Pakistan, partitioned from India, was predominantly agricultural, with as many Muslims outside its territory as there were Muslims within. It inherited problematic borders and a measly share, about 10 per cent, of the industry. All the large cities remained in India, including Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta. Even Lahore, with Hindus and Sikhs in majority, at one point, recalled Radcliffe in a conversation with Kuldip Nayar, was almost given to India, ‘…but then I realized that Pakistan would not have any large city. I had already earmarked Calcutta for India.’
New political terms
Furthermore, Pakistan got a poor share of the colonial government’s financial reserves—it inherited only 17.5 per cent of the financial assets. Its coffers were almost empty and virtually nothing was left for economic development. However, Jinnah, crestfallen and desolate at the outcome, continued to resolutely say, ‘better a moth eaten Pakistan than no Pakistan at all.’
And that was not all. The new international boundary cut across the basin, giving the upper reaches of the main Indus and its eastern tributaries to India while the lower reaches came to lie in Pakistan. The new frontier set forth new political conditions.
The constitutional provisions hitherto available for lower basin provinces to seek remedies against the upper provinces’ overuse of river waters, ceased to exist. Its vulnerability, as a lower riparian country, to what it considered a hostile India, quickly dawned upon Pakistan.
Thus, probably one of the first questions that the new government of Pakistan faced was riparian in nature: What would not a hostile India do? Jinnah’s thirst for partition overlooked the hydrological disadvantage. There is no evidence to suggest that whether Jinnah factored the waters except for an interesting fact that his paternal grandfather came from a ‘… decidedly well-watered province…’ of Kathiawad in Gujarat and was a native of Paneli not far from Porbandar, where Gandhi was born. Almost a decade after Partition, Wilfred Cantwell-Smith asked about Jinnah:
‘Is it not perhaps time to bring into question his statesmanship, his political sagacity, in view of his apparent failure to foresee— apparently even to try to foresee—the concrete outworking of his proposals? One is left with the impression that he had never studied a map of the Punjab or Bengal; let alone envisaged the former’s canal system.’
Nehru, much younger and healthier than Jinnah, lived to administer India through its formative stages until his death in 1964 and would oft say that India and Pakistan ‘. . . could not be enemies forever.’ During the torrid Partition process, Nehru and the Congress leaders were decidedly more alert to the significance of the canals and the headworks than Jinnah and the Muslim League hierarchy were. The perspectives of civil engineers like Sarup Singh and A.N. Khosla in the Punjab Irrigation Department, and Kanwar Sain in the Bikaner Irrigation Department, who had worked tirelessly to develop the canal system, also played an instrumental role in sensitizing the Congress political leadership to the criticality of utilization of the waters of the eastern rivers. They thereby regained the headworks, which would have gone to West Punjab had the Radcliffe Award not been intervened upon. The details of the Partition had its intrigue, manipulation and back-channel influence, but through tact and persuasion, the Congress leadership ensured that the Award maximized India’s position.
The Redcliffe Line
The business of literally drawing the line on the map was assigned to Cyril Radcliffe. The authorized pencil could not have been more historic than the one which Radcliffe wielded. With little time on his hand, merely five weeks since he arrived in India on 8 July, he had to draw what turned out to be the most tumultuous and tragic line. Radcliffe left India the day after he submitted the awards with a bitter taste in his mouth, possibly unconcerned but certainly helpless and frustrated and, as revealed later, burnt all the papers, and even refused to take his fees of a handsome 3000 pounds.
In a famous interview with Kuldip Nayar many years later, Radcliffe responding to a question said, ‘I had no alternative; the time at my disposal was so short that I could not do a better job…However, if I had two to three years, I might have improved on what I did.’
Bearing the brunt
It was the Punjab and Bengal provinces, with neither of the two having either Hindu or Muslim absolute majority, that had to face the brunt of an arbitrary map done in haste and without field surveys. But it was done and thus came about an inglorious end to ‘…what many Britons considered their finest achievement in Asia—the political unity of the sub-continent.’ Years later in 1966, W.H. Auden, the acclaimed Anglo– American poet, whose works had a major influence on the poetry of the twentieth century, in an unsparing poem on Radcliffe wrote: ‘The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not, Afraid, as he told his club, that he may get shot.
