WI: There is no Indian Partition in 1947

Let's suppose the British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, had been able to resist Jinnah's demands for a separate Muslim state, and kept India (with the exception of Burma) whole by the time it gained its independence in 1947.

How differently would a united India (comprising the present states of Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Kashmir) have affected history in South Asia? Was it doable?
 
Their would be some civil fighting and some pissy people in the short run, but in the long run it would end up being a positive for the region.
 
India would have a much larger Moslem population, They would have more clout. There would have been considerable violence in the begining and the some going on the the present day.
 
There would likely be several strong independence movements from Muslim areas, probably quite bloody over the course of time. It depends how decentralized or autonomous the government structure is. Hindu nationalists will likely stir things up just as much as the Muslims will.

Also, Bhutan and Nepal would not be a part of India, unless India post Independence marches in and annexes them via war.
 

Ak-84

Banned
A nice and vicious and bloody civil war. And an independent Pakistan in the 1950's or 1960's.


A contigious population on the periphery who wants out and hates your guts. Not something that can survive.
 
It depends. If there's a figure who can develop into a successor to Gandhi (i.e. seen as a national leader by Hindus and Muslims alike) he might be able to nurse the nation through it's first decade or so. Have that hold together and toss in an external war (say an equivalent to the Sino-Indian War- doesn't mean much but pulls the nation together) and it might be doable.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Like others have said, perhaps nasty in the short-run, but better in the long term. IIRC, the majority of Muslims and the majority of Hindus didn't want two seperate states, it was one of those "political cliques insist on their own ideologies" rather than a mass popular movement, sort of like how the Ukraine and Belarus were independent in the early 1920s even though most of the populace didn't give a fig about independence or anything like that.

Anyways, yeah, there'll be some tensions early on by Hindu nationalists and Islamic nationalists, but they'll probably peter out by the mid to late 50s. India will be the better for it, frankly.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Muslims and Hindus hated each other. The guns of the Raj are all that kept the place from blowing up and it did in OTL with about a MILLION killed during the partition violence.


As for Gandhi, he was seen as too much of a Hindu revivalist by muslims, and is the last person who would be seen as a national leader.

The Congress fought tooth and nail against partition and the British were not too keen on it either, by 1945 it was inevitable.

For there to be no partition and a viable country, you need i) no Gandhi and ii) the British to stay in someway for a while have independence become a process as opposed to an event as in OTL.


Clearly no one in the thread has the smallest inkling about the situtation of the time.
 
Any chance of this ended when Gandhi was so stupid as to state, where it would be overheard, that any commitments to the Muslims could be broken once independence was established.

Given that he and Nehru did not fail to violate their promises to the princely states I see no reason to believe that the Muslims would have been treated with more respect.
 
Let's suppose the British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, had been able to resist Jinnah's demands for a separate Muslim state, and kept India (with the exception of Burma) whole by the time it gained its independence in 1947.

How differently would a united India (comprising the present states of Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Kashmir) have affected history in South Asia? Was it doable?

The idea that Hindus and Muslims couldn't live together is silly; nobody had expected the country to be partitioned into two completely separate states even just a couple years before. And even when Partition was announced, neither side planned for any exchange of populations - the expectation was that Muslims would remain in India and non-Muslims would remain in Pakistan.

It's quite easy to come up with an alternative to partition in 1947 - the problem is that avoiding Partition at that stage becomes implausible not because it was undoable, but because none of the relevant political actors at the time had any commitment to a workable United India. Both the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress were more concerned with ensuring their own power. The League wouldn't consent to a united India unless it could have guaranteed power-sharing, and the Congress wouldn't agree to power-sharing or a confederation because it would rather have held unchallenged power in a smaller India.

One obvious POD is the rejection of the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan, which called for India to be a three-unit confederation. The League accepted it, but the Congress, after initially accepting it, withdrew their consent. I have trouble seeing this as a viable POD, though, simply because even if Congress maintained their consent longer, none of the leading members of the Congress had any commitment to the plan. They would likely have withdrawn from the terms ASAP, which would have resulted in its collapse. The Brits would probably have withdrawn much as they did in Palestine, there would have been an even more brutal civil war, and ultimately partition still occurs.

So to create a workable POD for a United India, you probably have to go back a bit, to pre-empt some of the Congress/League tensions. You could have the Brits give independence in the late 1930s, which was before the League acquired much popular support. But to this you need a change in government in the UK.

Some plausible PODs:

(1) Gandhi doesn't call off the Non-Cooperation/Khilafat movement in 1922, which had been an early example of a joint Hindu-Muslim mass movement. The cessation was prompted by the Chari Chaura incident, in which a clash between protesters and police resulted in a mob burning down a police station, killing 22. So perhaps that doesn't happen, and no other major examples of violence erupt; Gandhi's alliance with the Ali brothers holds, and much of the Muslim anti-British movement stays in the Congress.

(2) Nehru invites Jinnah to join the cabinet in 1937. Following elections to the Indian Legislative Assembly, Jinnah approached the Congress about forming a coalition government. At the time, the Muslim League had not embraced the Pakistan demand, and the League had done relatively poorly in the elections. Nehru rejecting Jinnah is said to have been a key breaking point, which convinced Jinnah that Congress would never consent to a more active role for Muslim representatives without playing hardball.

As for the original question - how does India evolve? I'm going to dissent a little from some of the other posters, and say that, if either if these PODs had occurred, and if a united India had achieved independence in 1947, India would be fine today. Certainly no worse off than it is in real life, and arguably better.

I doubt a United India would be any less stable than the present India is. There would be some low-level conflicts, particularly in Baluchistan and parts of the Northwest Frontier. But Punjab, Sindh, Bengal, and even Kashmir would all have been fairly peacefully esconed in the Indian Union.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Lebanon-style confessionalism is probably enacted either formally or informally. Probably the Prime Minister is traditionally a Hindu and the president a Muslim. If this is enshrined in the Constitution, it probably leads to a great deal of controversy and attempts at change in the 1990s-2000s. Politically, heavily-Muslim provinces would have meant an earlier end to post-independence domination by the Congress.

I suspect a united, less Congress-dominated India would have lead to a more open economy and a more decentralized union. Millions are still spent on defense, however, in order to project power throughout the Indian Ocean basin and in response to China.

In terms of foreign policy, it may well have been friendlier to the U.S. during the Cold War. It would also have been in a stronger position to prop up Zahir Shah in Afghanistan, neither permitting his ouster, nor the Soviet invasion, nor an American counteroffensive. Afghanistan likely remains a kingdom and a client state of India.
 
Top