Click to play videoIndira Gandhi betrayed my father and Jawaharlal Nehru during Emergency as they would never have done what she did, says Lady Pamela Mountbatten. In an exclusive interview to Karan Thapar on India Tonight, Lady Pamela along with her daughter India Hicks talk about partition, Independence, and the role Lord Mountbatten played during the critical days of 1947.
Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to the second part of a joint interview with Lady Pamela Mountbatten and her daughter India Hicks, on the transfer of power, partition and independence. Lady Mountbatten, many people have said that Lord Mountbatten was pro-Indian and in a sense anti-Pakistan. Is that a justified criticism?
Pamela Mountbatten: It's entirely unjustified. Don't forget when he came to India, the country was one large subcontinent. And it was a great sadness to us when, of course, Pakistan had to be created and we find that all the Muslims who'd been with us had to suddenly leave and go to Pakistan. We were saying goodbye to all our friends, and he was scrupulous in the partition of all the goods to the two countries and he had such an expectation that he would be invited to remain as Governor General of Pakistan as well as India that it really floored him when he found that the Qaid-e-Azam was going to take that position himself.
Karan Thapar: Had he been Governor General for the first year after independence of both countries, could he have ensured that things like the Kashmir dispute didn't become flashpoints that led to wars? Could he ensure that relations were more amicable?
Pamela Mountbatten: I think he would have been a very wise counsellor. Obviously, he would have no power, but he would have been a real counsellor with vast experience and I think they (India and Pakistan) would have benefited.
Karan Thapar: It has often been said, and this is perhaps one reason why the accusation that your father was pro-Indian, pro-Nehru, pro-Congress lingers, that he influenced Cyril Radcliffe to change the Punjab boundary in India's favour. Pakistan has frequently brought this up as an accusation. Is there any foundation in it?
Pamela Mountbatten: There is again no foundation in that. In fact, Radcliffe was sort of put into purdah. He was not even allowed to stay in the house. He was on a completely different, quite a different house on the estate. And we had no contact with him whatsoever.
Karan Thapar: Except for the fact that a gentleman called Christopher Beaumont, who was the Secretary to the Radcliffe Commission, admittedly more than ten years after your father died, published a paper where he alleged that your father had influenced Radcliffe to handover Ferozepur to India and the Pakistanis separately have always maintained that Gurdaspur, which is the chicken's neck that gives India access to Kashmir, was similarly handed over to India. Are those allegations spread by people without foundation or do you think perhaps your father felt that India needed to be made geographically viable and therefore he tweaked the boundaries a little to help India?
Pamela Mountbatten: As far as I know, Cyril Radcliffe was the epitome of integrity and honesty and my father had no influence on him at all. I believe Christopher Beaumont played a very… he was a very junior officer then, and he was excluded from any meetings that might have happened.
Karan Thapar: So, he doesn't know what he's talking about?
Pamela Mountbatten: Well I don't know either. Excepting that Cyril Radcliffe was a man of great integrity and my father had no influence with him.
Karan Thapar: You knew your grandfather in the years after he left India, in his conversations, in his reminiscences, did he come across as being pro-India? After all his friends were the Nehrus and Gandhi. Jinnah was a person, in a sense, who repulsed him. So, it would be understandable if his anecdotes were warmer about India. Were they?
India: Karan Thapar I was eleven when my grandfather was murdered. My memories of my grandfather are very childish. He was the backbone of our family. He was enormous fun; he was an extraordinary man in my life and in his part in history. At aged 11 I had no conversation with him about India other than the pride I had in carrying her name. That we did joke about occasionally. Often he actually didn't even refer to me as India, he referred to me as decibel, because I was rather too loud.
Karan Thapar: Lady Pamela Mountbatten, on the January 30, 1948, the day Gandhiji died, your father was amongst the first people to get to Birla House. And as he stepped out of the car, someone shouted, "a Muslim did it", and he immediately replied, "No, you fool, it was a Hindu." Although, at the time no one knew who the assassin was, do you think your father through his presence of mind actually saved a worse situation?
Pamela Mountbatten: I absolutely think so. He knew that if it was thought to be a Muslim there would have been an instant civil war.
Karan Thapar: And this was just a spontaneous reaction?
Pamela Mountbatten: Yes, and this was typical of my father actually. He was a born leader.
Karan Thapar: What did India mean to him?
Pamela Mountbatten: Well, should I say that during our time out there Princess Elizabeth married my cousin Philip and we came back for 10 days for the wedding. I was a bridesmaid. And when we returned to India after the 10 days my father wrote to my sister "it was lovely to get home again," meaning home in India.
Karan Thapar: So, India in a sense was a country that he identified himself with?
Pamela Mountbatten: Yes, very much so.
Karan Thapar: He may have come as Viceroy but he felt as if he belonged there?
Pamela Mountbatten: He did, and he felt that way because people made him feel that way.
Karan Thapar: I know that in later years, particularly when Mrs Gandhi was Prime Minister and relations between Britain and India were not quite as good as they might have been, he felt personally aggrieved and he made several efforts personally on himself to try and ensure that relations improved. Did he always spend a lot of time in his retirement caring about India?
Pamela Mountbatten: He did but, of course, he was a person who always looked forward, looked ahead, and was always busy doing something. So he wasn't somebody who looked backwards. But the affection remained and the interest remained and he followed affairs in India. But he was of course then plunged into problems but India remained in his heart all the time.
Karan Thapar: History and historians have this terrible habit of questioning people's achievements and critics pop up from nowhere and produce facts that seem as if they've contradicted what the person's done or the person's said. Did that sort of reevaluation hurt him or did he take it in his stride and say people who've achieved great successes must expect that there will always be great critics as well?
Pamela Mountbatten: My father always used to say, "I hope that my grandchildren will think that I did the right thing." And so this is an opportunity we can ask.
India: Of course, the pride one has in having a grandfather who played such a part in making history is immeasurable.
Karan Thapar: When your father died, India declared 14 days of official mourning and a contingent of the Indian Army was there to carry his bier. Would he have been proud of the fact that the country he'd been not just the last Viceroy of but the first Governor General of, was there in such a big way, paying its respects at his death?
Pamela Mountbatten: He'd have been enormously proud. And he was always staggered when, as the Chief of Defence Staff, he accompanied the Prince of Wales on his visits back to India, the streets from Palam Airport would be lined with people who generally hadn't even been born at the time he was Viceroy but they were cheering. And that he found marvelous.
Karan Thapar: And then in the 70s, in 1975 in particular, when Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency and most people said "good heavens what has she done, how could Nehru's daughter have declared an Emergency?" Did he in a real sense feel that Mrs Gandhi's erred, that she's made a mistake?
Pamela Mountbatten: He felt that she had betrayed her father and my father because (of) what they had agreed for the princes and obviously the judges. He felt a great betrayal.
Karan Thapar: So not just the Emergency, but even when she abolished privy purses and withdrew the privileges, which in a sense your father had promised the princes when he encouraged them to join India, he felt that she'd betrayed him in doing all this?
Pamela Mountbatten: And her father. Because her father had agreed to it, and the princes voluntarily gave up their power, and then they were treated like that. Her father and my father were honorable men and they would never have done that.
Karan Thapar: Did he communicate this to Mrs Gandhi, did he ever tell her that Indira you've gone wrong?
Pamela Mountbatten: I think probably yes. But Mrs Gandhi was a great friend, but she was a very prickly character. And she was, as I say, she was a politician and her father was a statesman.
Karan Thapar: The affection and the closeness he had for the father, he clearly didn't have for the daughter.
Pamela Mountbatten: No, he had hoped to have much more affection for her. As I say, he thought her an extremely clever woman, and they were polite to each other, but there wasn't the warmth that there had been.
Karan Thapar: And ultimately she disappointed him in many ways?
Pamela Mountbatten: Certainly, he thought the Emergency was a total disgrace.
Karan Thapar: Lady Pamela Mountbatten, India Hicks, a pleasure talking to both of you.
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