The interesting counter-factual raises, for me at least, two interesting thoughts that are a bit more tangential.
The movement for Pakistan is of course usually set against the idea of a United India. But what if we juxtaposed it with a different outcome: that of the balkanisation of India.
In British India, in the Muslim majority areas, regional parties espousing localist interests and regionalist identities tended to dominate politics until the Muslim League was able to make a breakthrough, which came quite late in the day. Therefore, there was in fact a strong basis for provincialism and indeed the raising of the Pakistan demand was in many ways designed to achieve a semblance of trans-provincial political unity amongst Muslims. (Some historians have gone so far as to argue that the image of Pakistan as a potent unifying symbol to rally around was in fact more important than a vision of it as a geographically bounded entity).
Though it may seem counter-intuitive, there is an argument that the movement for Pakistan - by redirecting focus to the idea of two nations - in fact weakened the case for a balkanised India.
The second point is triggered by the posts of
@ElRaja (post 6) and
@rickroll (post 13). The Partition of British India entailed the partition of Bengal and the Punjab. This had an important effect in altering the balance of power within India. As truncated states, the Bengal and Punjab became less powerful than would have been the case in an undivided India. (In the case of Bengal, the first-rate historian, Joya Chatterji, has drawn attention to Bengal's loss of influence, which was contrary to the expectations of those Hindu leaders in Bengal who advocated partition).
We can speculate that Nehru, from the UP, may not have been prime minister for as long as he was, had India not been partitioned.
