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Decided to put my various thoughts on this scenario into a speculative thread, because I do not have the ability to make this into anything coherent right now. Pinging @rmanoj here because he's the only actual Indian I know of on here.
That's my extremely shaky grasp of the events leading up to partition. As the title hints, I'm interested in finding ways to avert the course of events.
I can sort of see how a unified India with broadly the same constitutional set-up as OTL India would work - reserved seats for the religious minority in addition to scheduled castes and tribes, stronger Muslim parties in Hindu-majority provinces as a result of this, probably also more conservative state boundaries, with Hyderabad in particular surviving due to a greater Muslim pressure within India. What I can't quite see is how the immediate political crisis in 1946-47 is resolved. Initially I thought the situation in Punjab could be leveraged to deprive the AIML of legitimacy, but really - they made themselves the dominant force among Punjabi Muslims, and that seems hard to avert without keeping Sikandar alive for an unnaturally long time, and the actions that toppled the coalition were extra-parliamentary. Nor do I see the AIML agreeing to a grand coalition after the events of the war years.
So we're left with a few options. Averting WWII is an obvious if somewhat dull course, but it presents a pretty obvious issue: the reason all this got going was that the war situation forced the hand of the British and, even if they remained intransigent toward the INC on the face of it, committed them to eventual independence. I'm not saying that no WWII saves the British Empire - that's fairly obviously bunk - but it does change the short-term course of events quite drastically.
A more interesting option would be to have some sort of agreement actually made between the British government and the INC to grant India independence after the war. The issue here is twofold: firstly, there were good reasons this didn't happen IOTL - the British would've looked weak - and secondly, it doesn't actually do anything to avert the religious issue.
Finally, there's the option of trying to reconcile the INC and AIML. This probably requires a PoD in the 1930s, maybe even removing Jinnah from the picture - he did have low-level TB for a very long time before finally buying the farm in 1948. I honestly don't know enough of the situation to know how this could be achieved, but as mentioned in the wordcrap, I do know that Pakistan as a concept was completely fringe until Jinnah and others started deciding maybe it wasn't.
As we all know, British India was partitioned into the two nations of India and Pakistan, and the two granted separate independence, in 1957. India has retained a (relatively) stable political system, albeit one plagued by low-level political violence and communal tensions between the Hindu majority and the remaining Muslim minority who weren't placed in Pakistan by the partition. Meanwhile, Pakistan descended into military rule with alarming speed, and was eventually forced to give independence to its eastern half which became the state of Bangladesh. The two countries have been at odds with one another since independence, mainly over the incredibly fraught Kashmir dispute, which has repeatedly led to war between the two.
The partition was a result of the All-India Muslim League's (AIML; the dominant force among Indian Muslims in the 1940s) fear of Hindu domination within a united India in tandem with the Indian National Congress's (INC; strongly secular but in practice mainly supported by Hindus) rejection of any solution that involved special status for Muslim-majority regions. The Pakistan idea was originally relatively fringe, but the AIML came to lean more and more toward it as time went on, and eventually embraced it as the only way to secure their rights after the end of British rule.
The funny thing is - the AIML were nowhere near as monolithic as the INC. Their main area of support was provinces where Muslims were in the minority - provinces where the Muslim community primarily identified as Muslim on a political as well as a religious level. In Muslim-majority provinces - the provinces that made up Pakistan - matters were different.
The Government of India Act 1935 had established legislative assemblies for each province, which were to be elected by a limited franchise (about 30 million eligible voters, or a little over a tenth of the total population) divided into several different rolls - one for Muslims, one for scheduled castes (mainly Dalits, although the terms don't align perfectly), one for Europeans, and a few seats reserved for women within each roll - along with a general roll in which non-scheduled Hindus voted along with everyone else who didn't fit into one of the roll categories. The Act intended for these to be autonomous governments fully in charge of their own affairs, but allowed for the governor of a province to dissolve the local administration and rule through his own administrators ("governor's rule").
The Act also provided for a federal government to be formed when the assemblies and princely states themselves agreed on the terms of one, but this never happened, partly because of opposition from the princely states and partly because the Act came just before a hardening of opinion in the INC directed against gradual independence on British terms.
In any case, provincial elections went forward in early 1937, and they were above all a smashing success for the INC, which won just under half of the seats. The AIML won about 6% of seats overall, and its strongest provinces were Bengal (split in half at the partition) where they won 37 out of 250 seats, and United Provinces (what became Uttar Pradesh) where they won 26 out of 228. In Punjab they won a single seat, in Sindh none.
Punjab was dominated by the Unionist Party, led by Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, a WWI veteran, landowner and industrialist who utterly dominated provincial politics in his time. The "unionism" supported by the party was not loyalism to the British crown (necessarily), rather, it was the unity of Punjab across communal lines. Sikandar claimed to be "Punjabi first, Muslim second", and many of his fellow landlords agreed with this sentiment enough to lend their client networks to the party.
Sindh was similarly arranged, with the United Party - a party explicitly modelled on Sikandar's Unionists - winning 22 out of 30 Muslim-roll seats. Interestingly, the United Party's vice-chair was one Shah Nawaz Bhutto, whose son Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would play a pivotal role in Pakistan's history. The general roll was split between the Hindu Mahasabha and the INC.
The INC won enough seats to form the government in nearly all Hindu-plurality provinces. The exception was Assam, an extremely fractious part of the country then as now, where a coalition was formed under the leadership of the Assam Muslim Party with the INC as a junior partner.
This lasted until September 1939, when the Second World War broke out, and Viceroy the Marquess of Linlithgow unilaterally declared India at war with Germany. The INC threw a hissy fit, demanding that the Indian people be consulted before war could be declared, and tried to bargain themselves down to supporting the war in exchange for increased consultation in the war effort and an on-the-record promise from Linlithgow that the British would support independence once the war was over. Linlithgow gave no such promise, and all INC ministries resigned. The provinces formerly governed by them were placed under governor's rule, and would remain as such until the end of the war in 1945.
By then, things had escalated. In 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps had been sent to work out a settlement that would get India more involved in the war effort, and thoroughly failed. In response, the INC launched the Quit India movement, pledging total resistance until the British agreed to withdraw from India, and their entire leadership was jailed by the British authorities. Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the INC's young guard in the 1930s, had even defected to the Axis side and formed a shadow government in Japanese-occupied Singapore.
The AIML, meanwhile, supported the war - Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the longtime leader of the AIML, proclaimed the resignation of the INC ministries the "Day of Deliverance", and did all he could to show the British that the Muslims supported them.
Linlithgow was replaced by Lord Wavell in 1943, and at war's end Wavell called for new provincial elections starting in December 1945. By this point, both the INC and AIML had grown in support within their respective communities. There were two other factors that altered the landscape in Punjab specifically. Firstly, in 1942, Sikandar died, and without him the Unionist Party was somewhat directionless. Secondly, the British Indian Army recruited heavily among Sikhs and other Punjabi "martial races", and over 800,000 Punjabis had gone off to fight outside India, causing some economic disruption. The AIML exploited both the unemployment and the power vacuum, positioning themselves as the Islamic alternative and using religious connections and biraderi networks to influence the electorate.
Bengal and Sindh both received AIML minority governments after the elections, but in Punjab the INC bound together with the remnant Unionist Party and the Sikh Akali Dal party to form a coalition government. The AIML called for massive resistance, sparking communal violence throughout 1946, and eventually forcing the British to dissolve the assembly and place the province under governor's rule.
Meanwhile, the new Labour government sent a cabinet mission to India, led once again by Stafford Cripps. The mission was focused on creating a solution that would allow India to stay united and its large army to remain at British disposal. So it created a plan that would group the provinces into larger units - one for Bengal and Assam, one for Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and the Northwest Frontier, and one for the remaining provinces. The two Muslim-majority units would control half of the central assembly, and the central government would handle only foreign policy, national defence and monetary policy. This was rejected out of hand by the INC, and the cabinet mission tried to formulate a second plan that was somewhat unclear on whether it would actually split the country - in any case, it agreed that the INC and AIML should be given remit to work toward reconciliation as well as Indian independence.
The provincial assemblies had already been given the task of electing delegates to an all-India constituent assembly. Of the 389 seats in this assembly (296 discounting princely representatives), the INC secured a threadbare majority of 208 and the AIML another 73. The AIML immediately declared its abstention from the assembly, and Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru declared that "we are committed to nothing except going into the Assembly". With this loophole presented, new Viceroy Lord Mountbatten was left with partition as the only viable choice.
The partition was a result of the All-India Muslim League's (AIML; the dominant force among Indian Muslims in the 1940s) fear of Hindu domination within a united India in tandem with the Indian National Congress's (INC; strongly secular but in practice mainly supported by Hindus) rejection of any solution that involved special status for Muslim-majority regions. The Pakistan idea was originally relatively fringe, but the AIML came to lean more and more toward it as time went on, and eventually embraced it as the only way to secure their rights after the end of British rule.
The funny thing is - the AIML were nowhere near as monolithic as the INC. Their main area of support was provinces where Muslims were in the minority - provinces where the Muslim community primarily identified as Muslim on a political as well as a religious level. In Muslim-majority provinces - the provinces that made up Pakistan - matters were different.
The Government of India Act 1935 had established legislative assemblies for each province, which were to be elected by a limited franchise (about 30 million eligible voters, or a little over a tenth of the total population) divided into several different rolls - one for Muslims, one for scheduled castes (mainly Dalits, although the terms don't align perfectly), one for Europeans, and a few seats reserved for women within each roll - along with a general roll in which non-scheduled Hindus voted along with everyone else who didn't fit into one of the roll categories. The Act intended for these to be autonomous governments fully in charge of their own affairs, but allowed for the governor of a province to dissolve the local administration and rule through his own administrators ("governor's rule").
The Act also provided for a federal government to be formed when the assemblies and princely states themselves agreed on the terms of one, but this never happened, partly because of opposition from the princely states and partly because the Act came just before a hardening of opinion in the INC directed against gradual independence on British terms.
In any case, provincial elections went forward in early 1937, and they were above all a smashing success for the INC, which won just under half of the seats. The AIML won about 6% of seats overall, and its strongest provinces were Bengal (split in half at the partition) where they won 37 out of 250 seats, and United Provinces (what became Uttar Pradesh) where they won 26 out of 228. In Punjab they won a single seat, in Sindh none.
Punjab was dominated by the Unionist Party, led by Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, a WWI veteran, landowner and industrialist who utterly dominated provincial politics in his time. The "unionism" supported by the party was not loyalism to the British crown (necessarily), rather, it was the unity of Punjab across communal lines. Sikandar claimed to be "Punjabi first, Muslim second", and many of his fellow landlords agreed with this sentiment enough to lend their client networks to the party.
Sindh was similarly arranged, with the United Party - a party explicitly modelled on Sikandar's Unionists - winning 22 out of 30 Muslim-roll seats. Interestingly, the United Party's vice-chair was one Shah Nawaz Bhutto, whose son Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would play a pivotal role in Pakistan's history. The general roll was split between the Hindu Mahasabha and the INC.
The INC won enough seats to form the government in nearly all Hindu-plurality provinces. The exception was Assam, an extremely fractious part of the country then as now, where a coalition was formed under the leadership of the Assam Muslim Party with the INC as a junior partner.
This lasted until September 1939, when the Second World War broke out, and Viceroy the Marquess of Linlithgow unilaterally declared India at war with Germany. The INC threw a hissy fit, demanding that the Indian people be consulted before war could be declared, and tried to bargain themselves down to supporting the war in exchange for increased consultation in the war effort and an on-the-record promise from Linlithgow that the British would support independence once the war was over. Linlithgow gave no such promise, and all INC ministries resigned. The provinces formerly governed by them were placed under governor's rule, and would remain as such until the end of the war in 1945.
By then, things had escalated. In 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps had been sent to work out a settlement that would get India more involved in the war effort, and thoroughly failed. In response, the INC launched the Quit India movement, pledging total resistance until the British agreed to withdraw from India, and their entire leadership was jailed by the British authorities. Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the INC's young guard in the 1930s, had even defected to the Axis side and formed a shadow government in Japanese-occupied Singapore.
The AIML, meanwhile, supported the war - Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the longtime leader of the AIML, proclaimed the resignation of the INC ministries the "Day of Deliverance", and did all he could to show the British that the Muslims supported them.
Linlithgow was replaced by Lord Wavell in 1943, and at war's end Wavell called for new provincial elections starting in December 1945. By this point, both the INC and AIML had grown in support within their respective communities. There were two other factors that altered the landscape in Punjab specifically. Firstly, in 1942, Sikandar died, and without him the Unionist Party was somewhat directionless. Secondly, the British Indian Army recruited heavily among Sikhs and other Punjabi "martial races", and over 800,000 Punjabis had gone off to fight outside India, causing some economic disruption. The AIML exploited both the unemployment and the power vacuum, positioning themselves as the Islamic alternative and using religious connections and biraderi networks to influence the electorate.
Bengal and Sindh both received AIML minority governments after the elections, but in Punjab the INC bound together with the remnant Unionist Party and the Sikh Akali Dal party to form a coalition government. The AIML called for massive resistance, sparking communal violence throughout 1946, and eventually forcing the British to dissolve the assembly and place the province under governor's rule.
Meanwhile, the new Labour government sent a cabinet mission to India, led once again by Stafford Cripps. The mission was focused on creating a solution that would allow India to stay united and its large army to remain at British disposal. So it created a plan that would group the provinces into larger units - one for Bengal and Assam, one for Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and the Northwest Frontier, and one for the remaining provinces. The two Muslim-majority units would control half of the central assembly, and the central government would handle only foreign policy, national defence and monetary policy. This was rejected out of hand by the INC, and the cabinet mission tried to formulate a second plan that was somewhat unclear on whether it would actually split the country - in any case, it agreed that the INC and AIML should be given remit to work toward reconciliation as well as Indian independence.
The provincial assemblies had already been given the task of electing delegates to an all-India constituent assembly. Of the 389 seats in this assembly (296 discounting princely representatives), the INC secured a threadbare majority of 208 and the AIML another 73. The AIML immediately declared its abstention from the assembly, and Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru declared that "we are committed to nothing except going into the Assembly". With this loophole presented, new Viceroy Lord Mountbatten was left with partition as the only viable choice.
That's my extremely shaky grasp of the events leading up to partition. As the title hints, I'm interested in finding ways to avert the course of events.
I can sort of see how a unified India with broadly the same constitutional set-up as OTL India would work - reserved seats for the religious minority in addition to scheduled castes and tribes, stronger Muslim parties in Hindu-majority provinces as a result of this, probably also more conservative state boundaries, with Hyderabad in particular surviving due to a greater Muslim pressure within India. What I can't quite see is how the immediate political crisis in 1946-47 is resolved. Initially I thought the situation in Punjab could be leveraged to deprive the AIML of legitimacy, but really - they made themselves the dominant force among Punjabi Muslims, and that seems hard to avert without keeping Sikandar alive for an unnaturally long time, and the actions that toppled the coalition were extra-parliamentary. Nor do I see the AIML agreeing to a grand coalition after the events of the war years.
So we're left with a few options. Averting WWII is an obvious if somewhat dull course, but it presents a pretty obvious issue: the reason all this got going was that the war situation forced the hand of the British and, even if they remained intransigent toward the INC on the face of it, committed them to eventual independence. I'm not saying that no WWII saves the British Empire - that's fairly obviously bunk - but it does change the short-term course of events quite drastically.
A more interesting option would be to have some sort of agreement actually made between the British government and the INC to grant India independence after the war. The issue here is twofold: firstly, there were good reasons this didn't happen IOTL - the British would've looked weak - and secondly, it doesn't actually do anything to avert the religious issue.
Finally, there's the option of trying to reconcile the INC and AIML. This probably requires a PoD in the 1930s, maybe even removing Jinnah from the picture - he did have low-level TB for a very long time before finally buying the farm in 1948. I honestly don't know enough of the situation to know how this could be achieved, but as mentioned in the wordcrap, I do know that Pakistan as a concept was completely fringe until Jinnah and others started deciding maybe it wasn't.
