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Sir Cyril Radcliffe's line allotted 64 per cent of the area of undivided Punjab to Pakistan, with slightly less than 60 per cent of the populace. After Radcliffe's award was published and it became clear that both India and Pakistan were unhappy with it, the language used to describe the decision changed significantly. In early 1948, members of the British Parliament questioned Mountbatten's influence on Radcliffe's award. Mountbatten was a prime mover in the portrayal of Radcliffe as a completely independent figure. Beaumont thought that the irrigation system, particularly as it related to Bikaner, played a central role in Mountbatten's attempts to persuade Radcliffe to change his line in Ferozepur. On 19 March 1948, Mountbatten wrote to Evan Jenkins to say that he had no knowledge of any changes made to the boundary line 'between 8th and 13th August'. The geographical reality of the Radcliffe line remained as murky.
This chapter considers the various proposals submitted to the boundary commission in the weeks before partition. It examines the 'notional' boundary, which was based solely on demographic data from the 1941 census. The chapter analyses the sketch map line, an alternative that, the evidence indicates, Radcliffe considered only days before submitting his award. It discusses the likely repercussions of the Sikh claim, which called for a boundary following the Chenab River in the west. Next is the Congress proposal, which included Lahore and several large salients of central Punjabi territory. In central Punjab, the chapter examines the sketch map line of 8 August, which ran through the middle of the province, with a detour west into Ferozepur. The chapter also considers the Muslim League proposal, which left most of Amritsar district as an Indian enclave surrounded by Pakistani territory and extended several small salients into eastern Punjab.
This book is the first full-length study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. It uses the Radcliffe commission, headed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe , as a window onto the decolonisation and independence of India and Pakistan. Examining the competing interests that influenced the actions of the various major players, the book highlights British efforts to maintain a grip on India even as the decolonisation process spun out of control. It examines the nature of power relationships within the colonial state, with a focus on the often-veiled exertion of British colonial power. With conflict between Hindus , Muslims and Sikhs reaching unprecedented levels in the mid-1940s , British leaders felt compelled to move towards decolonization. The partition was to be perceived as a South Asian undertaking, with British officials acting only as steady and impartial guides. Radcliffe's use of administrative boundaries reinforced the impact of imperial rule. The boundaries that Radcliffe defined turned out to be restless divisions, and in both the 1965 and 1971 wars India and Pakistan battled over their Punjabi border. After the final boundary, known as the 'Radcliffe award', was announced, all sides complained that Radcliffe had not taken the right 'other factors' into account. Radcliffe's loyalty to British interests is key to understanding his work in 1947. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, Pakistan and Britain, combined with innovative use of cartographic sources, the book paints a vivid picture of both the partition process and the Radcliffe line's impact on Punjab.
Sir Cyril Radcliffe's loyalty to British interests is key to understanding his work in 1947. The party leaders, both Congress and Muslim League, fundamentally misunderstood this aspect of Radcliffe's position. Radcliffe endeavoured to divide territory fairly, according to religious demographics, but other factors played a role as well. In attempting to buffer Amritsar and in allowing Mountbatten to persuade him that the Ferozepur salient would cause more trouble than it was worth, he demonstrated a concern for geopolitical matters. In an address to the Pakistani nation at the end of August 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah lamented the fact that the Radcliffe decision 'may not be a judicial but political award'. Jawaharlal Nehru apparently remained convinced of the value of legal experience, although he came to regret the structure of the boundary commission. Nehru recognized that the boundary commission's format had, worked against real South Asian influence, at least in Punjab.
Sir Cyril Radcliffe's reputation as a great legal mind may have been a compelling factor for the nationalist leaders, many of them lawyers themselves, who endorsed his selection for the crucial boundary commission post. Mountbatten made clear to Radcliffe in their early meetings that it was absolutely necessary to have a boundary line drawn before the transfer of power took place. Both Congress and Muslim League leaders perceived Radcliffe as impartial, in large part because he had never been a member of the Indian Civil Service. Radcliffe's Indian experience reinforced, rather than shook, his sympathy for imperialist values and actions. Radcliffe's writings also demonstrate that his time in India strengthened his imperialist leanings. The British Government's later use of Radcliffe showed it to be satisfied with his work in India. Radcliffe played a central role in a violent historical episode of India and Pakistan.
This chapter builds on recent work in other borderlands, particularly scholarship on Bengal, to describe and analyse the development of the Punjabi boundary and the territory surrounding it. Beginning with the violence and mass migration of partition, the chapter examines the division's impact on areas near the border, both immediately after partition and in the years that followed. After tracing the evolution of the boundary disputes that arose from the Radcliffe award, the chapter deals with a brief discussion of the state of the borderlands at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines life on the India-West Pakistan border in the months following partition, attempting to reconstruct perspectives of people on both sides of Radcliffe's line. In February 1959, Pakistani and Indian delegates met again in Karachi to revisit the Sulemanke and Hussainiwala headworks disputes. In January 1960, India and Pakistan finally resolved their Punjabi boundary disputes.
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that the boundary commission headed by Cyril Radcliffe offers a window into the complexity of nationalist dealings with colonial power structures and of colonial strategies of control, even during decolonization. It examines the nature of power relationships within the colonial state, with a focus on the often-veiled exertion of British colonial power. The book traces the reluctant cooperation of South Asian elites with British leaders in setting up the Radcliffe commission. It focuses on partition's impact on Punjab, in the north-west wing of the South Asian subcontinent. The book also focuses on the high politics of the British withdrawal and of Indian and Pakistani independence. It deals with the ground-level impact of the partition process.
Arriving in South Asia on 8 July 1947, less than six weeks before the 15 August deadline for Britain's withdrawal, Cyril Radcliffe set to work clarifying the outlines of his task. Soon after his arrival, he met with the Congress and League nominees who would serve with him as boundary commissioners. Mountbatten leapt into damage-control mode, emphasizing that the boundary commission was independent and would interpret the mandate to consider 'other factors' on its own. Like most of the maps presented to the commission, Congress's maps emphasized the distribution of population. Based on census figures, creatively interpreted, as well as certain elements of infrastructure, they argued that all of central Punjab and even areas of western Punjab should go to India. Sikh map uses blocks of colour to differentiate Muslim from Hindu/Sikh majority areas. The Muslim League submission concentrated on showing Muslim majority areas.
With conflict between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs reaching unprecedented levels in the mid-1940s, British leaders felt compelled to move towards decolonization. Punjab had played an outsized role in Indian affairs since the nineteenth century, even though it was one of the British raj's last acquisitions. The Muslim League exerted relatively little influence in the province until the 1940s. The history of the demand for a separate Muslim state is too complex to address fully here, but it is important to note that Muslim League statements never specified where Pakistan's boundaries would fall. British efforts to map South Asia were limited by British perceptions of the land under their control. The Survey's maps did not capture the diversity of relationships, within and across these boundaries that would be disrupted by partition. As a result, Survey maps were useful only up to a point.
Violence had been brewing in Punjab throughout 1946. A number of factors contributed to the carnage. One of the most important was the boundary award, specifically the timing of its announcement and rumours about its content. The government created a Punjab Boundary Force (PBF) to maintain law and order, but, undermanned and confronted by 'accurate sniping, bombing, and rifle and automatic fire', it was ineffective. Louis Mountbatten's press secretary, Alan Campbell-Johnson, accompanied the viceroy on a trip taken with Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabai Patel to view the mass migration in the border areas. Until the 17 August announcement, people in Punjab knew where the boundary line had fallen. The boundaries that Cyril Radcliffe defined turned out to be restless divisions, and in 1965 and 1971 wars India and Pakistan battled over their Punjabi border. Pakistani bitterness against India and Indian bitterness against Pakistan are facts of life in South Asia.