If India/Pakistan (and then Bangladesh) tore up much more cleanly (without say Kashmir happening or 2-wing "artificial" pakistan happening etc)...we probably would have gotten to much better stage all around now (attitude wise especially)....even with partition happening on the ground like it did....just judging on how we've done pretty ok compared to others. I think that is all too frequently forgotten (what other's near-similar circumstances on close proximity divides suddenly erupting and spreading like wildfire have been like). Deep down we are not really that extremist at core level as many politicians like to think we are.
This was always going to happen when imperial Islam failed to convert the whole of the Indian populace.
There was never any escaping from this.
History is littered with ifs and buts.
What if the British had not come in?
Would there even be an India and Pakistan and Bangladesh?
Would the Marathas have succeeded and endured where no empire in history had in the past 5000+ years?
If anything, and were I to take a slightly pragmatic and even fatalistic view of the events that led us to where we are today, it is a good thing that we got our nations when we did. Before the Cold War began in real earnest.
It is a good thing that we are hostile nation states in the modern world. With treaties and nukes that assure mutual destruction.
But there is no question is my mind that we are capable of great violence and depravity. And that is what lends me to wonder why we have not killed more of each other when it has been so ridiculously easy?
Look at our population density and our capacity to kill and compare it to the European century of bloodshed that just passed.
Could we not have in the blink of an eye doused many more than what we did?
I posit that the two sides have always held back from really going Mongol on each other.
What is the reason?
Why do I say that we are destined to reunite .... in some shape or form?
Cheers, Doc
And some aren't. Some of the states you mentioned have tried their best to wipe out their past. Nothing remains the same as civilisations rise and fall. Even when you say "Persian" or "Indian" civilisations, they are not referring to a single point of origin, or a single set of rules or traditions that have been passed down unbroken for thousands of years. These civilisations arise over hundreds or even thousands of years, modifications are added and some removed. There isn't a cut off time is there, for civilisations to stop rising or falling?
A civilization is an ever changing beast.
But at the heart of it I believe it is Blood, Faith and Soil. The three elements of unbroken continuity.
Only India continues to have all 3.
Oscar believes there is a fourth thread that surpasses all 3.
Language.
But from where I see it, that is peoplehood. Not civilization.
As I've told the Iranians across generations here many times, I can put Africans in Iran and by the second generation they will all be speaking fluent Persian.
Cheers, Doc