South Asian and Middle Eastern Border Disputes

When British India was partitioned in 1947 into the independent states of India and Pakistan, the task of drawing the new boundary through the provinces of Punjab and Bengal fell to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never previously visited India and was given roughly five weeks to complete the work using out-of-date maps and census data. The line he produced, made public on 17 August 1947, two days after independence, became known as the Radcliffe Line. Because it split districts, villages, and even individual families along religious lines with little transition period, it triggered one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in modern history: an estimated ten to twenty million people crossed the new border in each direction, and communal violence during Partition is estimated to have killed between one and two million people.