flew with Edwina and Yola to Jaipur, one of India’s most beautiful cities, a pink sandstone metropolis set in the heart of princely Rajputana. They stayed with the Maharaja, whose silver jubilee they were to celebrate. He had succeeded to the throne at the age of eleven, since which time he had ruled over three million people. His glamorous Maharani had been Tatler magazine’s cover girl just five months before, was said to be very Western-minded, and played tennis with the Queen when she was in London.99 Dickie and Edwina stayed at the Rambagh Palace, a huge and spectacular estate. They watched a lot of polo, and attended a lot of banquets; Edwina was taken to visit schools, and Dickie to shoot ducks. At his jubilee durbar the Maharaja walked barefoot across the palace grounds, wearing garlands of flowers and a white plume held in place by a sumptuously jewelled turban ornament. The Mountbattens followed: Dickie in full dress uniform, Edwina in lamé with a coronet of laurel leaves and five strands of pearls.100 Afterwards, the Maharaja gave a very nice speech about Dickie, crediting him with waging all sorts of battles in Burma.101
From Jaipur, the Mountbattens flew on to Bombay; he to visit soldiers, she to visit refugee camps and women’s organizations. They returned to Delhi on 18 December to find that, once again, problems had blown up in their absence. Patel had ordered a freeze on 550 million rupees (£40 million) of Pakistan’s sterling assets, on the grounds that it would be used to arm invaders of ‘Indian territory’ in Kashmir. Jinnah and Liaquat were furious. The Pakistani treasury had only 20 million rupees left in it, and they were facing a serious financial crisis.102 Mountbatten presided over another hopeless meeting in New Delhi on 21 and 22 December, at which Liaquat and Nehru reached a complete deadlock. After sustained lobbying, Mountbatten persuaded Nehru to refer the Kashmir problem to the United Nations – a concession which he considered a great achievement, for ‘Nehru has been as temperamental and difficult over the Kashmir issue as he [had] ever known him’.103 To Mountbatten’s horror, Nehru had begun to talk of sending Indian troops into Pakistan to take out the ‘nerve centres’ from which raiders were being sent. The friendship between Dickie and Jawahar, recently so cordial, was rapidly souring. Jawahar’s relationship with Edwina remained strong, but even she could not always lift his despair. ‘I am afraid I have had no peace whatever for an age’, he wrote, ‘and I think rather longingly sometimes of the quiet days I had in prison.’104
On 25 December, Jinnah celebrated Christmas with a Pakistani Christian community.105 In Delhi, Mountbatten spent it writing Nehru an extremely long and agonized letter about Kashmir. ‘I have never and will never from my experience of war subscribe to the view that the operations which are now starting to take place are anything but of the most dangerous and risky character,’ he declared. Correctly, he pointed out that the modern weapons and great resources of India counted for nothing in the face of guerrilla warfare. ‘The raiders with the local population on their side can take on our forces at their will. This process is bound to wear down our army and our resources.’ He deplored the possibility of sending Indian troops into Pakistan in the frankest terms: ‘Each time I have heard you say it I have been more and more appalled.’ He predicted that it would lead to war between India and Pakistan, and observed that the idea that such a war ‘could be confined to the sub-Continent, or finished off quickly in favour of India without further complication, is to my mind a fatal illusion.’ He reiterated the need to call in the United Nations, but the most striking message to emerge from the letter was the simplest. Several times, he repeated and underlined the phrase ‘stop the fighting’.106
Nehru replied the next day. ‘We have not started the fighting,’ he protested. ‘I am convinced that the whole of this business has been very carefully planned on an extensive scale.’ After Kashmir, he wrote, the next objective would be Patiala; then the East Punjab; then Delhi itself. ‘On to Delhi is the cry all over West Punjab.’107
The Mountbattens had been due to set off on another trip to Gwalior. By the time Dickie received Nehru’s letter, and panicked, he considered the hour too late to cancel, though he believed that there was an immediate danger of war between India and Pakistan. He had been furious when Attlee threatened to have him superseded as Viceroy. Now it was he who sent a message to Attlee begging him to come out personally and take the crisis out of his hands.108 Attlee refused to do so.109 Mountbatten also asked Nehru to contact Attlee with a full report on Kashmir – though Nehru, again struck down with a cold at an inopportune moment, was confined to his bed and could not. Attlee sent him a sternly worded message telling him not to move forces into Pakistan, even if he thought such an action would constitute self-defence. ‘I am gravely disturbed by your assumption that India would be within her rights in international law’, he wrote. Moreover, Indian hopes for a quick and sharp campaign were ‘very optimistic … all military history goes to shew how difficult it is to deal with the tribes of the N.W. Frontier’.110
While these debates were going on, India began to drop half-ton bombs on Pathan tribes along the 500-mile front of Kashmir’s southwest. Within India, the government’s standing was precarious. There was a strike by half a million textile and industrial workers on 29 December, and a riot led by communist students against Congress in Bombay two days later. Finally, on the very last day of 1947, Nehru gave in to Mountbatten’s persuasion and instructed the Indian ambassador in Washington to submit an appeal to the UN Security Council.111 In under five months, the two nations of India and Pakistan had embroiled themselves in an irresolvable war.