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The
Partition of India in 1947 was planned in thirty-six days by a British lawyer
who had never visited the country, and the boundaries he drew caused one of the
largest forced migrations in human history and a wave of communal violence that
killed up to two million people.
When
Britain announced in February 1947 that it would transfer power in India no
later than June 1948, the final decision to partition British India into the
independent states of India and Pakistan was made and the timeline was
subsequently compressed to August 1947, leaving fewer than six months for an
administrative operation of continental scale.
The
task of drawing the actual boundary lines between the new nations — through the
Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east — was assigned to Sir Cyril
Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never previously visited India, had no
specialist knowledge of the subcontinent, and arrived in Delhi for the first
time in July 1947. He was given thirty-six days to complete the boundary
demarcation.
Radcliffe
worked from maps and census data in an air-conditioned New Delhi office,
dividing communities, irrigation systems, railways, and family landholdings
along lines that he acknowledged were inevitably imperfect. The boundaries were
announced on August 17, 1947 — two days after independence was declared —
meaning that millions of people only learned which nation they now lived in
after the transition of power had already occurred.
The
announcement triggered a massive simultaneous movement of populations across
both new borders, as Muslims moved toward Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs moved
toward India, in a migration involving an estimated 10 to 15 million people.
The migration was accompanied by communal massacres of extraordinary brutality,
with trains arriving at stations carrying only the bodies of passengers killed
in transit. Estimates of the death toll range from 200,000 to 2 million, with
most scholarly assessments centered around 500,000 to 1 million. Radcliffe
burned all his papers before leaving India, leaving no record of the
deliberations behind his decisions. He never returned to India and reportedly
never spoke publicly about his role in the partition in any detail for the
remainder of his life.
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