I'm torn about this. India is a much more pluralistic society, and Pakistan is a failed state. But one of the points made early on in the article makes it seem as if the Partition was entirely Pakistan's idea, and the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who died were all innocent Hindus being slaughtered at the hands of murderous Muslims. "But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history." Which is far from the reality; it was a clusterfuck all around, and communal violence was the rule of the day on both sides of the partition line.

It wasn't just Muslims in the 30s who called for two separate states. Many Hindus did too. It's true, the most prominent Hindu in the struggle (Gandhi) wanted a single state and tried to (in theory, at least) accommodate the large Muslim minority. For those efforts he was assassinated by a religious extremist.

Of course, you hear religious extremist and you might assume it was some Muslim who thought Gandhi was too effective a voice for unity. To the contrary, it was a Hindu nationalist who thought Gandhi was a sellout to the Muslims.

This strain of Hindu nationalism that endorses the use of violence has appeared again and again. As recently as 2002 a riot occurred in which a Hindu mob murdered around a thousand Muslims.

All this isn't to say the Muslims on the subcontinent are all paragons of virtue and liberalism. They aren't. But the story the author tells is just a pleasant story, meant to appeal to the baser instincts of Wall Street Journal readers. Maybe more than that, it's a story meant to appeal to India's own self conception, where it's as pure as snow and it's those dastardly Pakistanis who've made everything terrible.