If we are talking about india after mugal decline. Muslims were leaving a vaccum and someone had to fill it. If not for the british, certianly the hindus would have done that. They had the majority in india and the muslims were on decline. Who else? Maybe there may be some small pockets of "states" like hyderabad etc. but on the whole the hindus would have taken over whole india.
The british raj gave us breathing space. Sir syed and iqbal and qaid got time to organize muslims and work for their educational trainning etc. under the british raj. So within a 100 years muslims were able to establish a state of their own. If we had not got this space, our future would have been diffeent.
We should not ignore this.