Mate, the first step would always be to understand what the TNT was before either espousing its success or declaring its failure. It was never about 'We don't want to live with you guys because your Hindus' or anything of the sort. It was that Islam is a lot more than just praying 5 times a day and it has a profound and pronounced socio, political, economic and legal dimension to it and as Muslims we need the space to express it. Iqbal talked about how Muslims needed a platform where we'd be able to shun Taqid (or blind imitation) and engage in Ijtihad (or consensus to form a legal opinion, a fatwa in other words) to reinterpret Islam in the light of modernity. And for him the Parliament where Sunnis, Shi'ites and the sects within our sects will be represented so that they can exchange ideas, compromise with each other, engage in debates and try to come up with a brand of Islam that not only transcends our 'Sectarian' differences but presents solutions to some of our concerns. For example, Islamic finance is based, fundamentally, around two notions : 1) Making money off money is unethical and a Muslim will not indulge in this, i.e a certain kind of Interest is unacceptable to us. And 2) the Risk and Rewards of any financial venture should be equitably shared between the 'investor' and the 'manager of wealth' i.e Banks getting back their capital with interest whilst the lessee is virtually destroyed is unacceptable for us. What Iqbal wanted was for us to have a platform where we'd decide upon whether we'd need to reinvent the wheel to accommodate these Islamic Injunctions, whether there was an already existing model out there which fits this cent for cent or whether a compromise between the two would be established.
Further more the TNT recognized that many of Our Heroes were not your Heroes, many of our practices were the opposite of yours, many of our habits were in contravention to your own and within this existed a potential for a backlash if they were suppressed or a potential for a 'loss of identity' if they were ignored. Whether our view was right or yours....these fault lines were there ! No amount of political machinations could have ignited 'Our People' enough to butcher each other at the time of the Partition as they did.
And the TNT is just as valid today as it was in '47. Bangladesh despite their independence reclaimed their roots by giving patronage to Islam, explicitly, in their constitution. Israel is the living breathing example of the TNT where Jews and Muslims said we're too different and so we think it best to separate.
