I always thought India would have functioned better if it had confederated under a Swiss style cantonment system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switz

I always thought India would have functioned better if it had confederated under a Swiss style cantonment system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland). They maybe could have even avoided partition this way too. And whatever paroxysms of violence from internal migration might have been mitigated against if it was all being overseen by a single government and army instead of the three-way clusterfuck of the actual partition. There would have needed to be some system for maintaining a rough level of parity/equality of representation of various minority groups at the high level. Scheduled castes and tribes would probably not have been as well protected under such a system, for example, but it's probably something than could have been worked out with effort.