This may sound disengenous and/or off topic, but the fact is that until the 1930s and 1940s when the British began using religion as a wedge issue to divide Indians and M.A. Jinnah and the Muslim League began to drift away from Congress (basically, greater religious polarization and division), religion wasn't a massive issue. It's true. I believe that Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and others lived in relative harmony without religion being a particularly divisive issue. As I said, this began to change in the 1930s and 1940s as religion became a bigger issue, and the polarization, unfortunately, culminated in the Great Partition and all the bloodshed that resulted from it. Having said that there were, as others have said, regional differences - what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh did have more Muslims, what is now Punjab was more Sikh, and the rest of the land was mostly Hindu.
While there's little doubt that the Raj engaged in a very dangerous game of playing with fire without realising that fire is hot, this isn't a fact, it is a comforting pseudo-history. The direct ancestor of the Pakistan Movement - the Aligarh Movement - emerged in the 1870s in opposition to the collapse of Muslim cultural prestige and political power. Specifically the big trigger was growing demands for the recognition of Hindi, which was seen as the thin end of the wedge. Meanwhile the RSS was founded in 1925 and Savarkar's Hindutva was published in 1922: Savarkar led his first anti-Muslim pogrom at the tender age of twelve (!) in the 1880s.
First of all, I don't want to pretend to know too much on this subject, when my knowledge is in fact fairly limited; please feel free to correct me on this if I am wrong (and I may be).
But I wasn't denying the fact that there wasn't any religious division at all until the 1930s/1940s. Obviously there was. My point is, India was a pretty secular area - though obviously some Muslims and some Sikhs were persecuted in some places - and religion wasn't nearly a big an issue as it is today / 1936 onwards. I obviously don't think there was
no religious persecution at all before the 1930s, but my point is, it wasn't nearly as widespread as it has become, and it wasn't nearly as large a wedge issue (maybe it
was a wedge issue sometimes and/or in some places, but on the whole, it wasn't a very divisive issue or anything).
