On the 14th and 15th of August in 1947 when Pakistan and India proclaimed and celebrated their independence, no one except two men knew the existing demarcation of their territories. One had already left India and the other played a devious role in the process.
On February 20, 1947, Britain’s Prime Minister Clement Richard Attlee announced that the British would leave the Indian subcontinent by 30th of June 1948. This statement was followed by the appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy of British India. He was to ensure the implementation of Attlee’s decision and transfer the power to the Indian leadership as per the Indian Independence Act 1947. On June 3, 1947, the partition plan was announced. The most important feature of the Act was the partition of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal. As per the Act, the provinces of Bengal and Punjab as constituted under the Government of India Act 1935 would cease to exist and would be divided into East Bengal and West Bengal and Eest Punjab and West Punjab. It was also decided that to ascertain the boundaries of these two provinces, two commissions would be constituted.
The herculean task of ascertaining which territory is assigned to which dominion and especially the division of Punjab and Bengal was assigned to Sir Cyril Radcliffe.
Born on March 30, 1899, in Wales, Sir Cyril Radcliffe was educated at the Haileybury College and New College at the Oxford University. He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple and was a distinguished member of the Bar from England and was regarded as a man of high integrity, legal reputation, and wide experience.
He arrived in India on July 8, 1947, and had five weeks to finish a task for which he believed he should have had at least two to three years. Two members each from Congress and Muslim League were included in the Bengal and Punjab commissions. For Bengal commission, C.C Biswa, B.K. Mukherji, AbuSaleh Mohamed Akram and S. A. Rahman were selected while for the Punjab commission, Mehr Chand Mahajan, Teja Singh, Din Mohamed and Muhammad Munir were selected. Both commissions were tasked to demarcate the boundaries of both provinces on the basis of the majority areas as well as factors such as natural boundaries, communications, watercourses and irrigation systems and socio-political consideration. All members of the two commissions were lawyers and had no experience in geography or ethnography of the area. Due to paucity of time, the commissions had no time to conduct surveys or visit the areas. The Commission’s total reliance was on the existing census data and maps. This is how the fate of the people of the Indian subcontinent was decided by Radcliffe who had the final say. After finishing his job, he handed the document over to Mountbatten and immediately left for England. Before leaving, he burnt all his papers.
Mountbatten announced the partition plan and the boundary awards on August 17, 1947. There is considerable information available to believe that the plan was tempered and that it was done on the behest of Mountbatten.
As early as April 1947, Nehru had a discussion with Lord Mountbatten about the accession of Kashmir with India followed by a written warning by Krishna Menon that India-Britain relations would be in jeopardy if this did not happen. According to Transfer of Power documents, on August 4, Mountbatten stated that the state of Kashmir was “so placed that it could join either Dominion provided part of Gurdaspur were put into East Punjab by the Boundary Commission.” In the final plan, four Muslim majority districts of Punjab: Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Jalandhar and Ferozepur, were included in India. No satisfactory reasoning or official explanation was ever provided. On August 8, 1947, in a letter to secretary to the Governor of Punjab Abott, G. Bell, Viceroy’s naval attachŽ wrote: “I enclose a map showing roughly the boundary which Sir Cyril Radcliffe promised to demarcate in his award and a note describing it. There will not be any great changes from this boundary, but it will have to be accurately defined with reference to village and zilla boundaries in Lahore district.” Jenkins stated: “About August 10, 11, when we were still expecting the award on August 13, at latest, I received a message from Viceroy’s House containing the words ‘Eliminate Salient’. The change caused some surprise, not because the Firozepur salient had been regarded as inevitable or even probable, but because it seemed odd that any advance information had been given by the Commission if the award was not substantially complete.” The Chairman of the Central Waterways, Irrigation and Navigation Committee Rao Bahadur Lala Adjudhia Khosla told Nehru that Radcliffe intends to give the districts of Ferozepur and Zira to Pakistan. A far more criminating testimony was provided by Christopher Beaumont, Radcliffe’s secretary. According to him, a map showing the boundary line in the award was handed over to the viceroy on 9th of August. Ferozepur and Zira tehsils had been included in Pakistan (Transfer of Power Documents, Vol. XII). Later, he wrote an article in Daily Telegraph on February 24, 1992 on how the frontiers were secretly redrawn to favour India. This redrawing of the border provided India land access to the state of Kashmir. According to Alex Von Tuzelmann: “The Pakistani government was preparing a genocide case, naming him (Mountbatten) as responsible for the Punjab massacres. ... Attlee’s inquiries revealed the worrying fact that there was indeed reason to believe Pakistan’s suggestion that Sir Cyril Radcliff had altered the boundary award at the last moment, though it was not known whether this was done at the behest of Mountbatten. If the matter was to be pursued further; they would have to talk to Radcliffe; but this does not seem very desirable...” (The Indian Summer, p328). The British counselled Pakistan to drop the idea as any such case would affect the honour and reputation of the King’s representative who cannot defend himself in public. Pakistan agreed.
Although mass population transfer was neither intended nor planned yet due to the increasing violence, the partition resulted in a great mass migration, one of the biggest in recent history. According to one estimate, eight million Muslims moved into Pakistan whereas six million Hindus and Sikhs moved to India. Punjab and Bengal, the two provinces that were partitioned suffered severe bloodshed. The effects of the Radcliffe award loom large on India-Pakistan relations 76 years after. The developments that took place in 1947 and as a consequence, it has adversely affected India-Pakistan relations. The partition plan, the genocide that took place at the time of partition and the subsequent policies followed by New Delhi, violence that took place strengthened the perception among Pakistani leadership that India has not and would never accept Pakistan and would take every step to fail it. The illegal accession and occupation of the state of Kashmir by India started a conflict between India and Pakistan that continues to date and several factors snowballed into it. Its shadow still looms on India-Pakistan relations. Three wars and several near misses and a few attempts for confidence building measures and peace building, today both India and Pakistan are at a cross road. With the rise of Hindutva in India, Nehru’s secular India is on its last breath, Pakistan is struggling to overcome its economic quagmire and democratic deficit. While the past is not dead, it should not necessarily haunt India and Pakistan. It is high time that both India and Pakistan leave the past where it belongs. Unlike many other academics, I won’t suggest a miraculous leap towards friendship but to take one step at a time. What Pakistan and India should adopt is what in the literature is called an adverse partnership. Identify one or two areas where, without changing their stated positions they can work and cooperate. Once this happens, taking further steps would be easy. Going to war is easy, making peace is where the true test of a statesman lies.
-The author is a Karachi based academic. SRizwanZeb