Five Weeks, One Barrister

Cyril Radcliffe was a successful London barrister who had run the Ministry of Information during the war. In June 1947 he was asked to chair the commissions that would divide Punjab and Bengal between India and Pakistan. He arrived in Delhi on 8 July. He had never been to India.

That was the qualification.

The reasoning was explicit: a man with no prior connection to the subcontinent would have no stake in the outcome and no relationships to honour. Both the Congress and the Muslim League nominees on the commissions were expected to disagree on everything, which they did, so the chairman would effectively decide, and he had to be seen as neutral.

He had about five weeks. He worked from census returns, district maps and the written submissions of the parties. He handed his awards to Mountbatten on 12 and 13 August. They were published on the seventeenth, two days after independence. He declined his fee of two thousand pounds, destroyed his working notes, left on 18 August and never returned to South Asia.

The timing is the part that reads worst and the brief is the part that matters.

Start with the timing. Mountbatten held the awards back through the independence ceremonies of 14 and 15 August. Accounts of why differ in their wording and arrive at the same destination: when the consequences began, the authority meeting them would be the new governments and not the departing power. Two days is not a long delay. It was long enough that the celebrations happened before anybody knew which side of a line their village was on.

Now the brief, which was incoherent rather than merely difficult.

Radcliffe was told to divide the provinces on the basis of contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims, and also to take into account other factors. The other factors were not defined.

In Punjab those other factors were not optional extras. The canal system was a single engineered network: headworks in one district watered land in several others, and a line separating a headwork from its command area destroys the irrigation of both sides. The rail network was built around junctions serving whole regions. Districts had religious majorities that reversed at the sub-district level, and sub-districts that reversed again below that.

So every line satisfying the majority criterion broke the infrastructure criterion, and every line protecting the infrastructure left large populations in the wrong state. There was no solution. There were only different distributions of damage.

This is why the counterfactual people reach for does not work. Give the commission a year and an Indian chairman who knew the canal system intimately, and you get a different line, better in some districts and worse in others, with millions of people still on the wrong side of it and a different set of villages burned.

The deadline was indefensible and it was not the cause. The cause was the decision to partition provinces along a religious criterion in regions where populations were interleaved, and that decision was taken by politicians, not by the barrister who was handed its arithmetic in July.

The destroyed notes are the lasting loss. We can see what the line did and we cannot ask why any particular village fell where it fell, which means the one document that would let anybody test the charge of bias in either direction no longer exists.