Even before 1947, the concept of dividing a country into two was not new to India. India had known it earlier in 1905 with the bifurcation of Bengal. But the partition of India in 1947, into India and Pakistan, was unique in multitudinous ways: No other country in the world was ever before divided on the basis of religion. Besides, mass migration of the kind, before the partition of India, was unknown to the world. Germany and Korea had been through the process of division, but they did not experience the kind of calamity. ‘Partitioning two lives is difficult enough. Partitioning millions is madness’. The partition of India was not merely a historical fact but it was an example of Indian tendency to forget everything that brings with it some kind of agony. India seems to be scared recalling the memory of the unpleasant past, unlike the other countries of the world. Japan commemorates every year the atomic attack that has destroyed it. India rarely remembers that China has defeated her in the recent past. The political history of the event describes hundreds of problems as the instant by-products of the partition; each of them is deeply rooted in the helplessness of the humanity. The time from June 3, 1947 – when the partition was announced – to August 15, 1947, the date of the transfer of power to the two new dominions was seventythree days in all. ‘There were exactly 73 days before 15 August in which to draw up the divorce paper.’ 3 It took only a few days to locate the problems and set up the machinery of division of India. Within this period a host of problems had to be solved and innumerable administrative tasks had to be undertaken and to be concluded. With a bare five weeks in which to decide (Radcliffe arrived in India on July 8, 1947, and the awards was announced on August 16, 1947) and geographically fix the limits of India and Pakistan. ‘Radcliffe knew virtually nothing about India’. He got down to the momentous task of deciding a boundary that would divide a dominion of more than 35 million people, thousands of villages, towns and cities, a unified and integrated system of canals and communications, and 16 million Muslims, 15Million Hindus and 5 million Sikhs, who despite their religious contrariety shared a common culture, language and history. ‘Cyril Radcliffe’s scalpel had severed the tumour, but it had not been able to carve out the cancerous cells infecting each half ’. One of the most tragic and serious problems that emerged as the instant by-product of the partition was the transfer of population. Beginning with months before 15 august 1947, the migration was largest in human history. The migration was not at all very safe: The forty-five miles of roadside from Lahore to Amritsar along which so many passed became a long, open grave yard... and every yard of the way... there was a body, some butchered some dead of cholera. The vultures had become so bloated by their feasts they could no longer fly and the wild dogs so demanding in their taste they ate only the liver of the corpses littering the road.