An account of the water battles between India and Pakistan by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohd Ali Jinnah

Both leaders chastised Cyril Radcliffe for proposing to operate the Indus river-canal system as a joint Indo-Pak enterprise. His final effort to resolve the ongoing conflict that keeps coming up was that.Muhammad Ali Jinnah scolded Cyril Radcliffe a few weeks prior to his drawing the famous Line that separated India and Pakistan in August 1947. The Boundary Commission chairman was informed by Pakistan's founder that he preferred "deserts to fertile fields watered by courtesy of Hindus." Jawaharlal Nehru would then give a dressing-down as part of the "joint Hindu-Muslim rebuke."It was not Radcliffe's fault. His largest task in dividing the land was to assign control of the irrigation system, which was "built, with a good deal of British inspiration, largely by Sikh money, design, and sweat" to channel river waters through a system of intricate canals to the arid west, "turning the province into the granary of India" in order to combat the oppressive heat caused by a delayed monsoon in the soon-to-be divided Punjab.

The majority of the land they irrigated was in the west, which would eventually become Pakistan, but the five rivers that provided the water were all in the east and would always fall under India. Radcliffe proposed to Jinnah and Nehru, via the Viceroy, that they administer this river-canal system as an Indo-Pakistan joint enterprise after realizing that Partition "vitally threatened" the vast watering network.