Review of Philip Oldenburg's new book India, Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths has some "insightful" answers to some obvious questions.
"There was also more popular support for India at the time it was created than there was for Pakistan. The Indian National Congress, the torchbearer of India's nationalist movement, had enjoyed mass support since the 1920s, when Mohandas Gandhi became the party's leader. The Pakistani nationalist movement, the Muslim League, was not popular at all among Indian Muslims until the mid-1940s, just before partition. As a result, writes Oldenburg, referring to his famous 1985 Journal of Asian Studies article, one of the foremost on the 1971 breakup of East and West Pakistan, Pakistan was "a place insufficiently imagined" among those who would eventually live there. Feeling that lack of popular support, Muslim League leaders were hesitant to let other political parties develop once the country was created. Additionally, they feared that parties would divide an already weak nation. Since independence, the government has tried to limit Pakistan's political liberalization by introducing notions such as "controlled democracy," which has involved holding partyless elections at times. India's party system, on the other hand, is a venerable and robust arena for aggregating and articulating citizens' interests, and the field of parties is ever expanding.
Pakistan's need to forge a collective identity after 1947 was complicated by its ethnolinguistic arithmetic: the political and military center of power was in West Pakistan, but 55 percent of the population lived in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Pakistan's elites in the west of the country could not uphold democracy without loosing power to those in the east. Centralization and authoritarianism were the logical next steps. These were encouraged by the Punjabi-dominated army, which seized power for the first time in 1958. In one of the most interesting chapters of his book, Oldenburg writes about the attempt of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to impose Urdu -- a language spoken by a minority of the population -- as the national language, sparking protests among the Bengali-speaking majority in East Pakistan, which seceded during a violent war and became Bangladesh in 1971. In contrast, a 40 percent plurality of Indians spoke Hindi, and India tried to diffuse any ethnolinguistic tensions in the years after partition by recognizing several official languages -- including English -- and redrawing the federal map along linguistic lines to give each group its own administrative unit. Any account of the diverging paths of the two countries in the 1950s must start from this baseline."
"There was also more popular support for India at the time it was created than there was for Pakistan. The Indian National Congress, the torchbearer of India's nationalist movement, had enjoyed mass support since the 1920s, when Mohandas Gandhi became the party's leader. The Pakistani nationalist movement, the Muslim League, was not popular at all among Indian Muslims until the mid-1940s, just before partition. As a result, writes Oldenburg, referring to his famous 1985 Journal of Asian Studies article, one of the foremost on the 1971 breakup of East and West Pakistan, Pakistan was "a place insufficiently imagined" among those who would eventually live there. Feeling that lack of popular support, Muslim League leaders were hesitant to let other political parties develop once the country was created. Additionally, they feared that parties would divide an already weak nation. Since independence, the government has tried to limit Pakistan's political liberalization by introducing notions such as "controlled democracy," which has involved holding partyless elections at times. India's party system, on the other hand, is a venerable and robust arena for aggregating and articulating citizens' interests, and the field of parties is ever expanding.
Pakistan's need to forge a collective identity after 1947 was complicated by its ethnolinguistic arithmetic: the political and military center of power was in West Pakistan, but 55 percent of the population lived in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Pakistan's elites in the west of the country could not uphold democracy without loosing power to those in the east. Centralization and authoritarianism were the logical next steps. These were encouraged by the Punjabi-dominated army, which seized power for the first time in 1958. In one of the most interesting chapters of his book, Oldenburg writes about the attempt of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to impose Urdu -- a language spoken by a minority of the population -- as the national language, sparking protests among the Bengali-speaking majority in East Pakistan, which seceded during a violent war and became Bangladesh in 1971. In contrast, a 40 percent plurality of Indians spoke Hindi, and India tried to diffuse any ethnolinguistic tensions in the years after partition by recognizing several official languages -- including English -- and redrawing the federal map along linguistic lines to give each group its own administrative unit. Any account of the diverging paths of the two countries in the 1950s must start from this baseline."
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