In his report in The Times of India of 14 August 2026, Jayanta Kalita delves into the Archives of TOI and narrates the events that led to the birth of India and Pakistan.. The post overlaps with relevant inputs from the internet as well as personal inferences
Why India, Pak rang in I - day with no clue about borders
If there ever was a man unfit to undertake an exercise of humongous proportions and significance - drawing a line through 175000 square miles (453247 sq km) of land, determine the fate of millions of people and carve two sovereign nations out of British India - it was none other than the British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe.
On a sweltering afternoon in July 1947, the 48 year old British barrister stepped off a plane at Delhi's Willingdon airfield (now Safdarjung airport). He had never been to India before. He spoke none of its languages. He had no training in cartography. He had little understanding of the intricate, centuries old social and cultural landscape he was about to redraw.
He was mandated to divide colonial India into two nations. The exercise split communities, set off one of history's largest and bloodiest mass migrations and left territorial disputes that haunt South Asia to this day.
Radcliffe drew the partition map in secrecy. He relied on outdated census data, flawed maps and an ink pen for the surgical strike. He masked his incompetence through working behind the shuttered windows of a secluded bungalow on the grounds of the viceroy's estate - now Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Even as the British Empire was making a hurried retreat - it was desperate to leave India before a civil war erupted on its watch - the Partition was sealed under the June 3 plan, spearheaded by Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India. The plan established two Boundary Commissions - one for Punjab in the west and another for Bengal in the east - both chaired by Radcliffe.
Their mandate appeared deceptively simple. Draw the boundaries of the two new dominions along areas where Muslims and non - Muslims formed contiguous majorities. But Radcliffe had found himself wedged between the fiercely competing political demands of Indian National Congress and Muslim League along with the irreconcilable claims over territory put forth by them and the unforgiving deadline of Mountbatten - August 15, 1947.
Radcliffe never visited the border lands he was tasked to divide. He was reportedly wary that his presence could fuel panic among communities already living through a hypercharged and highly volatile political crisis.
Mountbatten's Ploy and a Million Deaths
Radcliffe finally submitted his boundary reports on August 12. Making a calculated decision, Mountbatten locked the maps in a safe and suppressed the announcement. India and Pakistan declared independence on August 15 and 14, respectively without knowing where their international borders actually lay.
Like much of the country, villagers in Punjab's Gurdaspur and Bengal's Nadia and Dinajpur raised the Tricolour on August 15, 1947, believing they were finally living in an independent India. Days later, many discovered that a new boundary line had placed their homes and villages in a different country.
It was only on August 17, two days after the British flags were lowered and the victory parades concluded, that the Radcliffe line was publicly revealed.
The result was chaos. The confusion was profound
Families woke up to discover that their fields belonged to one country and their homes belonged to another.
Police stations, courts and revenue offices suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the divide. Entire pockets were left without a functioning administration. In the vacuum, panic spread quickly, followed by violence. Within days, an estimated 15 million people had fled across the borders.
Mission over, Radcliffe left India on August 18, 1947 - just a day after his boundaries were published.
Horrified by the violence that followed, in which around one million people are estimated to have died, he burned his field notes. He refused his 3000 Pounds Sterling fee and vowed never to return to the subcontinent.
World War One was one of the deadliest conflicts in the history of the human race, in which over 16 million people died.
World War II was the largest and most violent military conflict in human history.. 70 million to 85 million people had died during World War II. This total includes roughly 21 million to 25 million military deaths and 45 million to 55 million civilian deaths, driven by combat, genocide, famine, and disease.
A cavalier approach means a careless, dismissive or overly casual attitude toward serious matters, important rules or other people's feelings. It shows a lack of proper concern and a tendency to ignore potential risks or consequences.
No doubt, Radcliffe's approach was cavalier. He proclaimed it loudly with his deeds. He was the perfect fit for the British who hated the Indians for driving them out of India. Retribution is what the British longed for. They had, for almost two centuries, lorded it over India with their 'divide and rule policy'. They left India after dividing it into two nations, that were to remain, perpetually at loggerheads. It suited their interests, especially business interests. It suited the interests of the Arm Merchants who invented the first World War. With the carrot of independence dangled by the British, the Indians unwittingly fell for the trap. India that had been one for centuries together was carved into two. Later the two became three with the inception of Bangladesh. Imagine what a super power India would have been if the British had been unsuccessful in dividing the great nation.
Radcliffe awarded the Muslim majority tehsils of Gurdaspur district to India. It was bitterly protested by Pakistan. The decision gave India its only vital land corridor with the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The Chittagong hill tracts, a region with a predominantly indigenous Buddhist population with ethnic ties with India's Northeast was awarded to East Pakistan to secure the hinterland for the Chittagong Port, creating long term ethnic displacement in the area.
The worst was the validation of the centuries old land gambling stakes, between the Kingdom of Cooch Bihar and the Mughal empire in the east, by the Radcliffe line in Bengal. Local legend had implied that the complex system of border enclaves between Cooch Bihar and Mughal territories (or Rangpur) originated from chess or dice games where regional rulers wagered local villages and pockets of land as stakes. The result was a bewildering constellation of enclaves - 111 patches of Indian territory inside East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and 51from the the other side inside India.
For the seven decades that ensued, tens of thousands of residents in these enclaves lived as virtual non citizens They were unable to access basics like electricity, healthcare or state protection.
For any job you need a person who is well versed on the demands of the job. If he doesn't know anything about it he is trained well and then is placed on the hot seat. It enables him to perform well. Radcliffe might have been a very good and clever barrister. But he didn't know any thing about the onerous task he was assigned. It is like placing one who doesn't know driving on the driving seat or placing someone with no idea of accounting as the accountant of a reputed Institution. He would blindly affix his signature on all the documents presented before him - exactly what the people who put him there desperately needed. Radcliffe was merely a signing machine. He happily did that and had sent one million to their deaths. He cannot absolve himself from the senseless act that displaced15 million people who never knew what had hit them
Cyril Radcliffe did exactly what the British desired.
With his cruel intervention, he finished India, the great country, for good.
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