Contemporary British History ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fcbh20 Mountbatten and India, 1964-79: after Nehru Rakesh Ankit To cite this article: Rakesh Ankit (2021): Mountbatten and India, 1964-79: afterNehru, Contemporary British History, DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2021.1944113 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2021.1944113 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 29 Jun 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fcbh20 CONTEMPORARY BRITISH HISTORY https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2021.1944113 ARTICLE Mountbatten and India, 1964-79: after Nehru Rakesh Ankit POLIS, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU England ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article throws light on Lord Mountbatten’s enduring involve­ Mountbatten; India; princes; ment in India after 1964, an overlooked feature of his later life. On Indira Gandhi; emergency a number of issues such as the abolition of titles, privileges and privy purses of Indian Princes (1967–71), imposition of Emergency in India (1975), arms sales, expulsion of BBC (1970–72) and evolu­ tion of history-writing on Partition, this article evaluates his chan­ ging role as a ‘friend of India’ in Britain, while becoming an irksome interlocutor for both the British and Indian ‘official mind’. This draining of Mountbatten’s influence, though not involvement, through the 1970s, represented an inter-generational dilation of Indo-British relations. Introduction When Lord Louis Mountbatten came to India in May 1964 for his friend Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s funeral, President Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan told him that ‘he was confident that Lal Bahadur Shastri will become Prime Minister’. Mountbatten promptly conveyed this to R.H. Belcher, then-acting British High-Commissioner (HC) in New Delhi.1 A waiting Belcher was grateful: ‘Your talk with the President was . of immense help and . it has been most fortunate that Radhakrishnan’s expectations turned out to be the truth.2 Mountbatten also congratulated Prime Minister Shastri, who, while agreeing to have a quiet lunch with him, declined his requests to let Nehru’s sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit represent India at the upcoming Commonwealth Prime Minister’s Conference or return to London as India’s envoy.3 This episode captures the changing contours of independent India’s first Governor-General’s influence in India, with the passing away of his friend and India’s first Prime Minister. This decline was an inter-generational dimming, but it did not decimate Mountbatten’s involvement in India. It side-lined it to a listening vantage—on the margins but privileged. This article is an exercise in tracing this trajectory of tailing off, which despite dwindling returns, throws an interesting light, from Mountbatten’s unique perch into certain Indian affairs and their inter-play with Indo-British relations, from the mid-1960s; a time called ‘the Other Transfer of Power in India’.4 V.P. Menon, Mountbatten’s constitutional adviser during the original transfer of power in 1947, assured him that notwithstanding Shastri’s diminutive stature, ‘there are only two and odd years to go for the next general elec­ tions . and . therefore the cabinet will hold together’.5 S.S. Khera, the last of the seven CONTACT Rakesh Ankit [email protected] © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med­ ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 R. ANKIT Cabinet Secretaries who served Nehru, added that ‘the story that [Nehru’s friend] Krishna [Menon] and [daughter] Indira [Gandhi] were lined up against [Shastri] was a figment of imagination’.6 This correspondence from the first month after Nehru’s death helped Mountbatten contribute to steady the British ‘official mind’, at an uncertain time in their outlook towards India. Yet, in the considerable scholarship on Mountbatten and India, there has not been much discussion of Mountbatten’s enduring interest in Indian affairs after June 1948, i.e. after leaving the subcontinent where he had arrived in March 1947 as British India’s last Viceroy and where he stayed on in August 1947 as Dominion of India’s first Governor- General.7 In Mountbatten’s official biography, the post-1948 period, unsurprisingly, cov­ ered his naval career that saw him become First Sea Lord (1955–59) and Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) (1959–65).8 Writers appreciative of Mountbatten’s time in India remain limited to praising his ‘mission’ in 1947–48,9 while those critical of him also make their case for the same time.10 Likewise, whether the biographies of Nehru,11 or the historiography on the Partition of India,12 they are focused on the ‘first year(s)’ of Partition, Independence, Integration of the Indian states and their contentious events.13 It is in the histories of independent India and of Indo-British ties under the New Commonwealth (1949),14 itself his contribution (with others), that Mountbatten appears frequently, if episodically. The latter include (a) the first India–Pakistan conflict on Kashmir (1947–49) and its diplomatic aftermath,15 (b) the first decade of Indo-British relations within the Anglo-American pact-politics of the early-Cold War,16 (c) the Indo-China con­ flict (1962) and its side effect of seeking a resolution of the Kashmir dispute,17 (d) India’s defence preparedness in 1963,18 and (e) the India–Pakistan war of 1965.19 Before and after these, he found himself involved in events as diverse as his friend Nehru agitating the Anglo-Americans in allowing the military annexation of the Portuguese enclave in India, Goa in 1961,20 and them, in turn, being anxious around the questions After Nehru Who/ What?21 Alongside these overt instances, evidence from the Mountbatten Papers indicates his behind-the-scenes involvement in issues like the princely state of Hyderabad and its enforced accession into the Indian Union in 1948 and arms sales to the Indian (and Pakistani) Navy(s),22 while maintaining an ‘influence of friendship’ in matters personal and of personnel in Indian diplomatic affairs.23 This made him a ‘friend of India’ in the West as well as a successful channel for successive British government(s) to reach out to Nehru. In short, for two decades from 1947, he was the one Viceroy, who refused to disappear from New Delhi and remained a considerable figureof recently recalled colonial authority,24 (if waning) in post-colonial India.25 Indeed, his prolonged influence in ‘unoffi­ cial capacities . with post-independence India and Burma’ has not been entirely unex­ plored though neither singularly nor, given the wider aim of looking ‘at the royal family in promoting Britain’s foreign policy’,26 at depth. This article, drawing upon Mountbatten papers and British official archives as well as supplementing them with personal papers of two of his Indian contacts, begins where such accounts finish that is with the end of Nehru’s life—the time of Mountbatten’s maximum impact in New Delhi as well as in London as the CDS—and brings to light those matters relating to India on which Mountbatten remained interested, informed and tried to involve himself longer than hitherto acknowledged, albeit with mounting impervious­ ness in both the capitals and among their respective bureaucracies. Apart from (a) an CONTEMPORARY BRITISH HISTORY 3 assortment of ‘high politics’, miscellaneous matters around history-writing, public mem­ orialising (1965–70) and palace intrigues (1974–76), this long-drawn-out British narrative includes (b) reaching out to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on the fate of Indian princes when their privy purses were sought to be abolished between 1967 and 1971 and (c) on the freedom of press in reporting from India as an Emergency was imposed there in 1975. Together they serve to (a) elongate a personal history of an imperial intermediary after empire in the post-imperial half of the 20th c. in India, (b) outline the shadow of a retrospective regime and (c) portray a certain British-Indian experience. Throughout, Mountbatten and his staff continued to prove highly ‘idiosyncratic’ interlocuters as befits a self-publicist and akin to his irksome initiative ‘between 1964 and 1966 to create new conference for the Commonwealth’27; of the highest status, if not quality, for the newly created Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) (1968) and its High-Commissioners.28 War & peace, history & memory As he began to work as Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri started hard enough to suffera heart attack within three weeks, setting waves of concern across New Delhi as well as in London. Mountbatten read from V.P. Menon that this was a ‘tragedy greater than [Nehru’s] death . if anything happens to [Shastri], Indira would succeed him . Please therefore make a lot of fuss about her.29 This, then, was part of the personal roles that Mountbatten was involved in from this time. Sir Saville Garner, Permanent Under- Secretary (1962–65) at the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), asked Mountbatten to help, when he read from Belcher that Indira Gandhi was contemplating a holiday in either Britain or Yugoslavia, with the latter “being considered as more likely to offer privacy”. Belcher and his officials in New Delhi were naturally “not happy” and felt that “it would be a positive gain if [she] could come to Britain instead”.