When a ‘neutral umpire’ almost gave Lahore to India
India Independence Day: Partition of India, which marked the end of the British Raj, was a hasty, if not botched, affair, so it may sound strange to know Lord Mountbatten, who literally took Partition through, said he wanted an unified India. He said he tried everything to stop the partition. He even said that he regretted it but had no choice.
Speaking to veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar, the last British Viceroy and Governor-General of India accepted that he could not «hold» the country and had to hasten the Independence process, leading to a massacre that killed nearly two million people.
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The date was pushed from the original June 6, 1948 to 10 months prior, August 15, 1947. And now, the British had a daunting task of dividing one India into two parts, in two independent nations – India and Pakistan. And all in 36 days.
Interestingly, the man chosen for the task was Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never even been to India before.
Although drawing a line between India and Pakistan may seem simple in words, this line drawn 78 years ago continued to shape the relationship between the two nations. Radcliffe, the boundary chairman, had, as Nayar writes in his book 'Scoop', «no fixed rules to go by when he drew the boundaries between India and Pakistan».
All the way from Inner temple to India
Imagine waking up in a foreign land and suddenly realizing that the fate of nearly 40 crore people lies in your hands. Radcliffe, a lawyer from the Inner Temple,
