Ironically, had Indian politics been encouraged to develop as British politics had, along ideological lines, one could have seen the emergence of a conservative party and a socialist one, with some liberals in between; these tendencies were all present among Indian public men. This kind of conventional political contention could have kept India united, with Jinnah and Nehru becoming the Disraeli and Gladstone of their era in an emerging Indian Dominion. But colonial policies drove conservatives and socialists alike to define themselves primarily in relation to the communal question, leading
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