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Definitely. It basically throws the political status quo of the subcontinent into limbo. Will Britain still be a player? Yes. But I don't think it can reestablish the kind of hegemony it had. You'll see a lot more Indian princely states which go along the lines of OTLs Siam/Thailand

You're assuming that all the rest of the Indians will stay" loyal " in the face of a comprehensive British setback. The Sikhs, for example, didn't side with the Company out of goodwill but rather out of the very pertinent historical fact that British hegemony was much less likely to interfere...

As others have said, you don't get a unified India. Nor does Britain get kicked out totally. They lose control over the Indo-Gangetic plain but probably stay entrenched in Bengal and in their South Indian ports. What's interesting is that this likely breaks the hegemony that Britain had over...

If you look at oral histories of the British Raj, by the 1920s the generation of British civil servants starting out as administrators in India were generally convinced that they would be the last generation to serve their careers out in India. Indian independence was already a given, and I...

What, precisely is going to get this vast population to tolerate conscription? As it is, recruitment to the Indian Army was pretty selective, and based on what the British perceived as "martial races". As it was, they did open up their recruitment- my great-grandfather was, I found out to my...

Because its much more profitable to extract raw materials and sell back finished products

Coal

Not that much local production, but just over the Ghats (accessible through the pass at the Pallakad Gap) is Tamil Nadu which does and did have a lot of textile production Yes, an Industrious Revolution to lay the base for an Industrial one. Playing the the European power politics isn't too...

Also a good point. Actually I was toying with a TL where Kerala in SW India moved towards using water power. It's a fairly narrow coastal plain squeezed between the sea and the Western Ghats, with lots of short rivers that drop pretty steeply.

Well to be honest, Bengal, at least, was already up to par with Europe just before the Industrial Revolution. There were thriving cottage industries, protoindustries and a reasonably robust financial system- IOTL it was the EIC which comprehensively choked this off by flooding the market with...

The main issue is access to fossil fuels. There was some coal mining carried out in Bengal during the colonial period but from what I understand it was pretty deep. Not the sort of easily explpitable deposits that helped build mining expertise in Europe.

And New Delhi in the early 80s is distinctly worried about Sikh nationalism. It wouldn't do anything to encourage it.

So China is going to occupy the Pakistani state that takes up most of the Indo-Pakistani border? I get that you know that the entire situation is absurd...but that also means its really hard to find plausible justifications

How were Chinese going to become a minority in Singapore? They're 80% of the population. As a Singaporean Indian I really don't have the complacency you seem to have about Singapore's current ethnic "harmony". We aren't Malaysia but that's not a comparable benchmark.

IIRC the problem with Nicholas is that he (a) sincerely believed in his god given duty to rule and (b) was at best of mediocre intellect. Not exactly a combination of factors likely to lead him to take such a drastic step.

OK if we're handwaving how we get there... Militarily this shouldn't be a contest. The Indian Army smashed Pakistani forces in 1971, and they will likely do so again. The political situation gets...interesting. The occupation of the Pakistani Punjab and Sindh will likely be extremely bloody...

Why does India want to actually occupy Pakistan? IOTL they've been content with relatively minor border adjustments even in situations like in 1981 where Indian armour was on the outskirts of Lahore. As marathag says, it's highly unlikely India would want to cooperate with China, which in 1981...

Well, and there was a large group of Chinese who had settled in SE Asia for centuries and spoke Malay with their own hybrid Chinese/Malay/Catholic culture. The generation who came of age after independence totally lost this culture. Even now I still know Chinese Singaporeans who can't even...

As I said earlier, if there are two European powers in India, there's no way Britain can dominate the subcontinent as it did IOTL. Expect a Great Game-style battle of intrigue and diplomacy as local princes align with one European power or another. Interestingly this may lead to a 19th C in...

Most Singaporean Chinese were speakers of Southern Chinese dialects such as Hokkien. Lee wanted to introduce Mandarin for economic and political reasons. He banned all non-Mandarin media and eliminated education in the Chinese dialects, and enforced mandarin as a second language even among...