This historic Hindu-Muslim compromise avoids the estimated 2 million deaths and 12 million refugees caused by a violent partition and the ethnic cleansing it would involve. It also has profound international implications for the balance of power between the West and the Soviet bloc and for the future of global Islam. A united, pro-Western India, unhampered by wars with Pakistan and a nuclear arms race, acts as a major bulwark against Russian and Chinese expansionism in Central Asia. The world's largest Muslim population — now 500 million — peacefully assimilated into a secular Indian democracy, avoids the jihadism of future generations in Pakistan and Kashmir. It dramatically shifts the Islamic centre of gravity from the turbulent Middle East, preoccupied with the issue of Palestine, because Indian Islam, with its far more tolerant and eclectic Sufic traditions, permeated by indigenous Hinduism, is a potent antidote to the fundamentalism of both Arab Wahabism and Iranian Shi'ism.  

Is all this just a far-fetched, counterfactual scenario born of nostalgia and wishful thinking? Or could it have become a reality if the partnership of Attlee, Mountbatten and Nehru hadn't rushed through a premature transfer of power to satisfy their own personal and ideological ambitions? The historical evidence suggests that India's partition was not inevitable and that the final decisions were far more finely balanced and swayed by personalities than nationalist historians in the subcontinent like to admit.

It's a nationalist myth that Indian independence was won by militant Congress direct action and that partition was the inevitable price exacted by a pro-Muslim colonial power determined to divide and rule. On the contrary, effective independence was implicit in the progressive constitutional reforms introduced by the Raj in 1909 and 1919, well before Gandhi launched his campaigns of civil disobedience. Congress was knocking at an open door: the real point at issue was how to introduce Westminster-style democracy in a subcontinent so diverse and largely illiterate.

The central problem with elected legislatures was to safeguard the interests of India's large Muslim minority, numbering a quarter of its population, still rooted in its imperial past and fearful of domination by more successful Hindu business and professional elites. The solution accepted by a reluctant Congress was to have separate electorates for additional, reserved Muslim seats. What had still to be resolved was how to guarantee adequate Muslim representation in newly devolved governments in the provinces and eventually at national level.      

Matters came to a head in 1937, when the Congress Party agreed to work the new 1935 constitution enacted by the Raj, which aimed at transferring power first to the provinces and eventually to an All-India federation. Provincial elections were held on a greatly expanded franchise, similar to that of Victorian Britain. The key test came in the largest province, then called UP or United Provinces, the heartland of the former Moghul empire. Congress and the Muslim League fought the UP elections in alliance against a loyalist party and, while Congress swept the "general" seats, the League won most of the Muslim seats. The logical outcome was a Congress-League coalition government; but Nehru turned down the League's coalition offer, and Congress formed a majoritarian government on its own, leaving the League in opposition. It was precisely the scenario that Muslims had dreaded at the national level, if independence was to mean simple majority rule.