Thread by @AsadRahim

The idea that Partition and Pakistan led to a radical India – thus hardly vindicating Jinnah – is an interesting one, as is the idea that things would have been different otherwise.

But this sidesteps the lived reality of both places for a weak counterfactual. Short thread:

The theory is an old one, but is often used to externalize India’s internal tensions. Congress, in dazed retreat since 2014, uses it to justify its own electoral decline. ‘If Pakistan had not been created,’ Shashi Tharoor says, ‘could India become what it is today?'

The first problem is the obvious one: it’s a counterfactual, meaning we have zero evidence. We’ve no way of knowing what would happen if the Archduke had survived, or if the Nazis had won (we do have actual fun facts though: like how Hindutva’s genesis lies in European fascism).

The second problem is that it assumes India doesn't have a staggering number of Muslims all by itself: the third-most in the world, and it may top that list by 2050.

Yet its only Muslim-majority ‘territory’ is an open prison called Kashmir, courtesy the secular Nehru.

Even UP, with its 43 million Muslims, has been handed over to garden-variety extremists like Yogi Adityanath. The 2014 election that brought in Modi was the first time since independence that the state didn’t return a single Muslim legislator to the Lok Sabha.

This is connected to the third problem: bad math. Pakistan’s far-left and far-right feel undivided India would’ve meant strength in numbers, preventing Muslim marginalisation.

But the first-past-the-post system destroys Muslim representation (not that they vote en bloc anyway).

Fourth, there was no Partition, no Pakistan, and no BJP during the 1930s, when Congress’s treatment of Muslims was so appalling, it breathed fresh life into Muslim separatism, and irreversibly set Jinnah on course for the Lahore Resolution.

Fifth, there was no Partition, no Pakistan, and no BJP during the 1946 election, when the Muslim League swept Punjab with 73 seats, but was still denied forming government by Hindu majoritarians.

Punjab was handed over to Khizar Hayat Tiwana’s boys instead. Riots ensued.

Sixth, Jinnah’s whole life was a repudiation of the Congress lie: that there would be space for progressive, pro-unity Muslims in a free India. That was his starting point too. Instead, he saw Congress become a populist beast: ahimsa, dharma, satyagraha. Pakistan was the way out.

Jinnah has since been distorted by conservatives as a start-to-end freedom diehard, and over-interpreted by unionist liberals as an anti-Partition gambler that was part of the problem. Both takes are false.

But that's another topic altogether, and requires a book, not a thread.

To India's extent, Jinnah was vindicated long ago. That critics like Shashi – and the anti-Partition school here – are left now only with historical what-ifs, makes this plain.

And yet all of this is cold comfort: the reality of Pakistan continues to fail Jinnah every day.