alt Hacker NewsA 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
> 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
Most importantly, the Civil-rights era US government was highly concerned with optics, because, you know, the world was being swept by Communist revolutions, and the last thing it wanted to do is to provide further fuel to their fire.
The current US government couldn't give two shits about its optics, because none of the people running it can even conceive of there being consequences to their brutality. The tail is wagging the dog.