Page:Report of the Bengal Boundary Commission (Radcliffe Award).pdf/2

1060 ﻿4. After preliminary meetings, the Commission invited the submission of memoranda and representations by interested parties. A very large number of memoranda and representations was received.

5. The public sittings of the Commission took place at Calcutta, and extended from Wednesday the 16th of July 1947, to Thursday the 24th of July 1947, inclusive, with the exception of Sunday, the 20th of July. Arguments were presented to the Commission by numerous parties on both sides, but the main cases were presented by counsel on behalf of the Indian National Congress, the Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha and the New Bengal Association on the one hand, and on behalf of the Muslim League on the other. In view of the fact that I was acting also as Chairman of the Punjab Boundary Commission, whose proceedings were taking place simultaneously with the proceedings of the Bengal Boundary Commission, I did not attend the public sittings in person, but made arrangements to study daily the record of the proceedings and all material submitted for our consideration.

6. After the close of the public sittings, the remainder of the time of the Commission was devoted to clarification and discussion of the issues involved. Our discussions took place at Calcutta.

7. The question of drawing a satisfactory boundary line under our terms of reference between East and West Bengal was one to which the parties concerned propounded the most diverse solutions. The province offers few, if any, satisfactory natural boundaries, and its development has been on lines that do not well accord with a division by contiguous majority areas of Muslim and non-Muslim majorities.

8. In my view, the demarcation of a boundary line between East and West Bengal depended on the answers to be given to certain basic questions which may be stated as follows:—

(1) To which State was the City of Calcutta to be assigned, or was it possible to adopt any method of dividing the City between the two States?

(2) If the City of Calcutta must be assigned as a whole to one or other of the States, what were its indispensable claims to the control of territory, such as all or part of the Nadia River system or the Kulti rivers, upon which the life of Calcutta as a city and port depended?

(3) Could the attractions of the Ganges-Padma-Madhumati river line displace the strong claims of the heavy concentration of Muslim majorities in the districts of Jessore and Nadia without doing too great a violence to the principle of our terms of reference?

(4) Could the district of Khulna usefully be held by a State different from that which held the district of Jessore?

(5) Was it right to assign to Eastern Bengal the considerable block of non-Muslim majorities in the districts of Malda and Dinajpur?

(6) Which State's claim ought to prevail in respect of the Districts of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri, in which the Muslim population amounted to 2.42 per cent. of the whole in the case of Darjeeling, and to 23.08 per cent. of the whole in the case of Jalpaiguri, but which constituted an area not in any natural sense contiguous to another non-Muslim area of Bengal?

(7) To which State should the Chittagong Hill Tracts be assigned, an area in which the Muslim population was only 3 per cent. of the whole,