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Revision as of 05:01, 20 June 2006
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The Radcliffe Line became the border between India and Pakistan in 1947. The partition of the British Indian Empire required that the territories to be assigned to the two new countries, generally had to have a population matching the majority. Pakistan was set up as a Muslim state while India was predominantly Hindu.
The border had already been roughly drawn up by Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India, but the final version was set out by Sir Cyril Radcliffe. Radcliffe had never visited India and didn't know anybody in India before his arrival. Thus, he was considered to be unbiased. However, he was ignorant of realities on the ground and this caused avoidable gaffes in the division. For example, there were instances where the border was drawn leaving some parts of a village in India and some in Pakistan. There were even instances where the dividing line passed through a single house with some rooms in one country and others in the other. Radcliffe's justification for such a casual division was that no matter what he did, people would suffer. He also had to work in a very short time period so there was little point in being careful where exactly the border lay. He made no real attempt to ensure that the border skirted villages or was drawn between thickly populated areas instead of right through them. Radcliffe has been accused of being completely unconcerned about the sufferings of the Indians. The division was done in secret, and the British government allowed no Indians to review it, since disputes were bound to have arisen then and it would delay the Partition.
There were two major disputes regarding the Radcliffe Line, the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Gurdaspur District. Chittagong Hill Tracts had a majority non-Muslim population, but was given to Pakistan while Gurdaspur, with a Muslim majority was given to India. The rationale of giving Chittagong Hill Tracts to Pakistan was to provide some buffer area to Chittagong (now in Bangladesh) a major city and port. In Radcliffe's initial proposal, Gurdaspur District was to be in Pakistan, but at the insistence of Lord Mountbatten it was changed so that, if the kingdom of Kashmir wanted to integrate with the Indian Union, it would be accessible to India. At the same time it would provide buffer to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar which otherwise would be surrounded by Muslim territory.c
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