with Edwina Mountbatten, were cemented in this period of close contact.
Lord Mountbatten did his best, with the forces at his disposal, to try and
help Nehru stop the bloodshed, and Lady Mountbatten actively involved
herself in relief measures for refugees.)
An aggressive Hindu revivalist frenzy had appeared in the open. ‘I find
myself in total disagreement with this revivalist feeling,’ Nehru had
written to Rajendra Prasad in response to Prasad’s request that Nehru
ban cow slaughter on August 15, ‘and in view of this difference of opinion
I am a poor representative of many of our people today.’^5 This was not,
however, an offer to resign; as he explained in public, to run away from
the responsibilities of leadership at a time of crisis would have been an act
of cowardice. And if Nehru had one strongly held belief, it was that
sectarian politics based on religion was wrong; he would have to try and
control the situation, staking his reputation and his popularity against
much popular anger and against many of his colleagues’ ideological
propensities. He repeatedly made appeals, during the Delhi slaughters
and after, that Muslims must not be victimised. He also objected strongly
to the proposals of large-scale transfer of populations being considered on
either side of the border, and was disturbed that many Muslims who had
originally wished to stay in India were now changing their minds. ‘[W]e
cannot encourage this business of Muslims leaving India,’ he wrote to
Patel. In the first place, Pakistan could not possibly ‘accommodate all
the Muslims in India’; the consequent ‘political and economic difficulties’
for both India and Pakistan would be immense. But there were reasons
larger than the merely practical to prevent such a situation from arising.
‘I feel convinced,’ Nehru wrote, ‘that culturally India will be the poorer
by any such divorce and all wrong tendencies will hold the field then.’^6
While the right wing of the Congress and the Pakistan govern-
ment scored political points from killings on either side of the border,
Nehru tried to create an area open for non-sectarian discussion. India had
‘degraded herself’ by violence, he said repeatedly. The more murderous
aspects of the post-partition disturbances were of more pressing concern,
but little acts of political discrimination and public humiliation directed
against Muslims, carried out with the consent of members of his gov-
ernment, had also to be curbed. Nehru was outraged that Muslim men
and women were being singled out from other passengers and separately
searched at airports in India, and demanded to know on whose orders –
he implied, in a letter to Patel on October 18, 1947, that the orders had
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 171