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Not to mention (West) Pakistan waged a genocidal war against its coreligionists in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) when the East Pakistani Awami League political party won the elections.

That said, the fears of Jinnah and the Muslim League were far from unfounded. While Gandhi was not hostile to Muslims like the VHP/RSS who ended up murdering him, his vision of India accorded them a subordinate role at best, as with the untouchables.

India has always been a pluralist place, and it is not ethnically homogeneous like China (genetically India is composed of a few hundred population clusters that have endogamy higher than 99.9%, higher than Ashkenazi Jews, for example). That's why India is unlikely to ever get a strong centralizing state like China. That also why democracy is a hardy weed in India, and may prove more resilient than the authoritarian Communist regime based on naked force on the other side of the Himalayas. Even the worst disturbances in modern Indian history, around the time of Partition, pale in comparison with the death toll of Mao's Great Leap Forward or his Cultural Revolution.




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