Book Review: Maya Tudor,The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan

Maya Tudor’s book illustrates both the value and the dangers in comparative history. The book is driven by a clear comparative question: Why is it that India and Pakistan, which emerged from colonial rule with ‘broadly similar state institutions’, subsequently ‘embarked upon markedly different democratic trajectories immediately upon their twin independences’? While India became a model of ‘democratic stability’, Pakistan’s ‘autocratic instability’ was already clearly in evidence by the 1950s (pp. 1–2). What accounts for this difference?

Tudor’s answer to this question is straightforward and developed with laser-like focus throughout a book that does not dwell on ambiguities—and whose clarity in developing its arguments is simultaneously its greatest strength and weakness. The key to the comparison, as Tudor sees it, lies in the sharply differing character of the Congress party and the Muslim League as the institutions that were bearers of the national movements that produced the two independent countries.

To be sure, the contrast between the Congress, with its long pre-independence development and popular depth, and the Muslim League, which developed as a popular party only in the last years before partition, has long been a staple for writings comparing the politics of India and Pakistan after 1947. But Tudor gives new depth and nuance to this focus by bringing a discussion of the relations between social class and political institutions into the mix. Though the Congress developed ultimately as a multi-class movement, its underlying structure was deeply rooted, in her argument, in its middle-class origins, which shaped its relatively ‘public’ and non-violent character. Its original class origins thus proved critical to the long-term entrenchment of institutionalized values and structures that allowed the Congress to develop a ‘coherent distributive coalition’, in spite of the varied interests that it eventually brought together. This laid the groundwork, she argues, for the post-1947 democratic constitutional order in independent India.

The Muslim League, in contrast, originated in a very different class milieu, among the aristocratic landed interests of the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh). Its aim was to protect landed class interests through lobbying for minority safeguards and extra-proportional representation. With these interests protected, the organization was long moribund. But when these interests were threatened by developments in the late 1930s, the League developed new ‘coalitions of convenience’ in the Punjab and Bengal to strengthen its voice in all-India affairs. It too retained an organizational structure traceable to its original aristocratic class origins. It thus relied largely on the autocratic leadership of Jinnah to hold together the diametrically opposing class interests from Punjab (landlords) and Bengal (peasants) that the organization now came to contain. The result was a party structure, in sharp contrast to the Congress, that was completely lacking in ‘distributive coherence’, and which thus provided a recipe for the unstable and ultimately autocratic rule that came to characterize independent Pakistan.

Tudor is well aware that other elements may have entered into the differing trajectories of Indian and Pakistani democracy, as a number of different authors have argued. But she nevertheless keeps the Congress/Muslim League contrast at the centre of her story as this allows her to draw from her story a theoretical contribution to the study of democracy. By analyzing political parties in terms of the complex relationship between class interests, on the one hand, and the development of values and structures that ultimately ‘work independently of class interests’, on the other (p. 18), she shows how a careful study of the history of political institutions can provide a critical, comparative framework for understanding democratic outcomes.

But her comparative framework also produces serious contradictions, not least in her use of history to develop her theory. Specific historical context is critical to the comparative model that Tudor proposes, for it was only through the ‘historically specific context’ of the Congress’ and the Muslim League’s development that one can trace, in her argument, the complex relationship between class and institutional structure. But her framing of the comparison between India and Pakistan as ‘a close approximation of a natural experiment’ (p. 39) in fact pushes her towards what is ultimately a strikingly ahistorical approach to the development of the Congress and the Muslim League. Tudor’s account is a deeply teleological one, shaped almost wholly by the end point she wishes to explain: that is, the emergence of a stable, democratic India versus an unstable, autocratic Pakistan. This stark, binary contrast, completely lacking in nuance, leads her to a presentation that downplays the contingencies that recent historical work has suggested shaped the historical developments she describes.

Tudor’s comparative framework in fact leads her to repeated assessments of historical developments that largely ignore context in the name of sustaining her larger comparative point. Thus, the ‘Pakistan independence movement’ is said to have been teetering ‘on the brink of political extinction’ in 1937 (p. 208), when it would be more accurate to say that at that point no such movement had yet come into existence. Similarly, Jinnah’s willingness to accept the 1946 Cabinet Mission plan without ‘a fully sovereign Pakistan’ is taken as a comparative critique of the organizational failure of the Muslim League to prepare itself ‘to assume the governance of a sovereign country’, (p. 157), when in fact it could be equally taken as evidence of ongoing uncertainty, even as late as 1946, about the very meaning of the Pakistan demand. To probe the contingencies of Pakistan’s creation would require a far deeper engagement with the meanings of ‘nationhood’ (and of its relationship to religion) than Tudor is willing to engage in. In spite of its many important insights, Tudor’s book thus effectively illustrates, in the end, how the use of history to develop comparative theory can, if one is not careful, force history into a straitjacket.