Bhanu Chak is a typical village in the heart of Punjab, the land of five rivers, with a civilisational history dating back to the Indus Valley civilization. Located in the middle of lush wheat and mustard fields, it is the first Pakistani village along the high chain-link border fencing with India. Before Pakistan’s creation, its demography was similar to the rest of Punjab. Muslims had a slight numeric edge but lived harmoniously with their Hindu and Sikh neighbours. Harmonious coexistence was the norm across rural Punjab before the British divide-and-rule policy created bad blood and became one of the reasons for the division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan.
Cyril Radcliffe, an English lawyer, drew the unnatural border between the two countries, splitting homes, villages, fields, rivers, bridges, and pastures. The Radcliffe Line sliced through Bhanu Chak, ending its significance as a thriving village halfway between Lahore and Amritsar along the storied Grand Trunk (GT) Road, which connected Kabul (Afghanistan) to Chittagong (now in Bangladesh), around 3000 km away, until 1947. Trade thrived along the road for centuries, bringing prosperity to the villages and towns abutting it before border controls became more rigid with each India–Pakistan conflagration. Indian farmers uprooted from the border villages would cultivate their fields on the Pakistani side until 1971, when Pakistan lost its eastern wing (now Bangladesh) in the war with India.
The cross-border movements have since become impossible, more so for ordinary village folks such as the residents of Bhanu Chak, whose ancestors were uprooted from Alwar and Bharatpur in India due to the violence the subcontinent division unleashed in 1947. Bhanu Chak briefly emerged from obscurity in 1999, when it was chosen as the venue for a 19-gun salute ahead of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to inaugurate the Delhi–Lahore bus service. The visit was the first by an Indian leader to Pakistan in 10 years.
How Britain’s hasty exit from India led to fragmentation and anarchy
Vajpayee’s visit raised the hopes of the divided families. But little has changed since. Crossing the border to meet their relatives remains a dream for most divided families as it was in 1999. A usual pattern has followed in India–Pakistan ties. Crisis after crisis has had the two countries go one step forward and two steps back, under the long shadow of Britain’s hasty exit from India that condemned some 400 million people to fragmentation and anarchy.
Cyril Radcliffe knew what he had wrought. He burned all his papers, refused his fee of 40,000 rupees, a fortune at that time, and immediately left after the completion of the six-week task in August 1947. He acknowledged that roughly 80 million people with grievances would begin looking for him. He did not want them to find him. It would become his first and last stay in India. In July 1947, Cyril Radcliffe arrived in India for the first time to draw the border. He did not know much about the regions he was supposed to divide. Radcliffe did not have the luxury of time to study them either.
How Britain Drew Borders in Haste
Cyril Radcliffe spent most of the six weeks in a Delhi bungalow, struggling with heat and humidity. He relied on demographics and census tables for the division. He would later accept that it would have taken years to settle on a proper boundary, which considered natural features, canal headworks, communications, and culture. Cyril Radcliffe, who described the unforgiving Indian summer as a foretaste of ‘the mouth of hell’, would never return to the Indian subcontinent. He suspected he would be shot if he did, as his haphazard division triggered violence at a scale never seen before.
As the last British viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, whom historian Andrew Roberts described as a ‘mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’, presided over Britain’s calamitous and hasty exit from India in 1947 after over a century-long rule. The historian Alex von Tunzelmann concluded the rush was Mountbatten’s, and his alone. Derided as ‘Master of Disaster’ in British naval circles, Mountbatten, a naval officer and British royal family member, came from a small group of upper- and middle-class men from which the British imperial rulers were recruited.
Author Pankaj Mishra writes that these men like Mountbatten were abysmally equipped for their immense responsibilities, but Britain’s brute imperial power nevertheless allowed them to blunder through the world. In ‘Notes on the English Character’, English author EM Forster blamed Britain’s political fiascos on its privately educated men, callow beneficiaries of the country’s elitist public school system. He wrote that these eternal schoolboys, whose ‘weight is out of all proportion’ to their numbers, are certainly overrepresented among Tories.
From Ireland to India: Britain’s Borders of Conflict
In 1921, borders were imposed on Ireland, England’s first colony, to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in a part of the country, leading to decades of violence that claimed thousands of lives before a peace agreement in 1998. The British arbitrarily redrew borders in Asia and Africa, causing endless suffering.
In 1915, British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes slid his finger across a map on the table as he explained a plan to Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith about drawing a line from Acre on what is now Israel’s Mediterranean coast to Kirkuk in Iraq as their sphere of influence. A year later, Sykes and French lawyer-diplomat François Georges-Picot secretly finalised the plan by hammering out the Sykes-Picot accord as their spoils of the First World War.
Sykes and Picot arbitrarily drew straight lines with a pencil and a ruler on the region’s map. The territories they marked as ‘A’ went to France and ‘B’ to Britain. The boundaries that divided them ignored local identities and preferences, spawning problems that West Asia continues to grapple with. The Sykes-Picot accord placed Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine under British and Syria and Lebanon under French influence, depriving Arabs of the freedom Britain promised them in exchange for joining hands against their Ottoman rulers.
The borders were redrawn to deepen conflict. In Ireland, between Protestants and Catholics, between Kurds and Arabs, Shias and Sunnis in West Asia, and Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. In Lebanon, boundaries were drawn to ensure the country was a haven for Christians and Druze. The Bekaa Valley on the Lebanon-Palestine border was effectively left to Shias. Syria was carved out with Sunnis as the biggest sectarian group. The arbitrarily drawn boundaries changed Arab politics, shifting focus to assertive nationalism. Weak public institutions and tiny civil societies in these countries made them susceptible to coups and instability.
The Colonial Borders That Still Haunt the World
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration promised a national home for Jews in Palestine, assuring existing ‘non-Jewish communities there’ that ‘nothing shall be done’ to prejudice their civil and religious rights. The promise was meant to be broken. The British colonizers encouraged Jewish migration to Palestine, increasing it from 9% in 1922 to 27% in 1935. The native Arabs accounted for 90% of the Palestinian population in 1917. The situation changed with Nakba (catastrophe) when an estimated 750,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians were forced out of their homes in 1948 for Israel’s creation. The West’s unqualified support for Israel has meant that the violent continuity of the colonial architecture in Palestine.
In India, the British first announced independence by June 1948, before suddenly proclaiming, exactly a year earlier, that the transfer of power would happen on August 15, 1947. Mountbatten himself called it a ‘ludicrously early date’, leaving just over a month for Cyril Radcliffe to recreate the political geography, drawing borders for Pakistan with eastern and western wings separated by roughly 1,600 kilometres of Indian territory.
Radcliffe, who was bestowed knighthood a year later, in 1948, did not visit any villages, communities, rivers, or forests he had demarcated. He divided agricultural hinterlands from port cities. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were suddenly reduced to a religious minority on either side of the new borders. The violence that followed left up to tens of thousands dead and created the world’s largest refugee population across the Radcliffe Line. Months after the botched partition, India and Pakistan fought the first of the wars over Kashmir.
Freedom from the British in August 1947 meant nothing to the millions who were either killed or uprooted because of the violence. It brought with it the onerous task for the two newly created nation-states of rehabilitating millions of scarred refugees. India and Pakistan have since spent more on defence than on healthcare and education in a region that continues to underperform on core human development indicators, including literacy, life expectancy, nutrition, maternal and child mortality, and per capita income.
