Decolonization and state building in South Asia.

AuthorBose, Sumantra

This article is a retrospective survey and assessment of political development in the three newly independent states of the South Asian subcontinent during their first decade, from 1947 to 1958. Of these, Pakistan gained independence on August 14, 1947, India on August 15, 1947 and Sri Lanka (known then as Ceylon) on February 4, 1948.

The most striking finding of this backward glance at the early history of these countries is that the political patterns which would dominate India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka for decades to come emerged and were consolidated during the first decade. Although all three states were formerly colonies of the same imperial power, Britain, these were very different patterns. (1) In India, democratic processes and institutions took root under the dominance of one party, the Indian National Congress, whose hegemony lasted until the end of the 1980s, with only occasional hiccups, notably in general elections in 1967 and 1977. Under the Indian National Congress, a moderately stable state structure based on decentralization to numerous ethnolinguistic units, the "States" comprising the "Indian Union," began to evolve. This happened despite India's endemic poverty and vast social diversity, both of which were conventionally considered impediments to sustainable democratization and state stability. In Pakistan, democratic processes and institutions failed to take root and civilian rule became identified with growing corruption and chaos during the 1950s. The country's drift into military-bureaucratic authoritarianism was sealed by the first military coup in 1958. Sri Lanka began its life with perhaps the most favorable circumstances of the new states of South Asia, marked by an orderly transfer of power in contrast to the mass killings and population transfers that accompanied the partition of India, and fortified by a relatively high standard of social development for a colony. But toward the end of its first decade, the island sank into ethnic polarization between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil communities, which culminated in civil war by the early 1980s.

It is important to resist the teleological temptation to assert that these very different outcomes were not inevitable. But the fact that the first decade set the pattern for subsequent decades suggests that the formative, transitional period of statehood could be extremely crucial to future prospects. Why India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were set on such different paths is explained below, and the comparative and contemporary implications of their experiences are stated in the conclusion. I emphasize the importance to the state-building process of a political organization with broad legitimacy in its society, capable of aggregating interest and identity groups. The Congress party discharged this role during independent India's first decade, while its Pakistani counterpart, the Muslim League, failed to do so in Pakistan. In Sri Lanka, party politics degenerated during the first decade of the state into an arena of expression and exacerbation of growing ethnic conflict rather than mediation and accommodation. I underscore that in states such as those of the subcontinent, which include diverse religious, ethnic and linguistic groups, it is critical to fashion ala inclusive, accommodative definition of the word "nation." This involves several interrelated challenges. During the formative period of statehood judicious decisions need to made on state policies in relation to religion and language. An institutional framework that encourages the sharing and dispersion of political power needs to be devised and consolidated, rather than concentrating political power in the hands of particular social and political groups. As we see below, these tasks were handled by India's leaders with considerably greater competence in comparison to elites in Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

INDIA AND PAKISTAN: PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE

India and Pakistan were born as independent states amidst a bloodbath of appalling proportions. Some 20 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs became refugees as a result of India's partition, and between 500,000 and 1 million people are estimated to have been killed in violence across the subcontinent. (2) For many Indian freedom fighters, this fratricidal horror and the division of the country represented a devastating emotional and psychological blow, the antithesis of the ideals for which they had struggled and suffered. Mahatma Gandhi, the leader who turned the nascent nationalist movement into a mass phenomenon in the early 1920s, spent August 14 and 15, 1947--the independence days of Pakistan and India respectively--in private mourning, fasting and meditating. A politically marginalized figure, he was assassinated by a Hindu extremist months later in January 1948.

There were significant differences between India and Pakistan in August 1947. India's new prime minister, the veteran Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, described India's independence as the fulfillment of a "tryst with destiny," but grandiloquence could not hide the harsh fact that for many Indian nationalists, Nehru included, the bloody, divisive circumstances of freedom represented the death of a dream--the dream of a united India at peace with itself, stepping out confidently on a journey to forge its own future. That ideal, and the self-confidence of the new Indian state, had been grievously damaged. For Pakistani nationalists, by contrast, August 1947 represented the realization of a dream--the dream of self-determination for the subcontinent's Muslims in their own sovereign homeland. The pain and trauma of partition, and the fact that huge numbers of Muslims remained in India because of circumstance or choice, became bearable in this light. The demand for an independent Pakistan had been formally raised only in 1940; a mere seven years later Pakistan was a reality.

Why did India and Pakistan fare so differently in their first decade and beyond? The most intuitive explanation is personality-centered. India's first prime minister, Nehru, led the country from August 1947 until his death in May 1964, and had 17 years to lay the resilient foundations of liberal democracy and relative political stability in a vast, fractious country rife with inequality and conflict. By contrast, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, died in September 1948, and Liaquat All Khan, the ablest Pakistani leader after Jinnah, was assassinated in October 1951. This argument cannot be dismissed outright, and probably does have some explanatory power. But it is also represents a shallow view of history and politics. Can India and Pakistan's divergent trajectories be plausibly attributed to the unpredictable life spans of one or two or three "great men" and "founding fathers"? It is not clear why Pakistan, formed amid much enthusiasm and optimism in 1947, should be unable to weather the passing of a few mortals such as Jinnah and Khan. As for India, there are reasons, mentioned below, to doubt any romanticized image of Nehru as a farsighted liberal statesman. In any case, the personalization of political authority can generate both short- and long-term ills. The most lasting Nehru legacy is probably the dynastic control of the Congress party by his descendants, his charismatic but autocratic daughter Indira Gandhi, prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984, and her son Rajiv, well-intentioned but inept as prime minister between 1984 and 1989.

It is plausible that the technocratic elements of state building were, at the outset, more daunting for Pakistan, the de facto "breakaway" state which inherited less of the apparatus and fewer of the resources of the departing Raj administration than India did. It has been argued that "by contrast with India, Pakistan was initially a quite extraordinarily ramshackle state to have emerged from the very same womb of British India." (3) But it is important not to overstate this point. Even amidst the confusion and chaos of 1947, Pakistan did inherit, for example, the services of 133 officers of the undivided Indian Civil Service (ICS), the elite corps of professional civil servants who administered India for their British masters. There is no doubt that, compared to India, Pakistan was at a relative disadvantage with regard to the personnel and resources needed for state building, but the disadvantage was not crippling and cannot decisively explain why the "ramshackle" state deteriorated into a shambles within a decade. The more significant factors were political.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND STATE BUILDING IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

The Indian National Congress, the party of India's independence movement, was a mass party with deeply entrenched roots in society The party's base was not uniformly strong across society. For instance, had the Congress party been more successful in securing Muslim support in the 1930s and 1940s, partition would have been unlikely Despite its limitations, however, the Congress party developed into something of a national institution during the protracted struggle under colonialism, which acquired a mass character from the early 1920s onward under Gandhi's leadership. It had effectively been a government-in-waiting for a quarter of a century before independence. As such, it was in a position to be the stabilizing linchpin of independent India's political system. The loss of Gandhi and the untimely deaths of other top leaders (Subhas Chandra Bose in 1945 and Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950) notwithstanding, the Congress party had a strong reserve of seasoned leaders at the national level and in most of the provinces, ready and able to take on the arduous tasks of "nation building."

The All-India Muslim League, the party that spearheaded the Pakistan campaign during the 1940s, by contrast, proved to be superficially rooted in the regions of northwestern and eastern India that became Pakistan. The apparent coalescing of...

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