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A spicy menage a trois: The shocking love triangle between Lord Mountbatten, his wife and the founder of modern India
‘At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’
Those powerful words, memorable to everyone who loves India, were uttered by the father of the modern nation, Jawaharlal Nehru, when the country became independent more than 60 years ago.
Behind this famous ‘tryst with destiny’ speech lay a deeply personal fight to escape the domination of the British Raj, a struggle all the more meaningful because of Nehru’s private life.
Special relationship: Lord and Lady Mountbatten with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
For the handsome widower had formed a more than usually deep bond with, of all people, the beautiful wife of the chief representative of the occupying power, Edwina, Lady Mountbatten.
If you came across their romance in a novel, you would dismiss it instantly as fiction.
But the fact is the couple shared an extraordinary love. Their deep attachment lasted from the moment they met in 1947 in New Delhi until the day Edwina died 13 years later.
It was such a meaningful relationship that even Lord Mountbatten himself found it best to turn a blind eye.
Perhaps he even encouraged it, so that he could benefit from any insight into the Indian mind that his wife could pass him at this pivotal time in their history.
This fascinating personal intrigue was to have been the basis of a new film, Indian Summer, starring Hugh Grant and Cate Blanchett as Lord and Lady Mountbatten.
As for the handsome Nehru, rumour has it he was to be played by Irrfan Khan, star of the hugely successful Slumdog Millionaire.
But so concerned are the Indian government to protect their favourite statesman’s reputation that, after nine months of costly pre-production in Delhi, filming has been dramatically ordered to cease.
Indian politicians have demanded to see the script to know just how explicitly the relationship will be portrayed.
Hitherto, those who know the truth about the relationship between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten (including Mountbatten’s two daughters) have always insisted the couple never consummated their great love, and that it was more spiritual than physical.
But what is the real story? Certainly, there are aspects of Lady Mountbatten’s early life that will shock India’s ruling elite, who even today do not allow their Bollywood stars to kiss on screen.
The spoiled favourite granddaughter of a Jewish financier close to the royals, Edwina Ashley was the richest and most glamorous deb of her time.
In 1922, she married the handsome, though impoverished, 21-year- old Lord Louis Mountbatten. Known in the family as ‘Dickie’, he is nowadays best remembered as Prince Charles’s great-uncle and mentor, tragically killed by an IRA bomb in 1979.
Ostensibly it was the perfect match, but the sexually inexperienced couple had little in common.
Perfect match? Lord Mountbatten and Edwina Mountbatten were married in 1922 but had little in common
After a fumbling honeymoon, some of it spent in Hollywood, Mountbatten resumed his career as a naval officer.
Meanwhile, the stylish Edwina, described as one of the six best- dressed women in the world, shopped at Chanel, played bridge, and danced the Charleston until 3am, sometimes with Fred Astaire.
At weekends, their country home was full of guests (including the Prince of Wales) arriving in fast cars and even aeroplanes.
Vain, charming and boyish, Dickie was devoted to Edwina, but still awkward in bed. He famously named her breasts Mutt and Jeff – the nicknames that World War I soldiers gave their campaign medals.
To him, sex was unromantic, ‘a mixture of psychology and hydraulics’. There were also mutterings that he preferred men.
Things went downhill after their daughter Patricia was born in 1924.
While Mountbatten doted on the new arrival, the passionate Edwina was pathologically jealous of her own child being the centre of attention.
‘A divine little daughter. Too thrilling, too sweet,’ she trilled to her diary – but then packed the baby off to nannies on the South Coast. The highly sexed Edwina then proceeded to look for lovers from all walks of life.
Her first was the aristocratic Lord Molyneux. He was followed by a rich, polo-playing American, Laddie Sandford, and then by Mike Wardell, the good-looking manager of a London evening newspaper. At times, she juggled all three at once.
‘Lord Molyneux is in the morning-room and Mr Sandford in the library, but where should I put the other gentleman?’ asked a desperate flunkey when they happened to visit together.
While her husband was posted to Malta in the early Thirties, she turned to American golf champion Bobby Sweeny.
Next came playboy Larry Gray, before she went on a Mexican cruise and jumped into bed with the elder of two Californian brothers, Ted Phillips, quickly followed by his sibling Bunny.
This serial sexual gallivanting went on until the birth of her second daughter Pamela in 1929.
By now, Mountbatten, too, was seeking other women. In 1931, he was flirting with the 18-year-old future Duchess of Argyll and even kept her photo in his cabin.
‘The only photo of any girl!’ he wrote to her. Later, there was Barbara Cartland and the Frenchwoman Yola Letellier, on whom Colette based her novel Gigi. Edwina was fiercely jealous, but she didn’t think to change her own habits.
Throughout the Thirties, she had dozens of admirers, known in the private slang of the Mountbatten circle as ‘ginks’.
As Mountbatten himself once put it: ‘Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.’
She even dallied with conductor Malcolm Sargent, and then embarked on her most adventurous affair to date, with the bisexual West Indian cabaret pianist Leslie Hutchinson.
Forbidden love: Edwina and Nehru in the Moghul Gardens of the Viceroy house during celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the Republic of India in 1960
Although Edwina successfully sued a newspaper for saying she had a black lover, there is not much doubt she conducted an on-off relationship with ‘Hutch’ for 30 years.
She famously gave him a gold bracelet bearing her name, a gold cigarette case and, conclusively perhaps, a jewelled penis sheath from Cartier.
This sexual track record seems like an unlikely apprenticeship for a woman to become the great love of the socialist founder of modern India.
But Edwina, the social butterfly, also had a strong streak of idealism. Never one for empty titles, she seems to have climbed in and out of bed looking for a cause.
With the onset of World War II, her tireless work in the bombed- out East End was followed by a spell in South-East Asia repatriating British refugees from prison camps and hospitals.
Not for nothing did the blood of her great-great-grandfather, the distinguished 19th-century reformer Lord Shaftesbury, run in her veins.
Mountbatten’s war service culminated, of course, in the recapture of Burma from the Japanese.
Indeed, both had such a successful war that in 1947 they were posted by the new Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee to Delhi, as the last Viceroy and Vicereine of India to facilitate the smooth transition of power to Nehru, the country’s nationalist leader.
While the young Edwina had been playing the field, the patrician Nehru had been working hard for his country.
Born in 1889, son of a leading lawyer, he came from a rich and influential family with distinctly Anglicised tastes in clothes and culture.
The boys were educated in England and the girls had English governesses who gave the children English names. Jawaharlal became ‘Joe’, his sisters ‘Nan’ and ‘Betty’. After Harrow and Cambridge, Jawaharlal was called to the Bar in London, but he soon returned to India.
In 1916, he had married the high-born Kamala, riding to his Maharajah-style wedding in Delhi on a white horse.
But he had already come under the spell of the charismatic Gandhi, at the time a failed lawyer who, having been shabbily treated in British-owned South Africa, returned to his own country fired up against social injustice and determined to free it from foreign domination.
Nehru sympathised with Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy. At home, meanwhile, his frail wife started her own radical crusade to improve women’s rights.
Interestingly, the Nehru marriage somewhat mirrored that of the Mountbattens. In her 30s Kamala developed into an irresistibly attractive woman who was always surrounded by infatuated young men, including Feroze Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma), the future husband of her daughter, Indira, who would of course later became the country’s fiery leader.
Many people are convinced Kamala and Feroze conducted a long and satisfying affair.
However, Kamala died at a young age of tuberculosis in 1936. And though Nehru had also had affairs, he never remarried. His only love now was his country – until he met Edwina Mountbatten.
It wasn’t Edwina’s first visit to India – she had engineered an invitation to the Viceregal Lodge before her marriage in hot pursuit of Mountbatten, who was also staying there.
Neither was it the first time she had met Nehru. She and Dickie had warmed to the man, whose aquiline features resembled Mountbatten’s own, in Singapore in 1946.
Deep attachment: Those close to the couple insisted they never consummated their great love, and that it was more spiritual than physical
Now, with Nehru’s mission to liberate his country at a time when war-weary Britain was desperate to get rid of it, the 47-year-old Edwina finally had a focus for her huge energy and political radicalism. Of course, British withdrawal did not go as smoothly as everyone hoped.
Mass migration and massacres followed as Indians fought for territory with the new Pakistan.
In this sensitive climate, Edwina put herself at great personal risk as she and Nehru tried to stop the looting and mob violence.
Working alongside him in hospitals and refugee camps, she was fearless. At one Muslim refugee camp, she found a gang of Hindus and Sikhs trying to set it on fire and kill the inmates.
Edwina stood in front of the crowd as calmly as though she were at a garden party, threatening to have her guards shoot the agitators. Improbably they backed off in the face of her natural authority.
After independence, the Indophile Mountbattens made many visits to the country, and Edwina spent more and more time with the new prime minister Nehru.
This is the point at which her younger daughter Pamela, the biographer in the family, acknowledges that love blossomed between the lonely Nehru and the Vicereine.
What’s more, says Pamela, her father condoned the friendship, even going so far as to call it a ‘happy threesome’.
‘My mother had already had lovers. My father was inured to it. It broke his heart the first time, but it was somehow different with Nehru,’ she has written.
As Mountbatten himself wrote to her sister Patricia at the time: ‘She and Jawaharlal (Nehru) are so sweet together, they really dote on each other.’
Undignifed as it seems against the backdrop of the huge historic events in which they were caught up, there are those who suspect that Nehru, like both Mountbattens, had bisexual tendencies, and that Dickie, in a last attempt to establish physical intimacy with his unresponsive wife, may have joined them in a physical menage a trois.
Whatever went on in the bedroom, the Mountbattens joined Nehru in a very public romance with India.
This, though, didn’t go down well back in Britain, where disapproval came to a head after Gandhi was assassinated in 1948.
Seeing a newspaper photo of the grieving Viceregal couple squatting on the ground at Gandhi’s cremation, Churchill angrily concluded that they had gone native, disgracing themselves as royal representatives. When they returned home, the old war hero refused to shake Mountbatten’s hand.
The unconventional Lady Mountbatten, however, rose above all this. She visited Nehru every year and he (her soulmate) visited her in England, where his sister became High Commissioner.
When parted, they wrote to each other constantly – and Edwina made no attempt to keep the letters secret from her husband.
As she wrote to Dickie in 1952: ‘Some of them have no “personal” remarks at all. Others are love letters… though you yourself well realise the strange relationship – most of it spiritual – which exists between us.’
When the correspondence is eventually published in its entirety, perhaps we may know the whole truth.
Meanwhile, one of Nehru’s own last letters, written ten years after their first meeting, sheds a little more light. ‘Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you also did) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was dimly aware, drew us to one another.
‘I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery. We talked more intimately as if some veil had been removed and we could look into each other’s eyes without fear or embarrassment.’
Intense words, yet Nehru was now 68, his romantic friend ten years younger.
No longer in the first flush of youth, perhaps there was no great urgency to climb into bed.
Little did they realise how little time was left. A year later, in 1960, 58-year- old Edwina, by now leading a selfless life, died alone in her sleep while on a trip to Borneo on behalf of St John Ambulance Brigade. Beside her bed was her collection of Nehru’s letters.
And the love affair was not over yet. As her body was taken by the Royal Navy to its sea burial off Britain’s south coast, Prime Minister Nehru made his last and most public declaration of his devotion, sending his own Indian Navy frigate to cast a wreath into the waters on his behalf.
Such a dramatic farewell would make a stirring finale to any film. But as the director Joe Wright, who was behind the scheduled movie says, it will be a long time before it gets made, thanks to the explosive mixture of politics and forbidden love.
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Over 20 states in power crisis as 3 grids collapse
NEW DELHI: Triggering a major power crisis,
three electricity grids connecting more than
20 states and the national capital collapsed on
Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the north eastern grid connects Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.
India has five electricity grids — Northern, Eastern, North Eastern, Southern and Western. All of them are inter- connected, except the Southern grid.
All the grids are being run by the state-owned Power Grid Corporation, which operates more than 95,000 circuit km of transmission lines.
One circuit km refers to one kilometre of electrical transmission line.
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India makes key arrest in Mumbai terror plot
By Harmeet Shah Singh, CNN
- The suspect is identified as Abu Jundal
- Investigators believe Jundal was on the phone coordinating the attack from Pakistan
- Indian forces killed nine of the 10 gunmen and later put the lone survivor on trial.
(CNN) — A key suspect in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks that killed more than 160 people has been apprehended, Indian authorities said Tuesday.
The Indian-born man, known as Abu Jundal, was recently arrested in New Delhi, said public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam.
“He was a key conspirator, who abetted the attack and carried out the planning,” according to Nikam, who did not say when the arrest was made.
Investigators believe Jundal was on the phone coordinating the attack from Pakistan as 10 gunmen staged the bloody three-day siege throughout India’s commercial capital.
Terrorist thumbs his nose at U.S. bounty
“He was there in the terror control room,” Nikam said. “His voice was intercepted here.”
While New Delhi police refused Tuesday to comment on the arrest, the Mumbai court handling the case has issued a warrant asking that Jundal appear before it.
The attacks targeted Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace and Tower and Oberoi-Trident hotels, the city’s historic Victoria Terminus train station and the Jewish cultural center, Chabad House.
Four convicted in Scandinavian ‘Mumbai-style’ terror plot
India blamed the attacks on Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a Pakistan-based terror group allied with al Qaeda. The group denied responsibility.
Indian forces killed nine of the 10 gunmen and later put the lone survivor on trial.
In May 2010, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, a Pakistani who was photographed holding an assault weapon during the siege, was convicted of murder, conspiracy and waging war on India.
Two Indian nationals accused of conspiracy in the case — Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed — were acquitted by the court in Mumbai.
More than 160 people were killed in November 2008, as the 10 men attacked Mumbai buildings including the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower and Oberoi-Trident hotels, the city’s historic Victoria Terminus train station, and the Jewish cultural center, Chabad House.
India blamed the attacks on the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a Pakistan-based terror group allied with al Qaeda.
Authorities said Kasab was trained by the organization, which was banned in Pakistan in 2002 after an attack on India’s parliament.
The development derailed a fragile peace process between the nuclear-armed neighbors for about 15 months.
Under American pressure, the two arch-rivals resumed their full spectrum of dialogue last year in their bid to build trust.
The news of Jundal’s arrest comes ahead of next month’s meeting in New Delhi between Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries.
Pakistani diplomats said they will continue to cooperate with India on such matters.
“Pakistan has been in the forefront in the campaign against terror,” a statement from the Pakistani high commission in New Delhi said. “As agreed at the highest level between Pakistan and India, terrorism is a common concern and counter-terrorism cooperation is in the mutual interest of both countries.”
SOURCE: http://edition.cnn.com
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INDIA-PAKISTAN TRADE, PROS AND CONS
Since Pakistan was born in 1947, it has been seen that India has constantly been trying to undermine and bringing it to knees because it never accepted its existence by heart. A big factor in these circumstances is some politicians and so called ulems of Pakistan who are on payroll of India. Just after the partition India merged the states f Kashmir, Junagadh and Hyderabad in it by force. India did not pay Pakistan’s portion of currency and military equipment honestly. It was Quaid-e-Azam’s wisdom which helped Pakistan to stand upon its feet. As soon as Quaid-e-Azam passed away India’s representatives in Pakistan, Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam to name as an example started there job with full vigor. In 1953 the started campaign against Ahmadiyya Muslim sect. In bloody riots many innocent Ahmadis were put to death. That was the first time armed forces were called in to control the riots which they did successfully. But these Indian agents did nit remain idol. They kept on conspiring against the government. As a result no stable government could br formed and in 1958 armed forces took over the government under the leadership of Ayub Khan.
Although I accept that it was not a democratic government but one has also to accept this bitter reality that the period 1958-1969 was the best period in the history of Pakistan and still is. No other ruler, civilian or military, has been able to bring that glory to Pakistan. Again the enemies of Pakistan could not bear it. in 1969 they found a figure in the person of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to destabilise the government and so an obnoxious general, Yahya Khan took over. That was the worst part of Pakistan’s history. All the civilian and military people joined together. conniving with India to lose eastern part of our country. Then Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto became a hero and took over what remained of Pakistan. Bhutto closed the doors of jobs for competent people and distributed them among incompetent flatterers resulting in a further collapse of economy whic was already in shackles because of the 1971 war and separation of the eastern part in the result.
Bhutto instead of holding fresh elections convened the national assembly with the elected members from the western part in which he had the majority. This assembly passed 1973 constitution. Even the ink of this constitution was not dry when the amendments started coming in. With 2nd amendment The Ahmadi Muslims were declared “Not Muslims”, and this was due to the conspiracy of Mullas. Jamiai-r-Ulema-e Islam, Jamaat-e-Islami, Ahrar-e-Islam to name a few. This threw the country in the wave of sect ism. Bhutto’s government was toppled by General Zia-ul-Haq. His rule was worst in terms of religious discrimination and harassment and ethical and lingual division in the country.
Eleven years rule of Zia-ul-Haq brought the country at almost 1971 situation.When God Almighty heard from his people and put him to death in a plane crash along with so many other generals. His body was not even found because it was burned to ashes. Then Bhutto’s daughter Benazir came to power.During the period following Benazir and Nawaz Sharif ruled the country in turns but no stable government could be established until Pervez Musharraf took over. He tried to stabilize the economy and somehow he was successful but hidden enemies could not digest this. He had to hold elections and as a result he had to leave the government and the country as well.
Now the Pakistan Peoples Party was again in power. The economy of the country started stumbling in Bhutto’s rule and came to shackles during the rule of his legacy. During the civilian rule after Zia-ul-Haq US dollar rose from 40 to 60 rupees. Durin g Musharraf’s rule it remained steady vat 60 rupees and now it is nearing 100 rupees.
I had to relate all this history because with the exception of Ayub and Musharraf eras we see Indias intrusion in the country very visible. Now Pakistan has declared India the most favourable nation and has destroyed its own economy۔ Is it patriotism or traitory. But who is there to decide this. It is being said that worst democracy is better than best dictatory. To me the only better ruler is the one who is loyal to the country and not loyal to himself and his family only, no matter a democratic or a dictator. If a dictator is loyal to the country and does well for the people of the country then no doubt people will admire him and they will never even dream of democracy.
The people ruling Pakistan now are a bunch of corrupt people who care only for themselves. They don’t have any sympathy for the common man. There is no gas, no electricity, no industry in the country and we are trading with India as a most favourable nation. Who will be the beneficiary in this situation? It will be India as a whole or the corrupt people in the Pakistan government and Indian agents in the country. God save Pakistan and its people, Ameen
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