If the British hadn’t displaced the Mughals, would an independence movement for democracy been against the the “foreign” Mughal rule or like the religion of peace they followed, would they have simply have abdicated?

The Mughal Empire, by the time of Company ascendancy, consisted of the Red Fort, a handful of slums, and an abattoir for cows and Hindus.

This great Empire- which stretched from Delhi to Palam, to borrow a contemporary saying- was a toothless nonentity kept afloat only by the paper consent by Islamic Bandit States to its titular authority in the face of the expanding Maratha Empire, even as the Mughal Emperors themselves ruled entirely by the consent of Pune.

The second half of the Eighteenth Century and the first half of the Nineteenth, thus, was essentially one long showdown between the Maratha Empire on one side- and the multitudes of Islamic tyrannies and theocracies, and the Turkish, Afghan, Kazakh hordes they were inviting in the land, as well as the opportunistic Firang powers- especially the Angrej, Firang, and Vilayat nations. The average Hill Raja with a mere two regiments of line infantry would've been a greater military asset than the entire Mughal Empire at the time.

A Maratha victory in the Anglo-Maratha wars might've resulted in the exact same thing that happened in 1857 CE anyway- the pensioning off of the so-called Emperor and the exile of his misbegotten line to some suitably unpleasant Mleccha land.