Gurdaspur district was Muslim-majority by a small margin in the 1941 census, about 51 per cent. Under the stated principle of the Boundary Commission it might have gone to Pakistan. Three of its four tehsils were awarded to India. That award gave India the only road link to Jammu and Kashmir.
The Radcliffe line through Gurdaspur is the single most disputed piece of the 1947 partition of Punjab, and the argument about whether the award was made on contiguity, on the canal headworks at Madhopur, or on Kashmir has run for seventy-five years without resolution. Radcliffe destroyed his working papers.
Two much older things are in the same district. Kalanaur, a small town on the Ravi side, is where Akbar was enthroned in 1556 at thirteen, on a brick platform that still stands in a field. Gurdas Nangal is where Baba Banda Singh Bahadur Ji was besieged for eight months in 1715, held out until the garrison was starving, and was taken and sent to Delhi.
Dera Baba Nanak and the Kartarpur corridor are in this district, and so is Batala.
Shakargarh tehsil went to Pakistan and the other three did not. The Ravi runs between them, which is the contiguity argument, and it is also why the line looks reasonable on a map today and looked like a decision to everybody who was there at the time.
The boundary commission's reasoning has been argued about since, and the papers that would settle it are in London and have been read by many people who disagree about them.
What is certain is the consequence. Without Gurdaspur there is no road from India into Jammu, and the events of October 1947 in Kashmir take a different course.