70 Years of the Radcliffe Line: Understanding the Story of Indian Partition

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• ostensibly

• Although the boundary was finalized on August 12, it was published on August 17, 1947, ostensibly to avoid confusion on independence day itself, and in order to buy more time to manage the chaos that was sweeping throughout the provinces of Bengal and Punjab.

• The basic principle underlying the border, and the decision to partition India itself, was the two nation theory,

• In other words, the Muslim League wanted the Muslim-majority provinces of British India to form their own country.

• Having themselves started the ball rolling on the notion of partition on the basis of religious demographics, the Muslim League could hardly go against this principle on the provincial level, although ultimately Pakistan’s inability to retain the entirety of two of India’s most fertile and prosperous provinces was problematic for the new state’s prosperity. H

• Islam was followed by around 25 percent of the subcontinent’s population. The vast majority of Indian Muslims were native converts, who became Muslim as India gradually came under the rule of Islamic dynasties from Persia and Central Asia, especially after the 12th century.

• The British province of Bengal, was briefly partitioned into two halves, Hindu in the west, and Muslim in the east, between 1905 and 1911

• Mountbatten officially became viceroy on March 24, 1947

• une 3 Plan, which, allowed, among other things, for the Provincial Legislative Assemblies of Punjab and Bengal to decide whether they wanted their provinces to be partitioned or not, and if so, start a process by which the Governor General of India would appoint a boundary commission to demarcate borders.

• The Indian Independence Act, which received royal assent on July 18, set in stone the partition of India

• While Radcliffe’s commission was mainly interested in demarcating the border on the basis of religious demography, other considerations, such as strategic roads and irrigation patterns were also sometimes considered, usually in a way that benefited India. For example, the Muslim majority district of Murshidabad in Bengal was given to India in order to keep the water route from Calcutta to the Ganges in India. To make up for this, the Hindu majority district of Khulna was included in what is today Bangladesh.

• Moreover, in Bengal, a thin corridor of Muslim majority areas was given to India on the border with today’s Bangladesh, in order to connect the northern and southern parts of West Bengal and connect northeastern India with the rest of the country.

• In Punjab, the Muslim majority district of Gurdaspur was mostly granted to India, something that soon proved advantageous to India because a direct route to the then princely state of Jammu and Kashmir ran through there, making it possible for India to annex it in 1948.

• . Any line would have been somewhat arbitrary and caused difficulties for the people living in Bengal and Punjab. The haste of the partition — Radcliffe had little more than a month to draw the boundary — has often been criticized, but the boundary did a fairly good job of demarcating frontiers on the basis of religious demography