Radcliffe Signed His Awards on 12 and 13 August 1947. Mountbatten Held Them Back Until After Independence Day So That, in His Own Words, the Odium Would Fall Less on the British

At five in the afternoon on 16 August 1947, Lord Mountbatten took the chair in the Council Chamber of Government House, New Delhi. With him were Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Liaquat Ali Khan and three other ministers. Copies of the boundary awards, two of them dated 12 August, had reached the ministers that morning. The minutes record Nehru on the Bengal award: the Chittagong Hill Tracts had gone to East Bengal, and “Sir Cyril Radcliffe had had no business to touch them.”

Radcliffe was not in the room. On the eve of independence he had written to his stepson on the Viceroy’s own notepaper. “After tomorrow evening,” he said, “nobody will ever again be allowed to use such stationery, and after 150 years British rule will be over in India.” The News on Sunday of Pakistan printed the letter, which comes from Marina Wheeler’s family history The Lost Homestead. A few lines on he wrote that “there will be roughly 80 million people with grievance who will begin looking for me.”

The short version of this story is the Radcliffe line drawn in five weeks, which gives the outline. This piece reads the awards against the papers of the time, above all volume XII of the British government’s series The Transfer of Power, which prints all three awards and Mountbatten’s own account of the week. For the colonial machinery that made a religious partition thinkable, see the divide that was designed. For the earlier cut through Bengal, see Lord Curzon and the partition of Bengal.

A date set in February and moved up in June

On 20 February 1947 the British government told Parliament of its “definite intention to take the necessary steps to effect the transference of power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June, 1948.” Mountbatten was named the next Viceroy in the announcements that day. Harold Macmillan, speaking for the Conservatives on 10 July in Churchill’s absence, said the fixed date “seemed to us an abdication of duty.” He added that “the partition of the Punjab fills us with apprehension, and partition of Bengal is a most delicate and dangerous undertaking.”

Power changed hands ten months before the deadline. The editors of the series credit the Viceroy’s sense of the timetable and mounting Indian pressure, “more especially Congress,” for “the effecting of transfer in August 1947.” On 10 May, they record, Nehru told Mountbatten he thought it very desirable that “there should be a transfer of power as soon as possible on a Dominion status basis.”

The day after the 3 June plan was announced, Mountbatten’s press attache Alan Campbell-Johnson noted that at a press conference the Viceroy “gave the first informal indication that 15th August would be the likely date.” On 1 August Mountbatten wrote that he was “more than ever convinced that if the date of transfer had been 1st October there would have been a serious risk of a complete breakdown before that date.” Campbell-Johnson drafted a broadcast marking the second anniversary of V-J Day, which he said would “drive home the double meaning of the 15th August.”

Both commissions had to fit that date. On 8 July, the day Radcliffe arrived, Mountbatten told his staff he wanted the work done by 14 August. Three days later he reported that “Nehru, Jinnah and the Boundary Commissions have all agreed that the work should be completed by the 15th August and Sir Cyril Radcliffe has concurred.”

Eight judges and a chairman who had to decide

The terms came from the Indian leaders. According to Mountbatten’s last Personal Report, dated 16 August, Nehru sent in the proposed terms on 12 June and Jinnah accepted them on 23 June. Each commission was “to demarcate the boundaries of the two parts” of its province “on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims,” and “also take into account other factors.” Nobody defined “other factors.” On 10 July the Partition Council agreed that no further direction would be given and that the commissions would interpret the words themselves.

On 27 June the leaders of both parties agreed that Radcliffe should chair both commissions. Campbell-Johnson credits Jinnah with the proposal. Each commission had four judges, two named by Congress and two by the Muslim League. In Punjab they were Mehr Chand Mahajan, Teja Singh, Din Muhammad and Muhammad Munir. In Bengal they were C. C. Biswas, B. K. Mukherjea, Abu Saleh Mohamed Akram and S. A. Rahman.

Radcliffe wrote that he attended none of the public sittings, which ran at Calcutta from 16 to 24 July and at Lahore from 21 to 31 July. He studied the daily record instead. At Simla, his report says “the divergence of opinion between my colleagues was so wide that an agreed solution of the boundary problem was not to be obtained.” The judges differed over “other factors” and “the weight and value to be attached to those factors.” They “assented to the conclusion that I must proceed to give my own decision.” In Bengal his colleagues “were unable to arrive at an agreed view on any of these major issues.”

What Radcliffe wrote that he was weighing

Radcliffe put the debatable ground between the Beas and Sutlej rivers on one side and the Ravi on the other. Canals there were “so vital to the life of the Punjab but developed only under the conception of a single administration.” There was also “the stubborn geographical fact of the respective situations of Lahore and Amritsar.”

He put his overriding of the majority rule on the record. East of the Sutlej, and in the angle of the Beas and Sutlej, lay “not inconsiderable areas” with Muslim majorities. He decided it “would be in the true interests of neither State” to give West Punjab “a strip on the far side of the Sutlej.” Railway and water systems “ought in this instance to displace the primary claims of contiguous majorities.” He could not keep the Upper Bari Doab Canal whole, and he hoped the two states would agree “some joint control” of canals, railways and the Mandi hydro-electric scheme. Conflicting aspirations, he wrote, belonged to “political arrangements with which I am not concerned.”

Lucy Chester finds the same order in both awards, with canals, headworks, roads, railways and ports discussed before population.

For Bengal, Radcliffe listed seven questions. They included who should have Calcutta and what control of the Nadia rivers the city’s port needed. Another was whether the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where he put the Muslim population at 3 per cent, could go to a different state from the district of Chittagong. He added that it was “quite impossible to draw a boundary under our terms of reference without causing some interruption” of railways and rivers.

On Lahore, Justice Din Muhammad wrote that to deprive West Punjab of it “would be tantamount to robbing a living organism of its heart.” Radcliffe told the journalist Kuldip Nayar in London in 1971, “I nearly gave you Lahore,” and that he gave it to Pakistan because Pakistan “would not have any large city” with Calcutta assigned to India. That is Nayar’s account of one conversation, with no notes to check.

Gurdaspur and the road to Kashmir

By 11 August Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Lord Ismay, had a verbal message from Liaquat Ali Khan, carried by the Pakistani cabinet secretary Mohamed Ali. If Gurdaspur district “or even a large part of it” went to East Punjab, Pakistan would see “a political and not a judicial decision,” and a breach of faith that could “imperil future friendly relations between Pakistan and the British.” Ismay replied that not even the Viceroy had received the award, and that the Viceroy had had nothing to do with the commissions.

The award gave India the Gurdaspur, Batala and Pathankot tahsils (sub-districts) and Pakistan the Shakargarh tahsil. One charge, that the line was bent to give India a road into Kashmir, can be tested against earlier papers. In February 1946, asked to sketch the Muslim areas, the then Viceroy, Wavell, telegraphed London that “Gurdaspur must go with Amritsar for geographical reasons,” because Amritsar, “being sacred city of Sikhs,” must stay out of Pakistan.

Amit Krishankant Paul, writing in ThePrint, adds that the Muslim League’s counsel, Zafrullah Khan, chose the tahsil as the unit of argument. In Zafrullah Khan’s memoir, as Paul quotes it, that choice would have won Pakistan the Ferozepur and Zira tahsils and enclosed Amritsar, but it risked Gurdaspur district, which the provisional boundary had left with Pakistan. Paul also cites Justice Munir’s 1960 statement that he and Din Muhammad knew “from the very beginning” that Gurdaspur would go to India. Paul argues one side, and we have not seen either source ourselves. Radcliffe’s own denial to Nayar was blunt: “I was not even aware of Kashmir.” Jinnah called the award “unjust, incomprehensible and even perverse” while telling Muslims to abide by it. Campbell-Johnson’s diary has the phrase on 6 September 1947, and Paul dates a Jinnah broadcast to 30 October. The first Kashmir war has its own piece.

The Ferozepur map

On 8 August Mountbatten’s private secretary, George Abell, sent the Punjab governor’s secretary a map and a note by Radcliffe’s private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, showing “roughly the boundary which Sir Cyril Radcliffe proposes to demarcate.” No copy survives on file, the editors say, though a 1968 letter from the Government of Pakistan says it holds both. Governor Evan Jenkins described them in April 1948 as showing “a sharp salient in the Ferozepore District” that “enclosed the whole of the Ferozepore and Zira Tahsils” in Pakistan. About 10 or 11 August, Jenkins wrote, a message from the Viceroy’s House told him: “Eliminate Salient.”

Mountbatten told Ismay in April 1948 that Abell had “sent the letter concerned without my knowledge” and that it “will look to have been an odd procedure.” Pressure was arriving at the same time. On 9 August Nehru forwarded a note by A. N. Khosla, chairman of the Central Waterways, Irrigation and Navigation Commission, which said it would be “most dangerous to let Ferozepore go to Pakistan.” In a telegram of 10 August, known from a later memoir, the Maharaja of Bikaner said the Ferozepur headworks fed his state’s Gang Canal. Mountbatten declined to forward Khosla’s note, writing on 10 August that he must not “prejudice the independence of the Boundary Commission,” and told Bikaner on 11 August that he had “absolutely nothing to do” with the findings. The award left the Ferozepur and Zira tahsils with India.

Pippa Virdee’s review of Chester’s book reports that Beaumont suggests Mountbatten did not shape the Gurdaspur line, and that Radcliffe “was certainly swayed by his opinions regarding Ferozepur.” Radcliffe told Nayar, by Nayar’s account, that there was no pressure on him over the line, only pressure to finish. The papers show who knew of the map and who sent the message, but not who changed the line.

The Hill Tracts, Darjeeling and Sylhet

The Bengal side of the crisis centred on the Hill Tracts. Mountbatten’s report says that on the evening of 12 August his Reforms Commissioner, V. P. Menon, warned him that Nehru and Patel “were both certain to blow up,” because they had told a delegation from the Hill Tracts that there was no question of the area going to Pakistan. Menon admitted, Mountbatten added, “that they had no possible authority for making such a statement.” Mountbatten wrote that a letter from Patel suggested the Hill Tracts people “would be justified in resisting this award by force,” and called it “so incredible” that he enclosed a copy.

On 16 August Nehru told the meeting that the Tracts were an excluded area whose people were roughly 97 per cent Buddhist and Hindu. Mountbatten answered that the Karnaphuli river and the Chittagong economy tied them to East Bengal. Fazlur Rahman of the Muslim League said the “contiguity” clause would not have allowed the Tracts to go to West Bengal at all. Liaquat Ali Khan, the minutes say, argued that Radcliffe “had completely ignored the fundamental basis of his terms of reference.”

Radcliffe’s third award, dated 13 August, split Sylhet after its referendum went to East Bengal. Giving East Bengal the Hailakandi area of Cachar, where Muslims were 51 per cent, would have left six non-Muslim police-station areas of Sylhet “completely divorced from the rest of Assam” and cut a railway. So he exchanged territory. Some non-Muslim areas went to East Bengal, while Hailakandi and Muslim-majority ground around Karimganj stayed in Assam.

Five days in a drawer

The leaders had asked for speed. At the Punjab Partition Committee on 20 July, the minutes have Mountbatten explaining that “the leaders of all parties at the centre had been insistent” that the award appear before 15 August. Two days later he wrote to Radcliffe that “we should all be grateful for every extra day earlier that you could manage,” and asked whether the 10th was possible. Radcliffe promised the 12th. On 21 July Jenkins had asked for warning of the award, saying “even a few hours warning would be better than none.” At a staff meeting on 9 August Mountbatten raised whether to publish right away, since the earlier it came out, the more the British would bear the blame for the disorder.

His report of 16 August is plain about what followed. Radcliffe told him on 12 August that the awards would be ready by noon next day. “From the purely administrative point of view,” Mountbatten wrote, early publication had advantages. “However, it had been obvious all along that, the later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British.” He had “deliberately refrained from reading” the Bengal award. Menon’s warning decided him: “somehow we must prevent the leaders from knowing the details of the award until after the 15th August.”

Campbell-Johnson’s diary adds a practical point. On 12 August he and John Christie called on Radcliffe and found the Sylhet award unfinished. It would be “physically very difficult” for all three to reach Mountbatten before he returned from Karachi on 14 August, and the texts could not be printed before the 16th. Mountbatten was “greatly relieved to have this ready-made solution at his disposal.”

He flew to Karachi on 13 August and told the governors of the split provinces to administer up to the provisional boundary until the awards were out. At the 16 August meeting Liaquat Ali Khan wanted the awards “published as they stood.” Nehru said he and his colleagues felt “in a moral impasse about the Chittagong Hill Tracts.” Campbell-Johnson records the moral Mountbatten drew: “the best evidence of its fairness seemed to rest in the undoubted equality of their displeasure.” A Gazette Extraordinary carried the awards on 17 August.

What the rumours did

Mountbatten’s report sums up what the Supreme Commander, Auchinleck, told the ministers on 16 August after a visit to the Punjab on the 14th. It begins: “Rumours as to the decisions of the Boundary Commission in the Punjab had been sufficient to start large scale rioting.” Around Amritsar, Auchinleck said, Sikh armed bands were raiding Muslim villages “at the rate of three or four each night.” Muslim bands in the Lahore district were “fewer in number” and “less well organised.” Up to 13 August, civilian casualties in the Punjab were “assumed to be about 1,500 killed and wounded.”

At the same meeting Patel’s view, as minuted, was that the only answer to the Punjab award was “a transfer of population on a large scale.” Everyone agreed that the communique would not mention any such proposal.

Nobody counted the dead. Yasmin Khan, in The Great Partition, writes that at least one million people were killed and that ten to fifteen million were forced from their homes.

What Radcliffe took home

“I had no alternative; the time at my disposal was so short that I could not do a better job,” Radcliffe told Nayar in 1971. Popular accounts say he refused his fee of 40,000 rupees and burned his papers. The fee story rests on secondary writing, and we found no archival record of it.

The editors of The Transfer of Power settle the papers question in a footnote to Radcliffe’s reports. They write that he confirmed, in a letter now held by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Research Department, “that he had destroyed his own notes and drafts in connection with the proceedings of the Boundary Commission and that he had in fact brought nothing at all of this sort home with him from India.” Another footnote says the original maps attached to his awards have not been traced, and that the maps printed in the volume come from Mountbatten’s own report on his viceroyalty, dated September 1948.