I agree with most of your post except "The Hindu-muslim unity in 1857 was a revolt against the british on religious grounds"
Indians have never and still do not draw lines between nationalism and culturalism. The 1857 uprising was a revolt against many atrocities carried out by the British. Indians have always been more sentimental about religion than civil or human rights (which is a shame) but that is how our country runs. So a revolt against religious tyranny IS in fact a fight for freedom because religious freedom is a basic civil right.
As far as the pros and cons of the British Raj are concerned, I do not even need to go into the details of it because it is no-brainer. However, speculating whether we would have been a part of Arabia or not if muslims had continued to rule is almost impossible to gauge. I believe that in the event of weakening rule of the Mughals, Indians would have staged an uprising against them as well. It took 90 years after the 1857 uprising to achieve democracy. The Brits still believe that they should've stayed back and avoided the mass massacres; the same idealogy is being applied in Iraq by the US - basically destroy a town in order to save it. But as people, every population has a right to conduct its experiments in democracy and pay the price in order to achieve freedom. This revolt may not be such a Hindu-Muslim unity affair as these people are making it out to be, but it was the first few steps in uniting our population as Indians against a common enemy.
So what we need to learn from this is the importance of unity in the face of religious diversities. We dont have to thankful to British about anything. We did not receive democracy from them. Democracy was invented and used a long time back by the Romans and Greeks. The Queen did not give two hoots about Indians and their right to have a democracy. If the 1930 stock market crash and the Nazi destruction of England during WWII hadn't occurred, we would've been their slaves for another 25 - 30 years.
