A Review Article
By Patricia Lee Sharpe
U.S. policy makers would love (I almost said “kill”) to find the magic formula for creating, co nsolidating and sustaining democracies. Political scientists, for their part, have been struggling to uncover the secret.
Academic speculations about democracy cover a lot of ground. Maybe what’s most determinative is a country’s socio-economic mix—its ethnic make up, education, class structure, income distribution, degree of industrialization and so on. But maybe, others assert, successful democratization depends more on historical and/or developmental sequences involving “tasks” like cons titution writing, party formation, trustworthy elections, the emergence of an organized civil society, and other elements of institutionalization that diminish the attractions of charismatic (or merely brutal) authoritarianism. Then there’s this: maybe, for an emerging democracy not to backslide, it’s better if the process has been gradual rather than abrupt.
Now try putting all these factors (and more) into a predictive formula. It’s apparent why democracy-building for real is such a dicey (and perhaps best avoided) ambition for outsiders, idealistic or otherwise. Human affairs are messy at best, which is why seers have opted, traditionally, for gnomic statements about future events, thereby proving how wise (or prudent) they were.
A new book illustrates the contingencies and complications of democracy-building by looking at two cases that couldn’t have been more salient if they had been imagined: India and Pakistan. That excellent book is Phillip Oldenburg’s India, Pakistan and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths.
Modern India and a brand new, largely Muslim Pakistan were born when England terminated its shape-shifting, three century old mercantile/colonial/imperial enterprise in South Asia. Among the still-remaining loose ends: the ultimate fate of Kashmir, now very much in the news again, and Pakistan’s political exploitation of a once rational but no longer credible fear of invasion by a “twin” that’s four times larger population-wise.
And yet, the twins’ political trajectories have been very different. Surely those differences will tell us what really matters in developing democracy, and so Oldernberg examines them, too.
Maybe it’s religion. How neat it would be to cite a Muslim-Hindu divide, but India is the home of the world’s third largest Muslim population, after Indonesia and Pakistan itself. What’s more, Pakistani Islam is split among often bloodily warring sects—can you say Sunni, Shia and Sufi? Or Deobandi or Barelvi?—and there’s nothing centralized about “Hinduism,” despite the efforts of some Hindutva fanatics to remodel it after Christianity. (Thus, Ram becomes a stand in for Christ, with both adorable infant and savior adult manifestations.) Some Hindus are as intolerant as the Taliban. Many Muslims are as tolerant as Buddhists. All in all, a superficial contrast turns out to be a structural similarity: a vast diversity of religious inclination within Pakistan as well as India. Religion, according to Oldenburg, can't account for the political divergences.
Probing on a more subtle level, Oldenburg speculates that the divergence in democratization could be due to the fact that independent India enjoyed considerable continuity with pre-independence political experience and institutionalization, while Pakistan had to build a country nearly from scratch, inspite of inheriting some civil service and military personnel from the colonial cadres, though fewer by far than India did. Many Muslims, not only the poor who couldn’t afford the cost of migrating, preferred to remain in secular India.
We also know that Pakistan’s leadership worried about the intentions of its gigantic neighbor. India was grudging and dilatory about rendering the funds and materials that would have helped to get Pakistan off to a flying start. Perhaps India wanted Pakistan to fail. Fears of invasion also danced through the heads of Pakistan’s rulers. Hence, the “security situation” to which Oldenburg so often alludes. From day one the Army was held to be disproportionately important in Pakistan. And so, Oldenburg writes, Pakistan was early on “forced...to seek an alliance with the United States, ” an alliance which the U.S., alarmed by India’s cozy relations with Moscow, was more than open to. Oldenburg continues,
It was not simply that at the beginning of Pakistan’s independent existence that scope and character of its military and security links with the United States in particular bolstered the leverage of the Pakistan military, and probably also reinforced and legitimated the army’s penchant to serve as the political guardian of the nation. Each military leader of Pakistan received wholehearted U.S. support: Ayub Khan for his “decade of development” economic policies; Zia ul Haq for his partnership in the Afghanistan jihad (at a time when “jihad” had a positive spin for the US government); and General Musharraf in the aftermath of 9/11.
All in all, writes Oldenburg, although “Pakistan’s efforts to institutionalize democracy have been supported by the US, ...those efforts do not come close to matching the support the military has received” from Washington. Sadly enough, America’s contradictory policy toward Pakistan continues. Preaching democracy. Bolstering the military for our own ends. Not surprisingly, our foreign policy establishment is always dissatisfied with the results of a policy that is, more often than not, at war with itself.
Finally, as Oldenburg runs down the profession’s diserata for democracy, he considers the question of pace. He points out that the Indian National Congress, which became India’s ruling party at independence, was formed in the late 19th century. By the post-World War II period, a collection of Anglophile professionals had long since evolved into an all-India mass movement. Congress was, in effect, prepared to govern and to govern democratically, in spite of the occasional autocratic impulses of the charismatic Jawaharlal Nehru, who was PM for 17 years. The Muslim League, by contrast, had far less experience and nowhere near the depth of leadership when it was called upon to govern Pakistan. What’s more, Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, chose to be president, not prime minister, which gave the seigneurial presidency power and prestige it never achieved in Delhi. In India, elected politicians have dominated the military and the bureaucracy from the moment of independence. In Pakistan, it has been the other way around. Parliament never became pre-eminent. The Army, more or less discretely, makes the life or death decisions and even controls much of the economy. While civilian governments occur intermittently, military coups are all but institutionalized in Pakistan.
In 1971, both India and Pakistan faced existential crises. Pakistan lost its eastern wing, which became Bangladesh. Within a few years a humiliated Army was feeling confident enough to depose a prime minister. By contrast, after two rough years of Indira Gandhi’s imperious Emergency rule, the Indian voters tossed her out of office. In short, as other analists have also noted, early political choices have consequences. Oldenburg sees little prospect of convergence between India and Pakistan vis-à-vis democracy in the forseeable future.
Oldenburg also notes another intriguing obstacle to a meeting of minds on the many issues agravating the India-Pakistan relationship: Pakistan’s “fear of Indian influence....If a certain degree of hostility keeps the borders closed, that would prevent Pakistan from being swamped by things ranging from India’s much stronger economy to Bollywood movies....and thus betraying the 1947 liberation” that created Pakistan.
India, Pakistan, and Democracy abounds with observations of equal insight. It's impossible for this review to do full justice to this richly-detailed, cool-headed, well-grounded must read for anyone interested in South Asia—or in the study of democracy. And yet, for all his command of the literature and the subject, Oldenburg (like those ancient seers) is never overweening or dogmatic. The story is too complex, too rife with contingencies. The early death of Jinnah, for example. The machinations of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, for another.
I have only one quibble. Maybe the title (an editor's PR impulse?) claims a little too much. Although our understanding of the divergence between India and Pakistan re democracy is certainly enhanced, I'm not certain that the puzzle is altogether solved, in this study or in any of the literature cited by Oldenburg. That being the case, here's a message for policy-makers in Washington: there’s no safe and sure superhighway to democracy, however desirable the goal, though one thing’s certain. It can’t be bought or imposed.