Daily Times

Evaluating the democracies of India and Pakistan is the most perplexing study within comparative studies. At the onset of partition, India faced extreme linguistic diversity, the issue of princely states and a class and caste based society, yet it went remarkably well with the amalgamation of skill and coercion, which helped India forge ahead to become a democratic state. The Indian leadership pledged communitarian reorientation during the freedom movement and they did it immediately in the first five years of independence.New provinces were set up on the basis of linguistic affinity. India drafted its Constitution soon after independence and managed to assign and allocate the powers to its respective institutions.

The colonial experience inherited a strong administrative structure, intermediaries and a strengthened political elite. Nehru did not want India to indulge itself in the global arena of conflict; rather he attempted to keep India aloof to let democratic practices consolidate. He had to consider ethnic, federal, domestic, regional and ideological imperatives. India maintained the status of a secular state that needed a strong government to protect the rights of minorities with no state religion. The majority of a single party in the democratic frame is surprising but to India it proved to be a great source of assistance as 17 years into independence the Centre remained led by Congress, providing overall stability to the political process.

Nehru went for the institutionalisation of electoral politics in India. Elections were held regularly without any hitch. It enabled India not only to extend democracy down to the local level but to indoctrinate democratic norms in the public too. Economic and political thinking at the time of independence crystallised along the perpetuation of an institutional framework based on universal suffrage and on widening the electoral base to achieve a functional parliamentary democracy.

India and Pakistan are the offshoots of post-colonialism. The edifice of the British Empire started crumbling with the advent of World War II. At the end of the war it became impossible for the British Empire to linger on with its colonies. This moment was effectively captured by the native masses by waging the Quit India Movement and it became obvious that sooner or later the British would withdraw from India. Now, all the focus was to remap India on the basis of religious affinity. It stirred a major controversy and embittered communal relations.

This deterioration of relations was one of the key factors later on in the fragile development of democracy in Pakistan. It affected Pakistan in multiple ways. The leadership that led India’s camp included Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Azad, who all belonged to Congress. It was a strengthened and circumspect leadership that knew it would have a dominant hand in the British exit from India. On the other hand the Muslim camp had only one charismatic leader and that was Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Muslims were the underdogs in this struggle who were operating on two fronts simultaneously. On the one hand they needed to struggle to liberate India and on the other they needed to ensure that they would not fall prey to the Hindu majority in the post-independence period.

The leadership of the All Indian Muslim League belonged to the educated middle class, which was wary of the competition with Hindus who outnumbered them in educational and job employment opportunities. The menace of Hindu dominance always remained in the back of the mind of the Muslim leadership. Muslims had a very bitter experience of the Congressional ministries of 1937 where they believed they were very roughly treated by the Hindus. It was nimbly manipulated by the Muslims later on when they constructed the identity of the Muslim League as the sole representative of the Indian Muslims.

As the movement for Pakistan gained pace, rivalry amongst both communities escalated manifold. The interim government of 1946 was the pinnacle of this rivalry when the Cabinet Mission Plan ended in smoke. This animosity propelled the Indian leadership to oppose any plan for the creation of Pakistan on every forum. One opinion is that Pakistan came into being due to the obstinate behaviour of the Hindu leadership otherwise Muslims were ready to cooperate in the wake of the Cabinet Mission Plan. The plan to partition India was announced on June 3, 1947 and Pakistan won independence on August 14, 1947. The real struggle began then. Pakistan was a seceding state in this case of partition.

The consolidation of democracy in a post-colonial polity like India seemed awkward as it inherited a social structure based on class and caste. India was the only state to secure a functional democracy; even the British rulers in India had opined that parliamentary democracy was unsuited for a society so rigorously divided into religious, caste and class groups and where the social structure rested on hierarchy rather than an ideological basis.

India had to contend with three enigmas in its initial years. The topmost was to sustain democracy in an extremely diversified framework. The second was to affiliate all religious groups as a majority of the population was Hindu along with significant minorities of Muslims and Sikhs. The third genuine concern was to associate itself with an economic development model and join either international power bloc. Reorientation on the basis of language was done. Even today the growing regionalism of India dates to that early resettlement. India became a federated democracy with a strong centre.

Though majoritarianism still prevails in India, it did not accredit any official religion; rather it declared itself a secular republic. India maintained poise between the centralisation and decentralisation of powers, and, as federal democracies go, India is a relatively centralised state. While many critics have made this observation, the fact is that demands for decentralisation only make sense in the context of a centralised authority. Authority and wealth have to exist before they can be redistributed.

The writer is a lecturer in Defence and Diplomatic Studies at Fatima Jinnah Women University, and writes with special emphasis on electoral politics and contemporary political processes in India and Pakistan. He can be reached at rajaqaiserahmed@gmail.com and tweets at @rajaqaiserahmed