Originally posted by astralis
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You could certainly see that as a 'lost opportunity', but I'm not sure what great difference it would have made in the long term. Indeed, it might actually bring forward the issue of partition. Would there be a single 'nation', two, three or more? I suspect that even India as a Dominion will still make the break with the UK around the same time everyone else did, if not before. WW2 becomes interesting - what exactly is the Indian motivation to bail out the UK? Are more than 2.5 million Indians going to volunteer to fight & die for Britain? They already have their independence. Perhaps they will choose the path of neutrality as Eire did.
Of course, the real issue here is that Britain is always going to be reluctant to risk giving a non-white colony any significant form of independence in the late C19th or even early C20th. If India goes then who next? it is one things to let white settle states have dominion status, but very risky to allow it with a major non-white one. It seems a lot to give for no appreciable gain to the mind of a politician of the time. Britain wasn't ready to dismantle the empire in 1919. In 1947 the world had changed a great deal.
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