What if… the British never partitioned India? (Pakistan/Bangladesh remain in India)

[Blue3]

What if… the British never partitioned India? (Pakistan/Bangladesh remain in India)

Besides being the most populous country on Earth (since India is #2, Pakistan is #5, and Bangladesh is #8)… and by far home to the most Muslims on Earth (India currently has the most Muslims on Earth, but they’d be a much bigger chunk though still a minority)… how would this change history from the 1940s to the 2020s?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The general understanding by the mid 1940s was that rapid independence for India (desired, by this point, by both just about everyone in India and by the British government, if for different reasons) was only possible with some form of Partition due to the strength of the Pakistan Movement. It's genuinely very hard to think of any scenario where the British government could have been persuaded to have retained control of India for more than a few years longer than in reality, or one in which British authorities in India would have been mad enough to arrange for independence without Partition: Mountbatten might have been sociopathic, but he wasn't insane. If somehow it had all happened like that anyway, then you're talking of a civil war on an unimaginable scale in all senses.

[Agonized-Statism]

Probably civil war into the 1950s, unfortunately, with Balkanizing India becoming another front for the Cold War.