Editing Radcliffe Line (section)

===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}}