If I were in charge of the partition of India, I’d do it bottom-up. Starting with the smallest practical districts, ask in each one: For each of your neighbors, would you amalgamate? Do the most favored mergers (skipping any that would create enclaves), and ask again.
(It appears that I had this idea first for Iraq after US occupation and later applied it to India.)
I imagine the result as perhaps a hundred unitary states in twenty confederations, each including both new republics and old monarchies.
A new thought. Suppose that, where mergers are least popular, we make the boundary permanent and not ask again. We might end up with some C-shaped states, partly divided by an internal boundary (imagine that France’s borders include the Loire). What would that mean?
Madhu hated the idea of letting India be cut into smaller pieces.
When I expressed the idea on Reddit, one Indian said the votes would be corrupted by local bigwigs. I’m not sure that that would be worse than the real history.