Given the royal mess we have made of our country, a number of young Pakistanis have started to ask whether the creation of Pakistan was a mistake. This reflects not just a painful disillusionment but is also indicative of a national psyche that seeks to pass the buck, i.e. we messed up but we only messed up because Jinnah asked for Pakistan. In view of the fact that this question has been raised on several occasions by well meaning young Pakistanis, I believe it is about time we considered as honest men and women what would have been alternative futures before us if India, especially the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, had not been partitioned in 1947. One view is that India would have emerged as one country from the Khyber Pass to the border of Burma and that, within this country, Muslims today would have been about 510 million out of a total population 1.6 billion people, i.e. slightly less than one third of the United Indian population. It is contended that not only would India have emerged as the greatest nation on earth but also within that nation, Indian Muslims would have been ascendant. In my view, the possibility of this happening was very remote. Let us assume hypothetically that India indeed had somehow managed to remain a federation of some sort. Within this federation, Muslim majority provinces would always want greater autonomy and rightly so. Consequently, the entire constitutional machinery of this mighty state would have been absorbed in resolving disputes between the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of the provinces, making the dream of a great United India next to impossible. Instead, there would have been far greater violence that would have consumed Hindus and Muslims more than what they experienced at the time of partition. The position of Muslims in this federation would not have been as rosy as is made out. Pakistan, despite its problems and constant failures, managed to create an indigenous Muslim middle class in what were formerly the Muslim majority provinces of British India. It is forgotten that the conditions of Muslims — a majority of whom constituted the lower peasantry in Punjab and Bengal — was pitiful before partition. The 1930 census reveals that there were no more than 30,000 industrial workers in all of Punjab, compared to 400,000 in Bombay alone. The trend after independence would have been an accumulation of capital in Hindu majority provinces. It was Pakistan that turned Karachi from a sleepy port town to a major world city and it was Pakistan that transformed the tract along the Grand Trunk Road from a poverty stricken rural agrarian society to the booming semi-urban middle class populated area that it is today. The rigours of operating a new nation state created mass participation in the economy and commerce, not just of Muslim men in this region but also of Muslim women. The huge numbers of women entering the workforce in Pakistan today would have likely remained in purdah (isolated). Obviously, if Pakistan would have put its house in order as a modern inclusive democracy, the benefits to its people would have been much greater and more obvious but this does not discount the real difference in livelihoods it made. In India, even today, Indian Muslim women are victims of community leaders’ whims, which are entertained by ‘secular’ parties like Congress, as is so painfully evident in the fact that Muslim personal law is not codified, leaving Indian Muslim women wholly dependent on the All Indian Muslim Personal Law Board. The lack of women’s empowerment along with the fact that the Muslims of what is now Pakistan would have remained aloof from commerce, banking and the modern economy and would have slowly but surely indebted the entire Muslim community to the Hindu community. This process had started long before independence and even the British were forced to pass such laws as the Land Alienation Act in Punjab to prevent Muslims from being gobbled up economically by their more advanced and economically astute Hindu brethren. This process would have accelerated. All in all, this would have ultimately led to mass scale civil disturbances between Hindus and Muslims on purely economic issues and would have brought the entire federation to a standstill. If this scenario were not frightful enough, the more likely scenario of India breaking up into several — even hundreds of — smaller states could have created an even more dangerous situation. Those who are familiar with the history of the roundtable conferences know that a federation of British India and princely India was proving to be an impossible task because the princely states wanted to come in on their own terms, a demand rejected by both Congress and the Muslim League. Meanwhile, both Punjab and Bengal resisted tooth and nail the idea of a centralised government as proposed by Congress. A United Punjab and a United Bengal would have meant that a federation on any uniform principles would have been a non-starter. The Two Nation Theory sought to unite the Muslims of Hindu majority provinces with the Muslims of Muslim majority provinces and, in doing so, cut across regional and provincial parochialisms, which were simmering underneath. Thus, Indian nationalism and its ‘other’ — Muslim nationalism — in the end managed to together deal a deathblow to more regional and local ambitions. Had this not happened, India would not have been divided into the three states it is today but into 300 states. Perhaps some of these states would have come together in European Union-style arrangements but that would have happened after a long process of trial and error. Critics of partition forget some basic facts of history, namely that the Indian subcontinent, while always a geographic unity more or less, has, with the possible exceptions of the empires under Asoka and Akbar, never been in political unity. Instead of aiming for political unity, the emphasis should be on regional cooperation and economic integration, which will help both Pakistan and India improve the lot of millions — indeed hundreds of millions — in their countries below the poverty line. Blaming partition for the ills of today is illogical and counterproductive to the goal of a progressive and prosperous future for the subcontinent. The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com