Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten, pictured here with Mahatma Gandhi, were known to have unconventional sex lives
As a UK tribunal decides whether to publish the personal diaries of Lord Mountbatten, it’s perhaps timely to recount the folly of ‘the master of disaster’
NO-ONE knows exactly how many died, how many were beaten, tortured or raped. The figures range from 200,000 to two million, the number displaced from their homes up to 20 million. This was the partition of India in August 1947, creating the state of Pakistan, the exact border of which wasn’t even publicly known until two days after independence.
“It had been obvious all along,” the last Viceroy to India, Lord Louis Mountbatten, reported, “that the later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British.”
Instead, chaos and mayhem ensued. And so began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked east while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never made it. Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had co-existed for almost a millennium attacked each other in a cycle of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other in a mutual genocide. Since then, there have been two wars between India and Pakistan over the Muslim-majority Kashmir, controlled by India, and both countries have also come close to nuclear war. In a political sense both countries are still in 1947.
Mountbatten had been sent to India in March by Britain’s then-Prime Minister Clement Attlee to produce, or enforce, a settlement, creating a Muslim Pakistan out of imperial India – and he had been given full powers and total control over how to do it.
