Editing Radcliffe Line (section)

==Problems in the process==

===Boundary-making procedures===
[[File:Map India and Pakistan 1-250,000 Tile NH 43-2 Lahore.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|right|The Punjabi section of the Radcliffe Line]]
All lawyers by profession, Radcliffe and the other commissioners had all of the polish and none of the specialized knowledge needed for the task. They had no advisers to inform them of the well-established procedures and information needed to draw a boundary. Nor was there time to gather the survey and regional information. The absence of some experts and advisers, such as the United Nations, was deliberate, to avoid delay.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|p=482}}: "After the obligatory wrangles, with Jinnah playing for time by suggesting calling in the United Nations, which could have delayed things for months if not years, it was decided to set up two boundary commissions, each with an independent chairman and four High Court judges, two nominated by Congress and two by the League."</ref> Britain's new Labour government "deep in wartime debt, simply couldn't afford to hold on to its increasingly unstable empire."<ref>{{harvnb|Mishra, Exit Wounds|2007|loc=para. 19}}: "Irrevocably enfeebled by the Second World War, the British belatedly realized that they had to leave the subcontinent, which had spiraled out of their control through the nineteen-forties. ... But in the British elections at the end of the war, the reactionaries unexpectedly lost to the Labour Party, and a new era in British politics began. As von Tunzelmann writes, 'By 1946, the subcontinent was a mess, with British civil and military officers desperate to leave, and a growing hostility to their presence among Indians.' ... The British could not now rely on brute force without imperiling their own sense of legitimacy. Besides, however much they 'preferred the illusion of imperial might to the admission of imperial failure,' as von Tunzelmann puts it, the country, deep in wartime debt, simply couldn't afford to hold on to its increasingly unstable empire. Imperial disengagement appeared not just inevitable but urgent."</ref> "The absence of outside participants—for example, from the United Nations—also satisfied the British Government's urgent desire to save face by avoiding the appearance that it required outside help to govern—or stop governing—its own empire."{{sfn|Chester, The 1947 Partition|2002|loc="Boundary Commission Format and Procedure section", para. 5}}

===Political representation===
The equal representation given to politicians from Indian National Congress and the Muslim League appeared to provide balance, but instead created deadlock. The relationships were so tendentious that the judges "could hardly bear to speak to each other", and the agendas so at odds that there seemed to be little point anyway. Even worse, "the wife and two children of the Sikh judge in Lahore had been murdered by Muslims in Rawalpindi a few weeks earlier."<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|loc=483, para. 1}}</ref>

In fact, minimizing the numbers of Hindus and Muslims on the wrong side of the line was not the only concern to balance. The Punjab Border Commission was to draw a border through the middle of an area home to the Sikh community.<ref>population?</ref> Lord Islay was rueful for the British not to give more consideration to the community who, in his words, had "provided many thousands of splendid recruits for the Indian Army" in its service for the crown in World War I.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|p=485}}</ref> However, the Sikhs were militant in their opposition to any solution which would put their community in a Muslim ruled state. Moreover, many insisted on their own sovereign state, something no one else would agree to.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|pp=484–485}}: "After the 3 June 1947 plan had been announced, the main Sikh organization, the Shiromani Akali Dal, had distributed a circular saying that 'Pakistan means total death to the Sikh Panth [community] and the Sikhs are determined on a free sovereign state with the [rivers] Chenab and the Jamna as its borders, and it calls on all Sikhs to fight for their ideal under the flag of the Dal.'"</ref>

Last of all, were the communities without any representation. The Bengal Border Commission representatives were chiefly concerned with the question of who would get Calcutta. The Buddhist tribes in the [[Chittagong Hill Tracts]] in Bengal had no official representation and were left totally without information to prepare for their situation until two days after the partition.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|p=481}}</ref>

Perceiving the situation as intractable and urgent, Radcliffe went on to make all the difficult decisions himself. This was impossible from inception, but Radcliffe seems to have had no doubt in himself and raised no official complaint or proposal to change the circumstances.<ref name="Read, p. 482" />

===Local knowledge===
Before his appointment, Radcliffe had never visited India and knew no one there. To the British and the feuding politicians alike, this neutrality was looked upon as an asset; he was considered to be unbiased toward any of the parties, except of course Britain.<ref name="Read, p. 482" /> Only his private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, was familiar with the administration and life in Punjab. Wanting to preserve the appearance of impartiality, Radcliffe also kept his distance from [[Lord Mountbatten|Viceroy Mountbatten]].<ref name="Read, p.483" />

No amount of knowledge could produce a line that would completely avoid conflict; already, "sectarian riots in Punjab and Bengal dimmed hopes for a quick and dignified British withdrawal".<ref>{{harvnb|Mishra, Exit Wounds|2007|loc=para. 4}}</ref> "Many of the seeds of postcolonial disorder in South Asia were sown much earlier, in a century and half of direct and indirect British control of large part of the region, but, as book after book has demonstrated, nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable."<ref>{{harvnb|Mishra, Exit Wounds|2007|loc=para. 5}}</ref>

===Haste and indifference===
Radcliffe justified the casual division with the [[truism]] that no matter what he did, people would suffer. The thinking behind this justification may never be known since Radcliffe "destroyed all his papers before he left India".{{sfn|Chester, The 1947 Partition|2002|loc="Methodology", para. 1}} He departed on Independence Day itself, before even the boundary awards were distributed. By his own admission, Radcliffe was heavily influenced by his lack of fitness for the Indian climate and his eagerness to depart India.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|p=484}}: Years later, he told Leonard Mosley, "The heat is so appalling, that at noon it looks like the blackest night and feels like the mouth of hell. After a few days of it, I seriously began to wonder whether I would come out of it alive. I have thought ever since that the greatest achievement which I made as Chairman of the Boundary Commission was a physical one, in surviving."</ref>

The implementation was no less hasty than the process of drawing the border. On 16 August 1947 at 5:00 pm, the Indian and Pakistani representatives were given two hours to study copies, before the Radcliffe award was published on 17 August.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|p=.494}}</ref>

===Secrecy===
To avoid disputes and delays, the division was done in secret. The final Awards were ready on 9 and 12 August, but not published until two days after the partition.

According to Read and Fisher, there is some circumstantial evidence that Nehru and Patel were secretly informed of the Punjab Award's contents on 9 or 10 August, either through Mountbatten or Radcliffe's Indian assistant secretary.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|p=490}}</ref> Regardless of how it transpired, the award was changed to put a salient portion of the non-Muslim majority [[Firozpur district]] (consisting of the two Muslim-majority [[tehsil]]s of [[Firozpur]] and [[Zira, Punjab|Zira]]) east of the Sutlej canal within India's domain instead of Pakistan's.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Singh |first=Kirpal |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/select-documents-on-partition-of-punjab-1947/page/n33/mode/2up?view=theater |title=Select Documents on Partition of Punjab – 1947: India and Pakistan: Punjab, Haryana and Himachal-India and Punjab-Pakistan. |publisher=National Book Shop |year=2006 |isbn=9788171164455 |location=New Delhi |pages=xxvi–xxvii |chapter=Introduction |access-date=4 April 2022}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=French |first=Patrick |url=https://archive.org/details/libertyordeath00fren/page/328/mode/2up?view=theater |title=Liberty or Death : India's Journey to Independence and Division |publisher=Flamingo |year=1998 |location=London |pages=328–330 |isbn=9780006550457 |access-date=4 April 2022}}</ref> There were two apparent reasons for the switch: the area housed an army arms depot,<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Datta |first=Vishwa Nath |author-link=Vishwa Nath Datta |year=1998 |title=The Punjab Boundary Commission Award (12 August, 1947) |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44147058 |journal=Proceedings of the Indian History Congress |volume=59 |pages=860 |jstor=44147058 |access-date=4 April 2022 |quote=It seems that Radcliffe had wanted to compensate Pakistan for having given a small portion of Lahore District and most of Gurdaspur to India, but he changed his mind. Firozpur was an important cantonment area, the major military bastion south of the Sutlej, and a junction point where four railway lines and three high ways met to cross the barrage-cum-bridge towards Kasur and Lahore. Perhaps geographical and strategic considerations weighed with Radcliffe. }}</ref> and contained the headwaters of a canal which irrigated the princely state of Bikaner, which would accede to India.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Altaf |first=Muhammad |year=2021 |title=Colonial Hydraulic Infrastructure, Princely States, and the Partition of the Punjab |url=http://pu.edu.pk/images/journal/HistoryPStudies/PDF_Files/08-v34_2_2021.pdf |journal=Journal of the Punjab University Historical Society |volume=34 |issue=2 |pages=128–131}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Mansergh |first=Nicolas |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/indiatransferofp12nich/page/638/mode/2up?view=theater |title=Constitutional Relations between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power 1942–7 |publisher=Her Majesty's Stationery Office |year=1983 |volume=XII |location=London |pages=638, 645, 662 |chapter=The Maharaja of Bikaner to Rear-Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma: Telegram (10 August 1947) |access-date=4 April 2022}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Sadullah |first=Mian Muhammad |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sPYYAQAAIAAJ&q=bikaner |title=The Partition of the Punjab, 1947: A Compilation of Official Documents |publisher=National Documentation Centre |year=1983 |volume=2 |location=Lahore |pages=202–210 |chapter=Arguments of the Bikaner State |access-date=4 April 2022}}</ref>

===Implementation===
After the partition, the fledgling governments of India and Pakistan were left with all responsibility to implement the border. After visiting Lahore in August, Viceroy Mountbatten hastily arranged a [[Punjab Boundary Force]] to keep the peace around Lahore, but 50,000 men was not enough to prevent thousands of killings, 77% of which were in the rural areas. Given the size of the territory, the force amounted to less than one soldier per square mile. This was not enough to protect the cities much less the caravans of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were fleeing their homes in what would become Pakistan.<ref>{{harvnb|Read & Fisher, The Proudest Day|1998|pp=487–488}}</ref>

Both India and Pakistan were loath to violate the agreement by supporting the rebellions of villages drawn on the wrong side of the border, as this could prompt a loss of face on the international stage and require the British or the UN to intervene. Border conflicts led to three wars, in [[Indo-Pakistani War of 1947|1947]], [[Indo-Pakistani War of 1965|1965]], and [[Indo-Pakistani War of 1971|1971]], and the [[Kargil War|Kargil conflict of 1999]].