How Did Religion Become the Basis for Political Identity in British India?

I have been reading Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann. I was struck by the author's comment on how the British and indeed the people of British India framed Indian independence in terms of religion.

If you think about it, that is pretty strange. On the one hand, after centuries of the British presence, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others were pretty well mixed in provences and cities. They had been living side by side for a very long time.

On the other hand, the country was divided culturally, linguistically, by caste, by urban-rural divisions, and in other ways.

Today India has some 17 major national political parties, and dozens of smaller national or regional parties, Pakistan more than a dozen, and Bangladesh eight. We know that Pakistan has Baluchi and Pashtun minorities that are politically distanced from the populations of Punjab and the Sind. The strong lines separating Hindu, Muslim and Sikh in 1947 don't seem adequate to unify the countries that were separated out of British India.

It may well be that the costs of administering an area as huge as British India were not justified by the economic gains from its huge market in 1947 but Indian Summer does not seem to suggest that there was a calculation of the political and economic cost of partition.

Von Tunzelmann does suggest that people at one time in British India did not think of themselves primarily by their religious affiliation, but that they came to do so by the time that the partition was being negotiated. Indeed, there is some doubt that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the key Muslim leader, actually wanted partition (but that he may have been using the call for partition as a negotiating ploy).

Of course, in the distant past Muslim invaders had invaded, conquered and taken control of the subcontinent. But it seems to have been the British Raj in part that encouraged religios identity to become political identity by treating it as such. So too did the division between the Muslim League and the Congress Party.

Given the degree to which religious identity has become a key basis for political identity in the Israeli-Arab, Shiite-Sunni, and Aghanistan conflicts, it might be useful to revisit India history to see how it happened there. The impact of the 1947 identity crisis was a million deaths and massive dislocation of populations, followed by long term economic decline. It itself was historically important, and it may also provide ideas on how to deal with present crises.

Incidentally, it seems to me that one of the strengths of the American political system is that in the past we have managed largely to keep political identity separate from religious affiliation. In recent years Christian Conservatives have linked their relgious affiliation with their political affiliation, and I am glad to see some religious leaders from that community beginning to argue that their concerns for the environment, the status of immigrants and other social justice issues were not well represented by the extreme right wing of conservatism.