How would that be any worse than the northeast for India?
1) Look at this
map of British army recruitment. Way more soldiers got recruited from NWFP alone than from the whole northeast. While both were frontiers, one frontier was more militarized than the other.
2) NWFP is a lot more responsive to changes outside it than the northeast. In the northeast the most international spillover comes from the Naga conflict, which has Indian and Burman theaters, but neither nation really has any interesting in backing the Naga rebels to needle the other-- both would prefer isolating and weakening them further. For NWFP, Pakistan has to constantly be on guard for irredentist claims from Afghanistan, refugee flows after Afghanistan falls apart, local militancy, links to international militant networks, etc. Militarized frontier it may be, but it really is a much more porous place.
How was it any more feudal than India? If they can break out of it I don't see why Pakistan can't.
Oh India's no stranger to feudalism, but like Khanzeer noted the wide variety of career politicians whose power
doesn't stem from land (for reformists/communists/Dalit activists, their power might stem from their
opposition to landowners!) are able to more or less crowd them out. In any case, Delhi more or less outsourced land reform to state governments, but even the more liberal state governments pursued it pretty halfheartedly. There's still a lot of concern in India over practices like
benami ("no name") landholding, where landowners forced to give up land have someone hold it in their name (but they still believe themselves to have rights over the land, and may threaten the placeholder until he concedes this). It's a real malign influence economically, it makes local politics pretty unrepresentative in places, and the influence is heavy on some states' governments. Still, they can't buy elections-- national paramountcy belongs not to landowner cliques but to two disciplined party machines drawing from all walks of life.
There's
this interesting article which claims that East Punjab (which underwent successful land reform and adoption of Green Revolution advancements) has more competitive party politics while West Punjab (where such initiatives stalled out) remains home to many "electables" who don't need party backing to win their seats, and instead lend their strength to the party that woos them best (in 2018, this was Imran Khan's PTI). These electables have a pretty good record of delivering wins for their suitors, by the way-- Punjab has the most seats, so any group of people able to promise a party half of Punjab has what you'd call national influence. There's also the rather interesting case where six PML-N politicians from South Punjab simply defected from their party and joined the PTI after it promised to set up a new "South Punjab" province. Progress on that is slow, but the six have already received jobs in the new government (I believe one is Foreign Minister).
Can we make India less hostile from the onset?
Gandhi's assassin would argue we weren't hostile enough :,^) Even if the INC had wanted to make more concessions, doing so might give the early RSS another shot at public relevance right as Delhi was trying to ban it/drive it underground, which could lead to anything from more street militancy to another round of assassinations. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
How come something similar didnt happen in India?
Indian religious policy includes a whole separate civil code for Muslims, meanwhile Pakistan's 2nd constitutional amendment declared the Ahmadis apostates because their end-times prophecies deviate from the Sunni standard. I'm oversimplifying, but generally religion was something that Delhi didn't want to muck around in except for purposes of keeping the peace, it wasn't interested in divide/rule. Keeping the peace, unfortunately, includes Punjab in the 80s. And though the BJP's been controversial, its religious or religion-influenced policy is for the most part framed as equalization-- taking Kashmir's privileges away because other Indian states do without, chipping away at the Muslim civil code because Hindus work on the secular civil code just fine, etc. It's kinda hypocritical (for all its former legal privileges, Kashmir still has to put up with extralegal Army-imposed burdens no other state has) but something like Pakistan's 2nd Amendment (explicitly, legally declaring religious group X to be outside the mainstream and sending militias after them) is unlikely.
we are looking at punjab and sindh as in OTL as west pakistan ? it would be much weaker and intimidated by both india and afghan superstate.
afghanistan uptil the indus DOES not guarentee that pashtuns will still be friendly to the people beyond it , history tells us otherwise
regarding independent balochistan I think its geostrategic importance will be much less than imagined and would probably be a lot under iranian influence
Yeah, more or less. Pakistan as a long thin noodle between 2 larger states that mostly had good-to-average relations with 1) each other 2) the USSR is gonna be a very paranoid country. Pakistan's quandary is that it needs to be somewhat large, but also has nowhere good to expand into, so any deviations from its OTL size are probably going to have many strings attached.
Meanwhile, Baluchistan just isn't feasible-- the area didn't even exist as a single unit until Pakistan abolished the local princely states (which controlled nearly the entire province) and economically it's not making any waves. It might not even scrape together the funds needed to buy Gwadar from Oman like Pakistan did OTL, though maybe that's a good thing-- maybe the Gwadar area could be a nexus for smuggling between the Mideast and South Asia? It's not great, but it's an industry all the same. Baluchistan would also have to worry about uber-Afghanistan, which can make claims on the Pashtun-majority area around (and including) Quetta.