Five Weeks to Draw a Border
Cyril Radcliffe had never been to India. He was given five weeks and out-of-date maps. A fifth of humanity still lives with the line, and two nuclear states defend it.
Cyril Radcliffe was given five weeks to draw the border between India and Pakistan.
He had never been to India. He arrived in July 1947, was handed out-of-date maps and census returns, worked in a bungalow in the heat, and produced a line that cut through Punjab and Bengal. He left the subcontinent the day the line was published and never returned. He later burned his papers and declined his fee.
Between ten and twenty million people were displaced. Somewhere between one and two million were killed. It remains the largest mass migration in human history.
A man with no knowledge of a place, working for five weeks from bad maps, determined where a fifth of humanity would live and who they would die alongside. And the resulting line is now treated as a fact of nature, defended by two nuclear-armed states.
That is the nation-state in the Muslim world, in one biography.
To question the arrangement now sounds close to unserious. States have borders, borders are sovereign, citizens belong to states. This is simply how the world is organised, and the assumption runs so deep that the question sounds like a category error rather than a question.
It is not how the world has always been organised. The nation-state is an invention, it is European, it is recent, and it was built to solve a specific European problem.