If not for Mountbatten,
India would have fallen apart Ramachandra Guha, in this extract from his new book on the last Viceroy, says that his most important bequest has been undervalued —to save India from disastrous balkanisation Few men have been as concerned with how history would portray them as Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India. When he finally left his post, a veteran journalist wrote that during his time in the subcontinent Mountbatten appeared to act as ‘his own Public Relations Officer’. In fact, he had a fully paid-up PRO, Alan CampbellJohnson, who chose to keep his job, albeit in a honorary capacity, even after his (and his boss’s) return to England. In 1951 CampbellJohnson published a book with the meaningful title Mission with Mountbatten. The tenor and contents of the book suggest that even if no man is a hero to his valet, this Viceroy was certainly a hero to his PRO.
Mission with Mountbatten was the first of a series of propagandist tracts written on behalf of the last Englishman to rule India. These books project an impression of Mountbatten as a wise umpire, successfully mediating between squabbling schoolboys: whether India and Pakistan, the Congress and the Muslim League, or Mahatma Gandhi and M.A. Jinnah. His claims are taken at face value: sometimes absurdly so, as in the suggestion in the official biography that the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, would not have included the nationalist stalwart Vallabhbhai Patel in his Cabinet had it not been for Mountbatten’s recommendation.
Curiously, Mountbatten’s real contribution to India and Indians has been rather underplayed by his hagiographers. This was his part in solving a geopolitical problem the like of which no newly independent state had ever faced. For when the British departed the subcontinent, they left behind more than 500 distinct pieces of territory. Two of these were the newly created nations of India and Pakistan; the others, the assorted chiefdoms and states that made up what was known as ‘Princely India’.
There were so many princely states that there was even disagreement as to how many. One historian puts their number at 521, another at 565. There were more than 500, at any rate, and they varied very widely in terms of size and status. At one end of the scale were the massive states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, each the size of a large European country; at the other end, tiny feudal fiefdoms of a dozen or fewer villages.
By the mid-1940s these chiefdoms found themselves facing a common problem: their future in a free India. In the first part of 1946 British India had a definitive series of elections; but these left untouched the princely states. The Cabinet Mission of 1946 focused on the Hindu-Muslim or United India-versus-Pakistan question; it barely spoke of the states at all. On 3 June 1947, both the date of the final British withdrawal and the creation of two Dominions was announced but this statement also did not make clear the position of the states. Some rulers now began, in the words of the political scientist W.H. Morris-Jones, ‘to luxuriate in wild dreams of independent power in an India of many partitions’.
The work of bringing the Princes into line was the responsibility of the Indian home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, and the energetic secretary to the Ministry of States, V.P. Menon. Between them they worked on a draft Instrument of Accession, whereby the Princes would agree to transfer, to the new Indian government, control of defence, foreign affairs and communications. On 5 July 1947, Patel issued a statement appealing to the princes to accede to the Indian Union on these three subjects. As he put it, the ‘alternative to co-operation in the general interest’ was ‘anarchy and chaos’.
Four days later Patel and Nehru met the Viceroy and asked him ‘what he was going to do to help India in connection with her most pressing problem — relations with the [Princely] States’. Mountbatten agreed to make this matter ‘his primary consideration’. Later that same day Gandhi came to meet Mountbatten. As the Viceroy recorded, the Mahatma ‘asked me to do everything in my power to ensure that the British did not leave a legacy of Balkanisation and disruption on the 15th August by encouraging the States to declare their independence... ’. Mountbatten was being urged by the Indian leaders to go out and bat for them against the states. This he did most effectively, notably in a speech to the Chamber of Princes delivered on 25 July, for which the Viceroy had decked out in all his finery, rows of military medals pinned upon his chest. He was, recalled an adoring assistant, ‘in full uniform, with an array of orders and decorations calculated to astonish even these practitioners in Princely pomp’.
The Indian Independence Act, said Mountbatten to the princes, had released ‘the States from all their obligations to the Crown’. He advised them therefore to forge relations with the new nation closest to them. As he brutally put it, ‘you cannot run away from the Dominion Government which is your neighbour any more than you can run away from the subjects for whose welfare you are responsible’.
Mountbatten told the princes that in the circumstances it was best that they make peace with the Congress, and sign the Instrument of Accession. This would cede Defence — but in any case the states would, by themselves, ‘be cut off from any source of supplies of up-to-date arms or weapons’. It would cede External Affairs, but the princes could ‘hardly want to go to the expense of having ambassadors or ministers or consuls in all these foreign countries’. And it would also cede away Communications, but this was ‘really a means of maintaining the lifeblood of the whole subcontinent’.
Mountbatten’s talk to the Chamber of Princes was a tour de force. It finally persuaded the princes that the British would no longer protect or patronise them, and that independence was a mirage. And this word was carried not by a rabble-rousing Indian nationalist but by the representative of the King-Emperor, who was a highly decorated military man, and of royal blood besides.
By 15 August virtually all the states had signed the Instrument of Accession. Meanwhile the British had departed, never to return. Now the Indians went back on the undertaking that if the princes signed up on the three specified subjects, ‘in other matters we would scrupulously respect their autonomous existence’. In state after state, nationalist organisations demanded ‘full democratic government’. In some states, protesters took possession of government offices, courts and prisons.
The Indian government cleverly used the threat of popular protest to make the princes fall in line. They had already acceded; now they were being forced to integrate, that is, to dissolve their states as independent entities and merge with the new nation. By 1950 the 500 states had disappeared from the map. All the Maharajas were left with were their titles, their palaces, their jewels and an annual allowance provided them by the government of India.
Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy is published by Macmillan at £25.
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