alt Hacker News> there also were violent sticks in the background vs Ghandi’s carrot
There are always agitators. Britain, however, did not withdraw because of them.
As with King, if they’d taken the driver’s seat, British public opinion probably wouldn’t have turned towards India the way it did in our timeline.
Now consider that the principle anti-colonial pusher in the wake of WWII was America. The timelines are too far apart for serious commingling. But consider how much worse the world would be if India fought a bloody revolution, and then America saw domestic terrorism at home. Instead of two forces amplifying each other we’d see strong incentives for the majorities in each power to err on the side of caution and security.
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The "principal anti-colonial pusher"? The first thing America did coming out of WW2 was support France, a nation just resoundingly beaten, in an utter colonial fumble on the other side of the planet.
A key part was that the PM of the UK at the time of independence had been supportive of the notion of Indian self rule for two decades. England had other priorities in the 1947 that administering India didn't help with too.
But yeah, Britain had put down a full scale rebellion of Indian troops with a 100:1 casualty ratio ninety years earlier, and had a full-blown self-styled "Indian National Army" surrender to them at the end of WWII shortly before independence was actually granted. They were tired of war at the time but certainly not afraid of badly-armed rebels. Noncooperation posed an entirely different challenge because it couldn't just be responded to with force of arms, and colonialist dogma taught that British leadership was supposed to make India a better run country, not virtually ungovernable. There were also more cameras around in 1947 than 1857
The flip side is that simple disobedience has far less effect in states less concerned with optics and values they claimed to live up to than the tail end of the British Empire or the US federal government at the height of the the Civil Rights era