Asia – with an avowed anti-imperialist at the head of government. Wavell
had done to Nehru in government what Gandhi had been accustomed to
doing to him in the Congress: imprison him in a system that made him
powerless to do any more than formally voice his protest.
Nehru could, however, survey the carnage of sectarian violence that
was to be the backdrop of all events from now on, with a certain lack
of comprehension. ‘What the Muslim League people told us was wrong
and exaggerated here and there,’ Nehru wrote to Patel from Bihar in
November 1946, ‘but the real picture that I now find is quite as bad and
sometimes even worse than anything that they had suggested... there has
been a definite attempt on the part of Hindu mobs to exterminate the
Muslims.’ Most participants in the violence were ‘ordinary peasant folk’,
who seemed full of remorse for what they had done, and had shouted
‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’ [Victory to Mahatma Gandhi] when Nehru
addressed them at public meetings. Inexplicably, everyone had turned
into animals; ‘a madness has seized the people’. Obviously there were
instigators – ‘some educated people of the Hindu Sabha variety’, or ‘some
Marwaris in Monghyr [district]’, or landlords who were partly attempting
‘to divert the attention of their tenantry from agrarian problems’. But
what disturbed Nehru most was that the people had to a very large extent
responded to the instigators.^32
The timetable for British departure was now greatly sped up. All
three negotiators had by now painted themselves into a corner: they were
in effect negotiating details while claiming to represent people who were
dying all around them with nothing they could do to stop this, and all
the bargaining about details of various schemes seemed more and more
like the vanities of old political rivals who were carried away by the logic
and momentum of their negotiations. On February 20, 1947, Attlee
announced that power would be transferred by June 1948 at the latest; in
March 1947, the new viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, announced upon
his arrival that he was to be the last viceroy of British India. The end came
even sooner than announced, at midnight on August 15, 1947.
There has been some speculation that there was a special magic
between the Mountbattens and Jawaharlal that somehow led to Jinnah
being cut out of the dealings. In some versions, this was allegedly due to
an affair between Lady Mountbatten and Nehru; in other (oral) versions,
this was due to an affair between LordMountbatten and Nehru. Although
evidence of relations of a sexual nature are hard to come by, limited by the134 THE END OF THE RAJ