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Importance of Good Precedents for Sustaining Democracies Essay

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There are many different reasons why the partition of India occurred. When Britain oppressed India, they had a divide-and-conquer policy that exacerbated the religious and cultural rifts that already existed in the society. The Muslim League, which believed in the ideology of “Pakistan”, actively campaigned to gain more support for the Muslims in India, especially under the guidance of dynamic leaders like Jinnah. Pakistani leader and founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah believed that this partition was inevitable since “‘[a] united India would never have worked’” (Komireddi 2009). He and others thought that a unified state would only lead to the relegation of Muslims to the fringe of society and, ultimately, to violence and civil war. The Indian …show more content…

The east and west sides of Pakistan were not divided over religion (they were mostly all Muslim), rather the division was on the basis of culture and language. West Pakistan was Punjabi while East Pakistan was Bengali. In 1971, there was a major war between India and Pakistan and the east side of Pakistan split off into what is today called Bangladesh. For the purposes of this essay, we will be focusing on just Pakistan and India.
The people in both countries have very common and even interlocked backgrounds, so how is it that these countries have very divergent political atmospheres since partition? India, adapting from the legacy of British rule and the Government of India Act 1935 for its constitution, kept the idea of federalism and was also successful in operating its political system within the formal democracy. Except for 18 months between 1975 and 1977 India maintained its democratic institutions. In the five decades since partition, there have been twelve legislative elections and many more state assembly elections. There have been seven peaceful transfers of power between rival political parties at the central (federal) level (Varshney 1998). Since 1967, the party that ruled in New Delhi has not ruled in nearly half of the states (Varshney 1998). A fleeting sample of the morning newspapers will show that the press in India has remained diverse, dynamic, free, and altogether unafraid to

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