Why is India better off than Pakistan, and how can we change that?

Both countries where hurt by the partition no doubt. But in almost every metric, India fares much better than Pakistan. Democracy, literacy, hdi, living standards, fertility, etc. Why is this? Didn't India and Pakistan both inherit the same form of government from Britain?

And how can we change this in alternate history? How can we make it so that Pakistan is the more democratic, more stable, better developed, etc of the 2?
 
Pakistan was ahead in nominal GDP per capita until around 2007, and in PPP GDP per capita until 2009. I'm guessing that the economic progress in India stems from economic reforms initiated in 1991, but I know nothing about Pakistani economic policies that may have allowed India to overtake them.
 
India was perceived by its founders as a secular state, the writing of its constitution was an orderly affair headed by Ambedkar (who as a member of a minority cared deeply about minority rights and integrated his thoughts on protecting them into the constitution), and its leaders were very, very cautious about avoiding the establishment of an Indonesia-style military dictatorship. In contrast, Pakistan was at the outset created as a Muslim state, the writing of its constitution was a damn mess in which the military was involved, and military involvement was not checked. There are other factors - the armies inherited by both nations were headed by martial races such as the Punjabi, but while in India this was quickly checked, Pakistan was and continues to be headed by a Punjabi elite, and this has meant that the unrepresentative nature of Pakistan's military was never checked.

Didn't India and Pakistan both inherit the same form of government from Britain?

They did not. India and Pakistan had constituent assemblies which decided on which form of government worked best. India, after a lot of debate, decided on a French-inspired parliamentary republic with a quite similar figurehead president as the French Fourth Republic but there were many who disagreed with the establishment of such a system and wanted a presidential system - as late the 70s and 80s, there was in fact substantial support for presidentialism within the Congress party, and the parliamentary instability of the 90s caused Vajpayee among others to also support it. Pakistan had something similar (but many more people including Jinnah were anti-parliamentarism), but then the military intervened and forced the GG of Pakistan to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. Eventually a new assembly was created which decided on a parliamentary system, but then the military intervened again and in 1958 the military made its control of Pakistan open.

How can we make it so that Pakistan is the more democratic, more stable, better developed, etc of the 2?

It's really, really tough, I'd say, but one would be to make Subhas Chandra Bose leader of India post-independence. He openly believed that India should be ruled by a dictatorship because he stupidly thought India wasn't "ready" for democracy (whatever that means). If he instituted a dictatorship, that could very well create instability, a democratic coup, and civil war which could screw India over.
 
In contrast, Pakistan was at the outset created as a Muslim state, the writing of its constitution was a damn mess in
It was a secular state its stated in the constitution. It didn't have sharia straight away and its founder was secular. It was a secular state created for muslims fearing hindu domination, but was still secular.
 
It's really, really tough, I'd say, but one would be to make Subhas Chandra Bose leader of India post-independence. He openly believed that India should be ruled by a dictatorship because he stupidly thought India wasn't "ready" for democracy (whatever that means). If he instituted a dictatorship, that could very well create instability, a democratic coup, and civil war which could screw India over
Why would it be so difficult?

Anyhow, I would generally rather make Pakistan better than India (though both are nessecary).

There are other factors - the armies inherited by both nations were headed by martial races such as the Punjabi, but while in India this was quickly checked, Pakistan was and continues to be headed by a Punjabi elite, and this has meant that the unrepresentative nature of Pakistan's military was never checked.
I heard once that Pashtuns where over represented in the Indian army, and after the partition the vast majority where inherited by Pakistan. Why didnt the balance out Punjabi dominace?

They did not. India and Pakistan had constituent assemblies which decided on which form of government worked best. India, after a lot of debate, decided on a French-inspired parliamentary republic with a quite similar figurehead president as the French Fourth Republic but there were many who disagreed with the establishment of such a system and wanted a presidential system - as late the 70s and 80s, there was in fact substantial support for presidentialism within the Congress party, and the parliamentary instability of the 90s caused Vajpayee among others to also support it. Pakistan had something similar (but many more people including Jinnah were anti-parliamentarism), but then the military intervened and forced the GG of Pakistan to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. Eventually a new assembly was created which decided on a parliamentary system, but then the military intervened again and in 1958 the military made its control of Pakistan open.

Why was Pakistan so much more prone to military intervention than India, and how could we stop it?
 
It was a secular state its stated in the constitution.

A state calling itself "secular" does not make it secular. For a state to be secular, it must separate religion and statecraft. Pakistan failed to do this. To an extent, so did India, with its separate Muslim personal law and inclusion of religious figures like Maulana Azad into its government, but that's different since after all that's in regards to a minority group, not at the expense of one.

This has only gotten worse, between Bhutto's persecution of the Ahmadi, Yahya Khan's inclusion of jihadis in campaigns against Bangladesh, and Zia's Islamization campaigns.

It didn't have sharia straight away

It did. British India had sharia law for Muslims ("Anglo-Mohammedan law"), and both India and Pakistan inherited this. The continued existence of Sharia law has become a major political issue in India (see the Shah Bano case, triple talaq), but while the constitution instructed the Indian constitution to create a uniform civil code for all religions, it hasn't been done yet. In Pakistan though, it seems sharia law stands strong with no challenges.

and its founder was secular.

Which founder? I assume you're talking about Jinnah, but his predecessor Sir Muhammad Iqbal was opposed to the "western concept" of secularism and supported divine nomocracy. And even Jinnah called Islam integral to Pakistani democracy. In many ways, Jinnah reminds me of that Hindu nationalist thinker Savarkar - while not personally religious, religion made a large amount of their political philosophies.

It was a secular state created for muslims fearing hindu domination, but was still secular.

Do you not see how a "state for Muslims" may quickly turn into a "Muslim state"?

Why would it be so difficult?

India had many, many advantages over Pakistan. I described them in my last post.

I heard once that Pashtuns where over represented in the Indian army, and after the partition the vast majority where inherited by Pakistan. Why didnt the balance out Punjabi dominace?

Pashtuns were rebellious, and their leader Bacha Khan the "frontier Gandhi" attempted to secede from Pakistan. So they were naturally excluded, thus resulting in Punjabi dominance. Furthermore, Pashtuns were considered "sneaky" according to British racialism, and so they were given different positions in the British army as a result.

Why was Pakistan so much more prone to military intervention than India, and how could we stop it?

India was really, really worried about an Indonesia-style military junta immediately after independence, and that's the main reason. Even before independence, here's what Gandhi had to say during the Quit India movement:

Ours is not a drive for power, but purely a non-violent fight for India’s independence. In a violent struggle, a successful general has been often known to effect a military coup and to set up a dictatorship. But under the Congress scheme of things, essentially non-violent as it is, there can be no room for dictatorship.​

As you can see avoiding a military coup was at the top of Indian leaders' mind even before independence because they wanted to not just win independence - they wanted to win the period afterwards. The same was not true for Pakistan. So, I suppose that would be a divergence. You need to make Pakistani leaders just as worried about a military coup as Indian leaders.
 
Here is the problem.

in a 1947 start

India from the start had a developed industrial base, laid out by the British.
The British primarily developed the areas in The Bay Of Bengal, The Deccan Plateau and the Ganges Basin comprising most of what is India.

Most of what is West Pakistan was on the periphery and only loosely part of British India i.e Balochistan, The North West Frontier and the Tribal areas. A buffer zone for the British.

Karachi was only a small fishing port, compared with say Bombay. or Calcutta or Madras.

East Bengal, modern day bangladesh, was a source for raw materials. All the Industrial Capacity was in West Bengal (Calcutta).

Pakistan,was bankrupt from the start, and had to fight a war for kashmir with India from the very beginning and was outnumbered and out gunned.
in 1947, Pakistan had six armoured, eight artillery and eight infantry regiments compared to the twelve armoured, forty artillery and twenty-one infantry regiments that went to India.

Pakistan did not have a navy or airforce worth mentioning until 1950.
 
Pakistan is always waiting for outside powers to pay for its education and infrastructure.

The government under funded secular education and the slack was taken up by Saudi funded religious schools, with disastrous results.

If we look at the China Pakistan Economic Corridor under construction today, that’s something any rational government would have built by itself decades ago and had they done it the country would have been able to leverage the Chinese economic growth all these years.

Do those two things and no one would be saying Pakistan is under performing.
 
With regards to Pakistan’s comparatively weak economy would Radcliffe drawing a more evenhanded border in Punjab have provided a significant boost (when ignoring the effect this could have had in reducing India’s access to Kashmir and Jammu)?
 
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With regards to Pakistan’s comparatively weak economy would Radcliffe drawing a more evenhanded border in Punjab have provided a significant boost (when ignoring the effect this could have had in reducing India’s access to Kashmir and Jammu)?

Yes, more agricultural lands and more likely that J&K accedes to Pakistan.
With J& K in pakistani hands, as well as control over the Indus tributaries, it would be a significant boost to pakistan's agricultural production. The problem STILL remains that pakistan does not have any industries to begin with.
 
With regards to Pakistan’s comparatively weak economy would Radcliffe drawing a more evenhanded border in Punjab have provided a significant boost (when ignoring the effect this could have had in reducing India’s access to Kashmir and Jammu)?

Pakistan got the larger part of Punjab as is; there's not really much more value you can add with scraps of the Sikh/Hindu heartland, in random mountains in Himachal Pradesh, or assorted morsels like Junagadh. OTL Pakistan in 1947 already has the 3 industrial centers it could realistically expect to start with (Lahore, Karachi, Dhaka) and plenty of agricultural potential besides.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
Both countries where hurt by the partition no doubt. But in almost every metric, India fares much better than Pakistan. Democracy, literacy, hdi, living standards, fertility, etc. Why is this? Didn't India and Pakistan both inherit the same form of government from Britain?

And how can we change this in alternate history? How can we make it so that Pakistan is the more democratic, more stable, better developed, etc of the 2?
1 Pakistan inherited only an embryonic civil service and administration compared to india

2 It in inherited the biggest security problem of British india i.e NWFP...meaning it would always be a security state first

3 Its better half [ future banladesh] was deeply alienated right from the start by politics of both eastern and western pakistani politicians meaning no viable constitution can be crafted in its earlier yrs and one of 1956 was not implemented due to Aybs coup

4 Feudalism was the backbone of political elite , so democracy in Pakistan has always been a way for these medieval minded leaders to solidify their grip on power.while grassroots political workers / labor unions were always brutally suppressed.e.g Benazir Bhutto in the west is considered a liberal female leader of the Muslim world in reality she was the heiress of a brutal feudal family who politically out maneuvered her own brother, threw her own party idealists and activists in jail and actively colluded with martial law era self serving leaders.Her only interest was to accumulate power and wealth and not the social welfare her party initially was founded for

5 lost most of its founding fathers relatively early on

6 almost half of west Pakistan was largely ungovernable tribal areas of pashtuns and baloch here combination of bad terrain , arid regions and tribal leadership prevented major development

7 army since start of ayub era became more interested in economics than war, its interested varies from housing projects to cement factories to breakfast cereal production.pakistani officer corp became the new landed gentry with massive land holdings , here atleast to their credit punjabi, muhajir, pakhtoon almost all generals have been equally corrupt and self serving.That being said army is immensely popular amongst populations as the only place where upward social mobility is possible for the common man

8 india has always adopted a very hostile attitude towards Pakistan right from the beginning [ holding pak govt funds until Gandhi hunger strike compelled it to release them ]despite friendly overtures from pakistan earlier in its history e.g ayub offer to nehru for united defence against china after 62 war.There was better hope of friendship in the 50s and 60s even though horrors of partition was still fresh rather than in 80s and 90s when the partisan attitudes on both sides had hardened and deeply entrenched.

9 big R i.e religion ! Actually till 70s , religious class was the equivalent of radical left in pakistan.It was only with the start of the jihad franchise in 70s did they move into mainstream politics atleast in west Pakistan.With an alphabet soup of militias and charity organizations they were cottage industry by the mid 90s.Their patronage totally torpedoed Pakistan international standing and foreign policy plus riddled the country with sectarian divisions prompting a huge brain drain of liberals , shias , qadianis , parsis , ismsilis , Hindus esp after 1985
 
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6 almost half of west Pakistan was largely ungovernable tribal areas of pashtuns and baloch here combination of bad terrain , arid regions and tribal leadership prevented major development

In retrospect would an ATL Pakistan composed of Sindh and OTL Pakistani Punjab have benefited an earlier POD where the Pashtun and Baloch areas ended up becoming part of Afghanistan or in the case of the Baloch as part of an independent Balochistan?
 
1 Pakistan inherited only an embryonic civil service and administration compared to india

How so?

2 It in inherited the biggest security problem of British india i.e NWFP...meaning it would always be a security state first

How would that be any worse than the northeast for India?

4 Feudalism was the backbone of political elite , so democracy in Pakistan has always been a way for these medieval minded leaders to solidify their grip on power.while grassroots political workers / labor unions were always brutally suppressed.e.g Benazir Bhutto in the west is considered a liberal female leader of the Muslim world in reality she was the heiress of a brutal feudal family who politically out maneuvered her own brother, threw her own party idealists and activists in jail and actively colluded with martial law era self serving leaders.Her only interest was to accumulate power and wealth and not the social welfare her party initially was founded for

How was it any more feudal than India? If they can break out of it I don't see why Pakistan can't.

lost most of its founding fathers relatively early on

What do you mean by this?

8 india has always adopted a very hostile attitude towards Pakistan right from the beginning [ holding pak govt funds until Gandhi hunger strike compelled it to release them ]despite friendly overtures from pakistan earlier in its history e.g ayub offer to nehru for united defence against china after 62 war.There was better hope of friendship in the 50s and 60s even though horrors of partition was still fresh rather than in 80s and 90s when the partisan attitudes on both sides had hardened and deeply entrenched.

Can we make India less hostile from the onset?

9 big R i.e religion ! Actually till 70s , religious class was the equivalent of radical left in pakistan.It was only with the start of the jihad franchise in 70s did they move into mainstream politics atleast in west Pakistan.With an alphabet soup of militias and charity organizations they were cottage industry by the mid 90s.Their patronage totally torpedoed Pakistan international standing and foreign policy plus riddled the country with sectarian divisions prompting a huge brain drain of liberals , shias , qadianis , parsis , ismsilis , Hindus esp after 1985

How come something similar didnt happen in India?
 

Khanzeer

Banned
In retrospect would an ATL Pakistan composed of Sindh and OTL Pakistani Punjab have benefited an earlier POD where the Pashtun and Baloch areas ended up becoming part of Afghanistan or in the case of the Baloch as part of an independent Balochistan?
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
 

Khanzeer

Banned
How so?

pakistan area british ruled over only less than 80 yrs effectively , mostly garrsion towns like pindi, and some other like lahore ,lyallpur etc are well developed but from the standpoint of their military strategic importance.Karachi was a minor trading town nowhere close to bombay , it was postpartition gujraitis that rejuvinated the economy of that city


How would that be any worse than the northeast for India?

as united india has no eastern border problem unlike pak of OTL

How was it any more feudal than India? If they can break out of it I don't see why Pakistan can't.


indian national congress is not dominated by feudal lords, muslim league was a gentlemans club for muslim landlords save a few like jinnah

What do you mean by this?
jinnah dead 48
liaqat 51
suhrawarday sidelined by 56
ch muhammad ali sidelined by 55
UP leaders of muslims had no following in pakistan
army takeover by 58


Can we make India less hostile from the onset?
meek submissive vassel state of pakistan , anything more will always be seen as a threat by india.Lets not forget jinnah was a difficult man to work with and muslim landlords were rooting for pak for self-serving interests but hindu nationalist and inflexible attitude of congress is no less to blame for partition. Even jaswant siggh indian FM admits to it in his book.British divide and rule worked brilliantly !



How come something similar didnt happen in India?
Thank god for nehru and the secular leftist tendencies of congress [ here i give full marks to indians] they truly embraced minority rights despite some ugliness [like sikh uprisings ,kashmir sepratist, gujrat riots etc] overall indian treatment of minorities has been FAR BETTER than paksistans esp after 1980s.

once pak army started using poor disillusioned youth as cannon fodder for religious parties militant wings they literally let the genie out of the bottle, this is the grts failure of the much vaunted ISI.Although to be fair pak army is a very professional force and this failure on part of its intelligence wing should not be reflective of the whole organization.Give credit where due pak army might not have won many battles against the indian army, but it has held its own in the west and by applying the "force in being" doctrine it does extert significant pressure on india forcing it to spend so much on defense.
 
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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.
 
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Would ATL Pakistan (old west) be better of if all of Bengal became one nation in '47 separate from India and Pakistan? Iirc Jinnah supported this as a counterbalance to India but the movement was blocked. Bengal would have had a Muslim majority I think and would have the ability to become a strong regional and Industrial power.

Butterflying the independence war in East Pakistan/Bangladesh would be a benefit as would the loss to India of one of its most industrialised provinces; Bengal and Pakistan would have, for the most part common aims and if Bengal is (as is necessary for its stability) as a genuinely secular state it could influence Pakistan's movement away from democracy (hopefully butterfly it)
 
To address OP's question: I think that broadly speaking, India's ability to overtake Pakistan (however ploddingly slow that progress may be) in all those metrics has to do with:
  1. India's generally peaceful power transfers encouraging central-gov't policymaking to build off past precedent. This might have stalled the pace of vital economic reforms, but consistency and stability have their upsides too. Contrast with Pakistan's sudden/violent power transfers, which creates government after government more concerned with its own survival or with ramming through revolutionary change (treating past precedent as politically toxic, basically) than with building off past successes and laying foundations for future growth. And so it goes to the IMF, again.
  2. India's federalism encouraging state-level policy experimentation. After the initial round of reorganizations India's states were assured of their powers and have continually accrued more since then. This allowed for Kerala to push hard on education for its populace, for Tamil Nadu in the 90s to be way ahead of the curve in attracting foreign companies to open factories (making Chennai the center of India vehicle-manufacturing industry for a time), and for other South Indian states to begin competing with Tamil Nadu's manufacturing in the years since. Big, unwieldy states have also been regularly split into smaller ones with their own budgets and freedom to pursue their own priorities-- allowing for areas like Jharkhand or Chhatisgarh, previously neglected regions of larger states, to compete for investment on their own terms. Pakistan's states, meanwhile, haven't changed their borders since 1947 and have oscillated wildly in the powers they hold.
I think avoiding Liaqat Ali Khan's assassination can go a long way toward both. It avoids the initial precedent for government overthrow and instead leaves a civilian PM free to do his job and then hand power to another civilian after he retires. And you'd avoid the experiments with "One Unit" centralism under Ayub Khan. I don't know how Liaqat Ali Khan and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman regarded each other, but their common background might make their negotiations more fruitful than the military vs. civilians dynamic of OTL.
 
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