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RE: Controlling Narratives: Deciding Who Gets to Speak
Uhhh... or they could have left it as a single polity, since, you know, India had extrordinarily little ethnic or religious violence in pre-colonial times compared to how ridiculously diverse India is. (Which is to say still a lot, of course, just not proportionally.) And since Partition has resulted in literally millions of civilian deaths in a quite direct fashion. The whole reason two was divided into three? Yeah, not a fun one. I feel pretty comfortable dismissing Partition as a terrible idea based on its real world consequences rather than worrying about an entirely hypothetical eventuality which never occurred.
India had literally centuries of experience being a single polity- splitting it into two out of nowhere? Such a weird move.
It seems that while you have a dim view of British colonial policies, I have a very dim view of humanity in general. :-)
Was not India as a single political unit, a gift, or remnant, of British colonial administration? Prior to British imperial policies, India was divided into separate principalities and kingdoms. Mughal invasion did create a northen empire, but through the will of force, not with assent of the populace.
The modern era of post-French Revolution seems to engender the delusion of national, ethnic, popular "self-determination" (whatever thart means). The fracturing of the Ottoman European holdings, the dissolution of Habsburg holdings, the Irish revolt, the tribal anarchy of the sub-Saharan African "republics," the fragmentaion of former Yugoslavia, etc. seem to indicate an inherent human tendency towards anarchy in the absence of a strong, ruthless central power coupled with modernist political drivel. The only other force that unites disparate human creatures into some type of cohesive polity seems to be xenophobic paranoia.
Maybe India would have remained united without the need to partition a significant group into a hostile, "foreign" entity. But I don't share such optimism within the human spirit.