Gurdaspur and Ferozepur dispute (1947)

How Muslim majority areas went to Modern India was among so many other mysteries surrounding the Formal Partition of the Punjab

On the 3rd of June in 1947, the British put forth a notional boundary to Partition Punjab based on the 1941 census and as most of the districts or tehsils touching rivers Sutlej and Beas were Muslim majority districts, the approach of how to split Punjab with any semblance of logic became next to impossible. Pakistani relatives tell their families that would huddle around the radio each evening in the summer of 1947 to hear the fate of the towns in the Punjab. It must have been a turbulent time not knowing as to which side of the International border you would end up with. They didn’t know about the British Raj but the Hindu population of the Dominion of India was opposed to Partition of British India. It reluctantly agreed to Establishment of Pakistan but raised hurdles at every juncture to create problems for the new fledged-country.

It was agreed that Muslim majority provinces would Constitute Pakistan. One of the blunders Pakistanis made was to agree to bifurcation of the United Punjab and United Bengal despite the fact that Muslims were in sizeable and comfortable majority there; Government of Pakistan should have insisted upon the whole provinces being given to it. What to talk of provinces, Pakistanis were handed over bifurcated districts.

This whole idea to bifurcate the Punjab and Bengal was initiated by Sardar Panikkar in October 1945 who was the prime minister of the State of Bikaner which was a state located within present-day Rajasthan. This idea was subsequently adopted by V.P. Menon and Sir Benegal Rau who worked with the Indian Viceroy’s office and had links with the Indian Congress party. It is nothing less than a joke that these two giant provinces were eventually Partitioned almost on the same pattern as suggested by these three gentlemen.

The Indian Viceroy Lord Wavell shared this bifurcation plan with London in February 1946 and then continued pressing the same scheme throughout 1946. London was not pleased with her "Crown of Jewels" whole idea of Partition of India and then bifurcation of the provinces; and thus PM Atlee’s government dismissed Wavell and replaced him by Lord Mountbatten who assumed charge on the 24th of March in 1946. Wavell’s reasons for giving the three tahsils of Gurdaspur to India was to protect Amritsar from being surrounded on all sides except the east by Pakistani territory. This is easily understood by looking at the maps. The most interesting point to note is that the Radcliffe Award was almost identical to Wavell’s Boundary-Demarcation Plan of 7 February 1946.

British India until then was relatively free of Hindu-Muslim riots. However, in early 1947, Amritsar, Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi, all cities experienced major riots which were controlled within a week with the use of the British Indian military but had resulted in the death of about 3,500 Desi people; a year earlier, Calcutta went through extensive rioting. On the 8th of March in 1947, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution drafted by Nehru which called for the division of the Punjab province due to the rising tension. The die had been cast.

The Congress and the Viceroy’s office were now on the same plane as far as thinking on the Partition of Punjab (1947) was concerned. The Attlee government was under a financial crunch and under American pressure to decolonize their British India respectively. Mountbatten thus advanced the date of Independence to August instead of June 1948.

The plan to Independence and creation of Pakistan was announced on the 3rd of June in 1947 by Mountbatten. Now the question of creating a boundary commission to bifurcate Punjab and Bengal came up. The Viceroy presented two options including one consisting of experts appointed through the United Nations to work in the commission. The Boundary award was announced on 17th of August in 1947 (British delayed the announcement for couple of days after the 15th of August, 1947). This raised controversy as to why there was a delay. A lot of writers on both sides mentioned that in the days prior to the release of the map, the Radcliffe Award was tilted in India's favor. Indian argument is that for all the economic loss that the Hindus and Sikhs suffered in losing their major business hubs of Lahore, Rawalpindi and Sialkot, plus the large tracts of Sikh owned farms in Lyallpur and Montgomery, that this "tilt" was a small token of recognition of their loss, a sort of consolation prize for the Indians. Also the award provided a buffer to protect Amritsar in case of a war, and thus the border is equidistant from Lahore and Amritsar. Pakistanis think the Radcliffe Award was completely unfair and that the borders were re-drawn despite having Muslim majority in Kasur tehsil, parts of Ferozepur and Gurdaspur districts each and that the final decision was different than what was originally discussed in June of 1947.

Neither the Wavell Line of the 7th of February in 1946 nor the notional boundary attached to the Second Schedule of the Indian Independence Act placed any of Ferozepur District in Pakistan. As the Maharajah of Bikaner told Mountbatten, an attempt to put the salient under Pakistani control would 'gravely prejudice' the water supply into northern Rajputana. Even an apolitical cotton farmer a 100 miles south at Khanewal could refer in late June to a Bahawalpur canal-head as being 'in Ferozepur district i.e. in Hindustan'. It never occurred to anybody- except Radcliffe and some local Muslim League activists- that the nominally Muslim-majority revenue divisions of an essentially Sikh district might be transferred to Pakistani control.

There is no way of knowing the precise reasoning behind Radcliffe's original decision. It appears from anecdotal evidence that he was particularly anxious to avoid disputes over water, given that the fertility of the Punjab depended on irrigation channels. He made various attempts during early August to have all common canal systems put under joint control but this proved politically impossible. Placing Ferozepur in Muslim hands may have been an attempt to give Pakistan some degree of control over one of its water sources, since the main headworks of the Sutlej Valley irrigated canal system were in Ferozepur catchment. It is also likely that Radcliffe wished to compensate for having given a small portion of Lahore district and most of Gurdaspur district to India, which had been done to prevent the Sikhs of Amritsar from being isolated. It is certainly true that in general the Radcliffe line favoured India. In the eyes of Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan, not only was their homeland being partitioned, but even the fringes were being gobbled up by Congress. Yet in practice it is hard to see how this could have been avoided, given the need to placate the justifiable anger of the Sikh minority. If the Sikhs' Holy city of Amritsar was and is to be located in present-day India, it was essential that it was not cut off in a hostile Pakistani sea. This inevitably meant that surrounding pieces of territory had to be allocated to the Indians, to the detriment of Pakistan. The Ferozepur salient may have been an attempt to redress the balance, but it was a dangerously misguided one, and Radcliffe was right to alter it. Pakistan would in the long term have gained little benefit from having to defend a strip of land that was in such a strategically vulnerable position.

On the 23rd of June, 1947 Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah told Mountbatten to instead appoint some distinguished member of the English Bar as chairman of the commission. Four days later, 48-year-old Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a barrister in London, with no previous experience of the problems in British India and who had never set foot in India, was agreed by all sides as the final arbitrator.

Against all norms of justice and fairplay, Pakistan accepted the giving of the three Gurdaspur tehsils to this Modern India without much protest. This was tragic and shocking and extremely unfair to the people of these tehsils who were massacred on a grand scale then by the Sikhs to expel the Muslims from the area.

The boundary commissions held public sittings in which lawyers on behalf of the Congress, the Muslim League, the Sikhs and other interested parties presented their cases. It is significant to record that Radcliffe did not preside over the public sittings, but only studied the records of the proceedings. As both the commissions did not reach an agreement, Radcliffe alone gave the awards, demarcating the boundaries of Punjab, Bengal and Sylhet. Radcliffe made his awards for Bengal and Punjab on August 12th and for Sylhet on August 13th. Mountbatten, however, did not release the Awards till the afternoon of the 16th of August, 1947. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah's comments on the Radcliffe Award were: "We have been squeezed in as much as it was possible." The most significant objections regarding the Radcliffe Award were that the tehsils of Ferozepur and Zira in Ferozepur districts, Nakodar and Jalandhar in Jalandhar district, Ajnala in Amritsar district and Gurdaspur and Batala in Gurdaspur district had Muslim majority and were almost contiguous to West Punjab, yet they were given to East Punjab or the Indian Punjab.

The British Raj were acting really fast and Radcliffe arrived in New Delhi on the 8th of July, 1947 and spent almost all his time at the Viceroy’s House there. He left India on the 16th of August after destroying all the papers of the boundary commission in his possession as he was told that his life would be in danger if he stayed and he never returned. He died in 1977 and never explained to anybody the details surrounding the bizarre Partition of Punjab that he proposed.

Regardless of what Pakistanis are told in Pakistan, the main concern on the mind of the Punjab boundary commission at all times was the presence of Sikhs. Every attempt was made not to hurt their interests. There was the Gurdaspur District which was contiguous to Sialkot and thus Pakistan and it had Muslim majority. There was absolutely no reason why this district should not have been given to Pakistan. It had four tehsils: 55.06% ☪ were Muslims in the Batala tehsil according to the 1941 census; 52.01% ☪ in Gurdaspur tehsil; 51.03% ☪ in Shakargarh tehsil and 40% ☪ in Pathankot tehsil, although the city of Pathankot itself was 54.36% ☪.

Transfer of Power was handed over to the locals by the British on the 15th of August, 1947. However, the boundary commission award about the bifurcation was given to the sides the next day which was made public on the 17th of August 1947. It was ironic that the nations were celebrating their independence without knowing their exact territories.

Except for the Shakargarh tehsil, the other three were given to the Hindu-Majority Indian Republic. Imagine the frustration of the Muslim population living in the latter three tehsils even after independence which was told that their areas would be part of the Republic of India, despite the Muslims being in majority. Against all norms of justice and fairplay, Government of Pakistanis accepted the giving of the three Gurdaspur tehsils to India without much protest. This was tragic and shocking and extremely unfair to the people of these tehsils who were massacred on a grand scale then by the Sikhs to expel the Muslims from the area.

Why were these three tehsils given to the Seceded India when two of them had Muslim majority? Pakistanis say that it was done to give India access to Srinagar through them. This is only partly true and perhaps not on anybody’s mind at the time as Pathankot tehsil was enough to give access to Srinagar and one did not need the other two tehsils to be given to India. The actual reason was the location of the Madhopur headworks of the Upper Bari Doab Canal which controlled the irrigation system of a vast tract within the Indian Punjab, a sizeable Sikh population in the area, and the Sikhs’ opposition of these tehsils being given to Pakistan as it would partition their community and Pakistan would get close to Golden Temple in Amritsar which was already surrounding it from the Lahore side.

Radcliffe in order to act fair awarded two Muslim tehsils (Ferozepur tehsil: 55.02% ☪; Zira tehsil: 65.02% ☪) from the Ferozepur District on the other side of Lahore where Muslims constituted 45% of the population which also had the Ferozepur Weir headworks on the Sutlej river. This was apparently an attempt by Radcliffe to balance the giving of one major headworks to the Indians in Gurdaspur by giving another to the Pakistanis in Ferozepur. The award of these two tehsils was conveyed to all by the boundary commission but as with so many other mysteries surrounding the Partition of Punjab, even the two tehsils after independence were given to India.

Stanley Woplert composes that Radcliffe in his underlying maps granted Gurdaspur locale to Pakistan yet one of Nehru's and Mountbatten's most prominent worries over the new Punjab fringe was to ensure that Gurdaspur would not go to Pakistan, since that would have denied India of direct street access to Kashmir. according to "The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture", a piece of UNESCO's Histories lead venture, as of late unveiled archives of the historical backdrop of the parcel uncover British complicity with the best Indian administration to wrest Kashmir from Pakistan. Alastair Lamb, in light of the investigation of as of late declassified records, has convincingly demonstrated that Mountbatten, allied with Nehru, was instrumental in pressurizing Radcliffe to grant the Muslim-larger part region of Gurdaspur in East Punjab to India which could give the Republic of India the main conceivable access to Kashmir. Andrew Roberts trusts that Mountbatten tricked over India-Pak Frontier and states that if gerrymandering occurred on account of Ferozepur, it isn't too difficult to trust that Mountbatten likewise pressurized Radcliffe to guarantee that Gurdaspur ended up in India to give India street access to Kashmir.

Perry Anderson expresses that Mountbatten, who was authoritatively expected to neither exercise any impact on Radcliffe nor to have any learning of his discoveries, mediated in the background – presumably at Nehru's command – to modify the honour. He had little trouble in getting Radcliffe to change his limits to dispense the Muslim-greater part region of Gurdaspur to India rather than Pakistan, along these lines giving India the main street access from Delhi to Kashmir.

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