New Delhi: Just weeks before India became independent, a British lawyer with no prior experience of India was given one of the Partition’s toughest tasks – drawing the borders between India and Pakistan.
The leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League knew that deciding the boundary could lead to prolonged disagreements. The responsibility was eventually handed to Radcliffe, one of Britain’s leading lawyers at the time. He needed to draw an average of about 30 miles of boundary every day to complete the assignment within the available time, according to Freedom at Midnight.
Years later, he defended his decisions in an interview with veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar. “I had no other option. I had so little time that I could not have done a better job.
However, if I had two or three years, perhaps I could have done my work better,” he said. Radcliffe also said, “If some people’s expectations were not fulfilled, the reason must lie in the political decisions with which I had nothing to do.”
The next day, he handed one envelope to Nehru and another to Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. The two leaders went into separate rooms to study the maps.
