AHC: Switch the fates of Pakistan and India

With a POD no earlier than the partition, have Pakistan develop into a nation widely talked about as a 'potential superpower' with a strong economy and a rapidly developing middle class while India devolves into a terrorism infested region bordering on a failed state.
 
With a POD no earlier than the partition, have Pakistan develop into a nation widely talked about as a 'potential superpower' with a strong economy and a rapidly developing middle class while India devolves into a terrorism infested region bordering on a failed state.

It would have to be a hell of a POD for Pakistan, like a threatened Chinese invasion or something. You'd need a totally different border with Afghanistan (no Tribal areas), a radically different Jinnah and above all no army coups every five minutes.
 
It would have to be a hell of a POD for Pakistan, like a threatened Chinese invasion or something. You'd need a totally different border with Afghanistan (no Tribal areas), a radically different Jinnah and above all no army coups every five minutes.

Plus Pakistan simply isn't big enough. At best, it can turn out like Indonesia or Argentina. But no one talks about those countries as potential superpowers.

For this to really work, you need to keep East and West Pakistan together, or simply have Pakistan not be based on the idea of a Muslim homeland. But both of those require PODs at least in the 1800s.

Cheers,
Ganesha
 
Plus Pakistan simply isn't big enough. At best, it can turn out like Indonesia or Argentina. But no one talks about those countries as potential superpowers.

For this to really work, you need to keep East and West Pakistan together, or simply have Pakistan not be based on the idea of a Muslim homeland. But both of those require PODs at least in the 1800s.

Cheers,
Ganesha

Seconded. You'd need a POD well into the 19th Century.
 
I think this would require a POD during the Muslim conquest of India. Northern India would have to have far more conversion. Then an Indian Muslim homeland would have a far larger population and more resources. Even half of India has immense potential.
 
You'd just need a POD at the partition. If Jinnah's original vision for Pakistan was followed then Pakistan would be a much more viable potential superpower. Then Pakistan wouldn't have to rely on it's military-industrial complex so much to survive. Given its position next to the Soviet Union and China, as in this AH Jinnah's proposed Pakistan has Kashmir, Pakistan would get loads of aid from US develop Pakistan's military as they did in the real history. Whether or not Pakistan would become successful as an anti-communist military dictatorship is not clear, perhaps it would be like Taiwan and South Korea where when the Soviet Union fell they became democracies, nonetheless their economic advance was mostly in the 1980s under military dictatorships. India could definitely collapse too; it is very diverse and only really was artificially created by the Raj. If India kept it's idealistic non-aligned status and accepted help from the Soviet Union and was even poorer without the rich regions that border Pakistan, then America, Pakistan and China could sow dissension and with all the social inequality and a democratic civilian government, then there could be a successful Maoist revolution.
 
Jinnah's demands at the time of partition like the whole of Punjab or the whole of Bengal or a corridor connecting the two halves of Pakistan were all ludicrous and preposterous and would not have been accepted by the Viceroy or the Congress leaders. As Pakistan itself was founded on a false notion of Islamic identity and the aspirations of the feudal elements of the North Indian Muslims, it had no potential to develop as a normal democracy. It is no wonder that it became a military dominated polity and is becoming a failed state.
It is not the areas in the neighborhood of Pakistan that are more advanced portions of India.Only Punjab can be described thus. Actually it is the South and the West ie. the Peninsular portions that have advanced. The North India,the Indo-Gangetic Plain Heartland has lagged behind. When the Home Minister of India hailing from the southern state of Tamilnadu commented that the North and the East are pulling the South and the West back,inviting criticism from many people, he was just telling the truth.
It is the challenge that the Government of India has to face. To pull the Northern Heartland in line with the Southern Peninsular India. It is similar to the unequal development of the East and the West Portions of China.
It is true that India has religious,linguistic and cultural diversities. But considering it as an artificial creation of British Raj is a silly notion of British Imperialism. The concept of India as an entity existed from centuries back. Many empires from the Mauryas downwards has aspired to bring the entire subcontinent under their control. The philosophers, poets, writers and artists have upheld the concept of Bharatvarsh, Aryavart or Hindustan through their works down the centuries.
 
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Cook

Banned
Plus Pakistan simply isn't big enough. At best, it can turn out like Indonesia or Argentina. But no one talks about those countries as potential superpowers.
Indonesia is a member of the G20 and at its current rate of economic growth will be one of the top ten world economies within the next decade. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono met with the chief of the International Monetary Fund on July 10 and pledged a 1 Billion US Dollar loan to the IMF for the bailout of Europe. Germany’s Angela Merkel was in Indonesia this week for financial talks concerning how the Indonesians can assist Europe. If people aren’t taking about Indonesia as a potential superpower then they need to fucking wake up.
 
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Jinnah's demands at the time of partition like the whole of Punjab or the whole of Bengal or a corridor connecting the two halves of Pakistan were all ludicrous and preposterous and would not have been accepted by the Viceroy or the Congress leaders. As Pakistan itself was founded on a false notion of Islamic identity and the aspirations of the feudal elements of the North Indian Muslims, it had no potential to develop as a normal democracy. It is no wonder that it became a military dominated polity and is becoming a failed state.
It is not the areas in the neighborhood of Pakistan that are more advanced portions of India.Only Punjab can be described thus. Actually it is the South and the West ie. the Peninsular portions that have advanced. The North India,the Indo-Gangetic Plain Heartland has lagged behind. When the Home Minister of India hailing from the southern state of Tamilnadu commented that the North and the East are pulling the South and the West back,inviting criticism from many people, he was just telling the truth.
It is the challenge that the Government of India has to face. To pull the Northern Heartland in line with the Southern Peninsular India. It is similar to the unequal development of the East and the West Portions of China.
It is true that India has religious,linguistic and cultural diversities. But considering it as an artificial creation of British Raj is a silly notion of British Imperialism. The concept of India as an entity existed from centuries back. Many empires from the Mauryas downwards has aspired to bring the entire subcontinent under their control. The philosophers, poets, writers and artists have upheld the concept of Bharatvarsh, Aryavart or Hindustan through their works down the centuries.

Agreed. The South and West are generally much more developed- Bangalore, Chennai, Kerala, Bombay etc.

Punjab is rich but theres no way Pakistan could get all of it.
 

GarethC

Donor
I'm thinking a secular Pakistan is needed here, rather than a Muslim state.

A better UK outcome to WWII might make it less determined to wash its hands of the subcontinent, and a multifaith Pakistan might avoid some of the worst atrocities of OTL Partition, as well as being the larger state needed for TTL's desired outcome.

Then if one of those border clashes in the Himalayas between China and India (you know, where the weather kills more troops than the enemy does) bizarrely spirals into WMD usage or something, then India might go badly wrong leading to Pakistani assistance in border areas which then secede in some de facto way.
 
I'm thinking a secular Pakistan is needed here, rather than a Muslim state.

Then it doesn't exist. That's its purpose. Pakistan is an artificial entity. Maybe as part of a loose Indian Confederation you could have a secular Punjab state but that ignores the OP.
 

GarethC

Donor
Then it doesn't exist. That's its purpose. Pakistan is an artificial entity. Maybe as part of a loose Indian Confederation you could have a secular Punjab state but that ignores the OP.

Well, its purpose is being a Muslim state that Jinnah is in charge of

Change that purpose to being a bigger and more powerful not-just-Muslims-but-definitely-not-majority-Hindu state that Jinnah is still in charge of.

You need a POD well before Partition though, to get Jinnah to not go for Muslim identity = national identity as the underpinning philosophy for post-Partition Pakistan.
 
Jinnah had demanded Pakistan as a country for Muslims.The word 'Pakistan' means 'The Land of the Pure' ie. Muslims. If not as a homeland for the Muslims of the Subcontinent the Pakistan has no relevance at all. If Israel was not meant for Jews, why was it formed? If it was for the Arabs, then Palestine was sufficient. Here also the case is similar. There is one major difference. Israel has all the Jews of the Middle East inside her borders. But Pakistan is home to barely one third of the Muslims in the Subcontinent. It is like a situation where the majority of the jews live in countries like Jordan,Syria,Iraq,Egypt and Saudi Arabia and are not permitted inside Israel.
 
I'm thinking a secular Pakistan is needed here, rather than a Muslim state.

A better UK outcome to WWII might make it less determined to wash its hands of the subcontinent, and a multifaith Pakistan might avoid some of the worst atrocities of OTL Partition, as well as being the larger state needed for TTL's desired outcome.

Then if one of those border clashes in the Himalayas between China and India (you know, where the weather kills more troops than the enemy does) bizarrely spirals into WMD usage or something, then India might go badly wrong leading to Pakistani assistance in border areas which then secede in some de facto way.

The problem is that the whole concept of Pakistan was based on it being a Muslim state. Theres no reason to set up a separate state in North-West India otherwise- besides appealing to the idea of Muslim identity theres nothing else Jinnah can go for. What's the point of a secular multi-faith Pakistan? There's nothing to distinguish it from the existing secular multi-faith India. It's not as if everyone in North-West India had some sort of unifying factor- they were just as polyglot as the rest of India comprising Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans, Baluchis etc. And thats not even considering the justification for East Pakistan and the Bengalis. Once the idea of secular Indian nationalism encompassing all the Indian ethnicities is established there's no real reason for these disparate ethnic groups to clump together to form another state. Why would Sindhis join a secular state that would overwhelmingly be dominated by Punjabis as opposed to joining India where the ethnic balance would be a bit better?
 
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The problem is that the whole concept of Pakistan was based on it being a Muslim state. Theres no reason to set up a separate state in North-West India otherwise- besides appealing to the idea of Muslim identity theres nothing else Jinnah can go for. What's the point of a secular multi-faith Pakistan? There's nothing to distinguish it from the existing secular multi-faith India. It's not as if everyone in North-West India had some sort of unifying factor- they were just as polyglot as the rest of India comprising Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans, Baluchis etc. And thats not even considering the justification for East Pakistan and the Bengalis. Once the idea of secular Indian nationalism encompassing all the Indian ethnicities is established there's no real reason for these disparate ethnic groups to clump together to form another state. Why would Sindhis join a secular state that would overwhelmingly be dominated by Punjabis as opposed to joining India where the ethnic balance would be a bit better?
Correct! Flocculencio has said it!
 
Plus Pakistan simply isn't big enough. At best, it can turn out like Indonesia or Argentina. But no one talks about those countries as potential superpowers.

For this to really work, you need to keep East and West Pakistan together, or simply have Pakistan not be based on the idea of a Muslim homeland. But both of those require PODs at least in the 1800s.

Cheers,
Ganesha

Really? Indonesia's a Next Eleven country. And sitting over the Strait of Malacca along with its hefty bounty of natural resources, Indonesia has a lot of places to go.

Argentina is... a different matter, and its problems really started at the turn of the 20th century, but at its height, Argentina had living standards that were better than those of the average citizen of Italy or Spain and in some aspects matched Britain or France.

But yeah, basic consensus on this, I agree here, when India has over five times the population of Pakistan, there is kind of already a problem between the two when it comes to economic ability and regional power status, add in the fact that Partition was an ugly mess for Pakistan and incompetent leadership like Jinnah and then you sort of start to see why Pakistan descended into a vicious cycle of authoritarian military rule interspersed with brief and tenuous periods of rule by crooked democracies which were eventually taken over by the military again. Add in the fact that Pakistan is a country that wasn't created with much attention to ethnic/tribal boundaries, and is next to a big, festering regional sore (Afghanistan) and you have at least some of the reasons for which Pakistan is a mess.

Pakistan's best hope is to be a regional power, capable of holding its own in a purely military sense against India while simultaneously enjoying good economic growth fueled by cheap, export-driven manufacturing booms and improved human development.
 
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