“The earth is thirsty, it demands blood, but of whom? Of the Muslims,” Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), the leading pro-Congress Indian Muslim nationalist, had rued in the late summer of 1913. As far as he could see, Tripoli was soaking with Muslim blood as were the plains of Persia and the Balkan Peninsula. Now Hindustan too was athirst for Muslim blood. In an egregious display of British arrogance and brute power in Kanpur in August 1913, Muslims protesting the demolition of a lavatory attached to a mosque were fired upon indiscriminately, leaving several dead.

Few political decisions in the twentieth century have altered the course of history in more dramatic fashion than the partition of India in 1947. To be sure, the end of formal colonialism and the redrawing of national boundaries was a tumultuous event, sending tremors throughout much of Asia and beyond. Yet perhaps nowhere was the shock felt more intensely or more violently than in the Indian subcontinent. Economic and social linkages which over the millennia had survived periods of imperial consolidation, crises and collapse to weld the peoples of the subcontinent into a loosely layered framework of interdependence were rudely severed. Political differences among Indians over the modalities of power sharing once independence had been won sheared apart the closely woven threads of a colonial administrative structure that had institutionally integrated, if never quite unified, the subcontinent. That the culmination of some two hundred years of colonial institution-building should have sapped the subcontinent's capacity for accommodation and adaptation is a telling comment on the ways in which imperialism impressed itself on Indian society, economy and polity.

A rich and complex mosaic of cultural diversities which had evolved creative political mechanisms of compromise and collaboration long before the colonial advent, India through the centuries had managed to retain its geographical unity despite the pressures imposed by military invasion, social division and political conflict. There was little agreement on the basis of this unity or on its precise boundaries.

For all their historical specificities subcontinental South Asian states and societies have kept a march ahead of the rest of the world in at least one important respect. The recent surge in assertions on ‘ethnic’ identity and demands for national sovereignty in the erstwhile Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere is an old and familiar occurrence in the subcontinent. Indeed, the dialectic between centralism and regionalism has played a pivotal part in the more dramatic developments in subcontinental history. Frequently overlaid by communal, sub-regional, caste and class factors, the fluctuating balance between centre and region nevertheless has been something of a constant. Unflinching faith in the virtues of a strong central state authority proceeds from a clear recognition of the subcontinent's perplexing diversities, most with recorded histories of periodic defiance of attempts to bring the farflung frontiers of geographical India under a single political banner.

As if the weight of pre-colonial history was not burden enough, the partition of India in 1947 followed by the disintegration of Pakistan in 1971 have served as sharp reminders of the potency of centrifugal tendencies in the subcontinent. Far from encouraging greater flexibility towards the fact of diversity, both developments have turned the hearts and minds of influential segments in political society, to say nothing about the guardians of the state, against loosening the screws of centralized structures.

The 1970s witnessed the crystallization of significant changes in the statesociety dialectic in South Asia. During the 1960s state interventions in the economy had contributed to important alterations in social structures and in the process broadened the arena of mass politics. In the absence of any perceptible movement towards the strengthening of equal citizenship rights for the many who remained outside the charmed circle of a small elite, largely unorganized resistance to established structures of dominance assumed new levels of potency. The expansion and radicalization of the social bases of politics posed challenges to oligarchical democracy and military authoritarianism alike. These were sought to be met by comparable experiments in what widely came to be termed ‘populist politics’ during the late sixties and the seventies.

Populism by its very nature is an elusive concept. Open to varied interpretations, populist politics in the South Asian subcontinent have escaped the exactitudes of a searching or rigorous historical analysis. To the extent that populism has been defined at all the emphasis lies on the personal aspects of the phenomenon. Yet a focus on the role of charismatic leaders has produced a somewhat shadowy, if not distorted, view of the populist drama. The appeal of populism lay in its claim to give voice to the frustrations of the dispossessed and downtrodden and in its declared aim to dent the existing structures of domination and privilege. It was really more a matter of temperament than ideology.

Among the more fascinating themes in contemporary South Asia has been the ‘success’ of democracy in India and its ‘failure’ in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yet studies of democratic politics in India and military dominated authoritarian states in Pakistan and Bangladesh have rarely addressed, far less explained, why a common British colonial legacy led to apparently contrasting patterns of political development in post-independence South Asia. The lacuna in the literature is surprising given the oft-heard scholarly laments about the artificial demarcation of the subcontinent's political frontiers at the time of the British withdrawal. Many historians are coming to question the inclusionary and exclusionary claims of both Indian and Muslim nationalisms and, more guardedly, the appropriateness of the concept of the ‘nation-state’ in subcontinental conditions. The spatial and temporal artifact that has been the modern nationstate in post-1947 South Asia nevertheless remains inextricably stitched on to the scholarly canvas.

Analyses premised on historical disjunctions, even when acknowledged as arbitrary, tend to emphasize differences rather more than similarities. The loss of a subcontinental vision has not only compartmentalized South Asian historiography but deflected from any sort of comparative understanding of the common dilemmas of the region's present and the interlocking trajectories of its future. While most historians see the dividing line of 1947 as the outer periphery of their scholarly terrain, politicial scientists take it as an obvious point of entry from where to begin analysing the state–society nexus in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Threading the intricacies of multiple social, cultural and ideological meanings informing subcontinental South Asian states and politics is a task befitting a team of artful tapestry makers. Subcontinental societies in their varied regional and sub-regional cultural and ideological hues defy unidimensional patterning onto neat seamless folds. At each step in their historical evolution they have devised their own modes of resistance, both passive and active, to the dominant frames within which centralized states have sought to embroider a coherent national identity. Partly expressed in the dialectic of state and political processes, social dynamics at the regional and local levels also need to be decoded in terms of their own relatively autonomous, if never wholly insular, cultural and ideological idioms. Neither static nor unchanging, these represent the hybrid and improvised responses of different social formations to the centralized state's efforts at constructing and imposing monolithic cultural and ideological meanings.

The dialogue between state and societal cultural and ideological semantics waxes and wanes according to the level of political and economic incorporation of specific regions. But at no stage does it fade away to establish the omnipotence of state-sponsored symbols and meanings. Resistance to the dominant discourse promoted by the state has been an immutable feature of South Asian societies and psyches. Shaped in overlapping realms of the public and the private, these contestations have given cultural processes a certain measure of autonomy from the state, even as they are influenced by the larger political and economic context.

This volume has taken shape during my sojourns at various academic institutions in the United States since 1987, all of which share the credits in different measure. Intellectually it forms a bridge between my earlier monographs and current research on multiple identities and theories of sovereignty in South Asia. The inspiration for it was provided by my students at Wisconsin-Madison, Tufts and, above all, Columbia and it is largely for them that I decided to undertake a work of this level of generality and, hopefully, accessibility.

While teaching South Asian politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was struck by the absence of any historical and comparative analysis of states and political processes in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The arbitrary lines drawn at the time of India's partition in 1947 – the subject of my doctoral research – appeared to have become a mental barrier to a comparative and thematic treatment of post-independence developments in the subcontinent. After completing a study of the first decade of Pakistan's independence, I turned to culling material on post-independence India available in British and American archives. The findings convinced me that the immediate post-independence period in both countries was not only comparable but a key to understanding the divergences in their post-independence history. After the ‘transition’ to democracy in Pakistan and Bangladesh, any comparative exercise had to try and explain why political, social and economic developments in the subcontinent were apparently showing signs of converging.

A compelling yet under-investigated question in contemporary South Asian history is why the partitioned inheritance of the British raj resulted in a different balance between state structures and political processes in post-independence India and Pakistan. A matter of wide and often imaginative speculation, it has invited explanations owing more to the predilections of specific schools of thought than to an actual examination of the historical factors that have contributed to making India a democratic polity and Pakistan a military dominated state.

Those steeped in the liberal democratic tradition have stressed the unique organizational phenomenon of the Indian National Congress. This is seen to have provided India's founding fathers, generally regarded as men of considerable political acumen and vision, with the institutional support necessary to lay the foundations of a stable, liberal democratic state. Marxist theorists for their part have sought explanations in the ‘overdeveloped’ institutional legacies of the colonial state and the corresponding weaknesses of dominant classes in civil society. Shades of determinism have clouded both interpretations. Long experience of working together in the antiimperialist struggle had been more conducive to understandings among the top leaders of the Indian National Congress than was the case with the Muslim League, a communal party with no real organizational existence in Muslim India before the final decade of the British raj. Yet placed in identical circumstances after independence it is debatable whether the Indian leadership would have done much better at institutionalizing representative democracy than their supposedly less able counterparts in Pakistan.

The study so far has alluded to the ways in which the state and economy influence social dynamics underlying political processes in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Exploring this relationship further and making the implicit more explicit is the task to which this chapter now turns. Instead of looking at economic factors to the exclusion of the political, the analysis merges the two in a broad approximation of the approach adopted by the practitioners of political economy. The concept of political economy, located as it is at the interstices of state and economy, assists analyses of social structures and political processes on economic policy choices which for their part seek to mould the patterns of social change. A focus on the political economies in each of the three countries lends an added dimension to the comparative assessments based on an examination of the unfolding dialectic between state structures and political processes.

Since the end of the second world war, most states in the post-colonial world have laid emphasis on planning for development. The experience of the great depression and the war had underscored the merits of state interventions in the economy. With the onset of decolonization the state's role in development processes came to pervade the theory and practice of development economics. Development was to be overseen by the centralizing state which was considered to be the ultimate leveller of inequities and injustices and, by extension, the myriad diversities rooted in developing societies.