Reddit reviews The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

Gandhi was actually actually a pretty controversial figure within India, even during the height of his influence. The Indian independence movement was not a united front, and the conflict between Hindus and Muslims is just the most obvious of many, many divisions. Gandhi managed, for a time, to get everyone pointed in the same direction (specifically, at the British), but the instant the external threat was gone he lost a lot of his sway and became one of many power players - and as one of the more visible and outspoken leaders in the pot, he was one of the ripest targets for assassination by the more extreme elements.

I'd highly recommend The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan on the subject - its focus is the division between Pakistan and India, but in explaining how that came to be it goes into a lot of depth of the politics of the Indian independence movement.

One major point that people should know about Pakistan is that they are culturally, religiously, historically and linguistically tied to India and to an extent, Bangladesh and Afghanistan (the latter tie being stronger than the former).

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were once a single entity under the British Raj. Most Indian nationalists at that time, and some (though a smaller component) of Greater India nationalists see these three countries as one entity.

There are many reasons as to why India and Pakistan split, some of them are very legitimate concerns, whereas there are some issues that were very clearly motivated by personal interests of several leaders.

There is more to the split between India and Pakistan aside from the Republican split from the British Raj, there are other factors playing into the division of India into India and Pakistan, such as those that pertain to the treatment of the many Princely States.

Here are some solid recommendations as far as reading is concerned on this particular part of the world:

Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah and the Battle for Pakistan by Qutubuddin Aziz & Katherine Wang

Makers of Modern India by Ramachandra Guha

A Concise History of Modern India
by Barbara D. Metcalf & Thomas R. Metcalf

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
by Yasmin Khan

Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum by Stephen Cohen

Remember the Doctor Who episode about the Partition of India? Well I found a book about it written by someone named Yasmin Khan, do you think the Doctor Who companion was named after her?