WI: Ghandi assassinated by a Muslim

tallwingedgoat

When Ghandi was assassinated Nehru immediatly announced his killer was a Hindu to calm the mob. His aid asked him how did he know and Nehru said that he didn't but god help them all if the assassin was Muslim.

As it turned out, it was indeed a Hindu radical. But what if it turned out an Indian Musilm radical, acting on his own, was revealed to be the real assassin? Almost certainly there would have been a nation wide pogrom against Muslims in India. Combine that with being in the middle of a shooting war with Pakistan, it would surely be a perfect storm for wholesale violence.
 

Rockingham

Banned
Indian civil war.....:(

The second largest population of Muslims in the world wouldn't be the seconf largest in the TTL either....
 

randomkeith

Banned
Wow, now that would be a great POD for any future time line.

Almost certain wholescale slaughter and deffinatly a Jihad by the muslims (just to stay alive). We would probally see an earlier "War on Terror" but probally against the British rather than the Americans ITTL.

That is actually a scary thought, you'd probally have atrocities commited that would make the Holocaust look like sunday school.
 

Flocculencio

Donor
Bad, bad things would happen. India would probably break apart and across the subcontinent as a whole there would be a death toll of millions.

Quite a few prominent contemporary Indian politicians and the like have recounted their thoughts as being on the lines of "Thank god it was a Hindu who killed him".

I don't know what the previous poster means by "jihad"- there would certainly be an all out Hindu-Muslim conflict within the Indian subcontinent but I doubt there would be much activity by Muslims in other parts of the world. Most of them probably wouldn't really care much about the Indian Muslims- the lack of modern communications in many Muslim areas like Indonesia and the Arab world would mean that the average man on the street there wouldn't really hear much about it.

Incidentally this should be in post-1900.
 

randomkeith

Banned
By jihad i ment that the rest of the world Muslims would not sit ideley by and watch as Indians slaughtered thousands of Muslims. Hence a Jihad, pretty mush the same as we saw in OTTL against the Russians in Afganistan.
 

Flocculencio

Donor
randomkeith said:
By jihad i ment that the rest of the world Muslims would not sit ideley by and watch as Indians slaughtered thousands of Muslims. Hence a Jihad, pretty mush the same as we saw in OTTL against the Russians in Afganistan.
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I think you'll find that in many cases they would sit idly by. This is still a decade or two before the era where Islam got internationally politicised. An example would be Algeria where Muslims were fighting their French rulers- yet there was little if any response from Muslims worldwide.
 

randomkeith

Banned
I don't think we would be talking about fighting it would be more like whole scale slaughter. I imagine it would go on for years as well. Eventually other Muslims would rally to the call to fight against the Hindu's in India/Pakistan
 

Fabilius

randomkeith said:
I don't think we would be talking about fighting it would be more like whole scale slaughter. I imagine it would go on for years as well. Eventually other Muslims would rally to the call to fight against the Hindu's in India/Pakistan
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Not unless it lasts for decades. Flocc has a point. Look at Algeria.

This could be an interesting TL if made by someone knowledgable about India or someone willing to do research. I think we would get a balkanized India.

And that would change quite a lot actually.

Some parts of India could become quite rich maybe and others even more poor than OTL.

I wonder whether once the dust settles we would see communist, dictatorships or democracies. Maybe all of them. A huge war in India lasting a long time could affect the cold war in interesting ways.
 

Ibn Warraq

Banned
I agree completely with Flocc. This was long before the rise of political Islam.

Also, we would probably witness the most bloody civil war of all time.
 

Wendell

So, how bad might this get, and does it perhaps bolster the survival of some of the old monarchies in India?
 

Matthais Corvinus

As Indian and Pakistan separated there was both massive communal violence against Muslims and Hindus, and a shooting war between Pakistan and India, so I don't really think that the violence could get much worse . . .
 

Chengar Qordath

Matthais Corvinus said:
As Indian and Pakistan separated there was both massive communal violence against Muslims and Hindus, and a shooting war between Pakistan and India, so I don't really think that the violence could get much worse . . .
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Of course it could; the war between India and Pakistan could turn escalate far beyond a limited engagement using relatively small forces over Kashmir. I could easily see India choosing to press the war until they regain all of Kashmir rather than settle for a UN-suggested partition, and if things really got completely out of control there might be total war between India and Pakistan and government-organized ethnic cleansing on both sides.
 

Flocculencio

Donor
Matthais Corvinus said:
As Indian and Pakistan separated there was both massive communal violence against Muslims and Hindus, and a shooting war between Pakistan and India, so I don't really think that the violence could get much worse . . .
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It could get much, much worse, especially in North India. The stress would definitely balkanise India- the Southern states would certainly break away. They'd be in a better condition than the North, having less baseline religious stress in the first place- which would be in total chaos.
 

Flocculencio

Donor
randomkeith said:
I don't think we would be talking about fighting it would be more like whole scale slaughter. I imagine it would go on for years as well. Eventually other Muslims would rally to the call to fight against the Hindu's in India/Pakistan
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You're assuming there is even going to be a call to fight- it's really not part of the worldview at this time. Since the 70's modern communications have made it easier for details to be broadcast to get to every little village with a TV or radio and raise awareness among the bored young male demographic. This is why you have chaps going to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Twenty years earlier, however, there'd have been no real way to get many details of the conflict, half of them probably wouldn't know where Afghanistan was, and the other half wouldn't really care.

The concept you're talking about didn't even develop until the 70's- IIRC Afghanistan was the first time it was seen in practice
 

~The Doctor~

Flocculencio said:
It could get much, much worse, especially in North India. The stress would definitely balkanise India- the Southern states would certainly break away. They'd be in a better condition than the North, having less baseline religious stress in the first place- which would be in total chaos.
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Is it possible that the war against the Muslims might help unify India?
 

Matthais Corvinus

Hindavatu (sp?) isn't theocracy, its getting the religious majority to seize power and reshape the state in their image . . . in a democratic way of course.
 
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