Pakistan and northwestern India have many commonalities in terms of languages, food, culture, social norms, history, etc, and one needs to look further—South India—to understand the real difference between the two countries
What went wrong vis-à-vis India was the common question, particularly since Pakistan did better economically than its eastern neighbour until the 1990s. The answer may be in looking at India as a whole. For starters, there is not much difference between Pakistan and northwestern India. The two regions have many commonalities in languages, food, culture, social norms, history, etc. One needs to look further to South India to understand the difference between the two countries.
Southern and Western India have, over four decades, emerged as manufacturing and high-tech hubs and driven much of the country’s economic development. Heartland states such as Uttar Pradesh, where one of the mainstays of Pakistan’s governing elites came from, lag far behind. Much of South India’s achievements have to do with better human development indicators—higher female literacy rate, lower infant mortality, higher life expectancy, etc—that ensure healthier and better-educated people needed for a robust economy. South India has a superior education system. It is governed better and has more social harmony.
Better governance has meant the region has better schools, hospitals, and lower drop-out rates. South India contributes more to the national economy and the revenues of the Central government. The people there are healthier, better fed, more prosperous, and better educated.
In a June 2021 piece in The Telegraph, Ramachandra Guha argued the South was better placed to take advantage of the economic liberalization in 1991 with a more skilled and healthier workforce. He wrote that factories, engineering colleges, software parks, and pharmaceutical units boomed in states such as Tamil Nadu, while places like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were locked in a cycle of communal and caste conflicts.
More Entrepreneurs Than Peasants
Guha wrote the Ramjanmabhoomi movement for the construction of a temple in place of Babri Masjid, and the horrors unleashed largely bypassed the South. Guha wrote that there are more entrepreneurs than peasant castes in South India, unlike Pakistan, where peasant Punjabi communities have held sway over the state’s affairs through extended spells of military rule.
Pakistan’s mercantile communities, such as the Gujaratis, bolster this argument. Pakistani Gujaratis, mostly concentrated in Karachi, contribute disproportionately to the country’s economy. In his book Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, Laurent Gayer writes that firms based in Karachi controlled Pakistan’s 96% private industries in the 1960s. They owned 80% of the assets in private banks and insurance companies.
Thirty-six out of 46 large industrial groups were generally in the hands of Karachi-based businessmen from Gujarati Memon, Khoja, and Bohra mercantile communities. The Gujarati trading communities accounted for Pakistan’s 0.4% population but controlled the country’s 43% industrial capital, according to Gayer. Halai Memons alone owned 27% of these industries.
The House of Habib conglomerate, whose founders were from Jamnagar in the Indian state of Gujarat, among other things, runs Pakistan’s biggest bank. The Mandiwalas, also of the same heritage, have led a multiplex boom in the country. Gujaratis own five-star hotels, manufacture cars, and dominate the country’s biggest stock exchange. Gujarati-speaking Parsis, the Bhandaras, ownMurree Brewery, and are among Pakistan’s biggest taxpayers. Another Parsi family– Avaris–owns five-star hotels across Pakistan.
The political culture of Karachi is similar to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar since immigrants from the two Indian states have dominated the polity in the metropolis. Nawaz Sharif, who comes from a business family of Kashmiri origins, attempted to infuse a pragmatic mercantile approach to Pakistani politics, particularly vis-à-vis ties with India. He championed India-Pakistan cultural affinity and the promotion of trade ties while attempting to put contentious issues on the back burner.
Feudalism has also hurt Pakistan, while India mostly ended it post-independence. It has also prevented democracy from taking root. Landowners have used their economic might to cultivate political authority. In a January 2018 piece, The Economist noted that though the power of the landlords is fading, over half the lawmakers in Punjab, the country’s largest province, inherited their seats from relatives. This was more than twice the rate in India’s parliament. Journalist Badar Alam told The Economist that the canniest feudals have long since morphed or married into the rising industrial class.
More Egalitarian
Imran Khan, who sought to change the political status quo before the country’s military brought him down, blamed feudalism for a grossly unfair social system that has hurt Pakistan. South India, particularly, has a much fairer social system in contrast. The hegemony of the Brahmins, who have the highest position in the caste-based hierarchical social order, was challenged much earlier in the South. Thinkers such as Sri Narayana Guru and E V Ramaswamy Naicker, popularly known as Periyar, contributed to a more egalitarian society.
South India also has a greater proportion of women in the workforce thanks to social reforms. Women in the South are more likely to survive infancy, be educated, marry later, choose their partners, have fewer children, own assets, and have a better working culture to work alongside men.
Academic Sunil Khilnani has offered the most compelling explanation of the link between women’s empowerment and the South’s betterment in his book Incarnations (2017). He writes that the majority of women marry before 18 in the North. In the South, the number in some states is as low as 15%. Fertility rates in parts of the South are half what they are in some northern states. The labour force participation of women is also higher in the South.
Khilnani writes that such variations are arguably at the heart of a North-South divide, which is often cited as one of India’s major faultlines. He adds that this divergence has something to do with a primary school dropout, Periyar, the anti-Brahmin rationalist. Periyar was an iconoclast who joined Congress before falling out with Gandhi.
Periyar founded the Dravidian Self-Respect Movement in the mid-1920s. His followers called him Thanthai Periyar, the Great Man, which Khilnani calls a self-conscious dig at Gandhi, better known as Mahatma or the Great Soul. Periyar never ran for office but left an imprint on politics. Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which emerged from his movement, have governed Tamil Nadu state since the late 1960s.
Periyar’s advocacy of the Tamil language and refusal to accept the nationwide imposition of Hindi influenced India’s post-independence linguistic pluralism. His anti-caste views helped shape legislation on affirmative action:
He was also the first leader of his time to argue forcefully—without the paternalist condescension many Indian men are given to when they speak on this subject—for the freedom of women in a country where the wagons are always circled around the patriarchal family. Periyar mocked the ‘stupidity’ of Sanskrit epics that celebrated self-sacrificing women as if they were chaste footstools. He advocated girls’ education, love marriages, divorce if those marriages didn’t work out, women’s property rights and—most radical of all—respect for women’s sexuality and ability to control conception.
Sunil Khilnani, Incarnations: A History of India in 50 Lives
This has been the key to Tamil Nadu’s progress. In the 1960s, the state’s per capita income was 51% higher than Uttar Pradesh. An average Tamil Nadu resident earned 128% more than an average person in Uttar Pradesh in 2005. By 2021, the gap is estimated to have increased to almost 300%. The per capita income difference between the South and the North was 39% in 1960-61. At the turn of the century, it widened to 101%. The average annual per capita income of the northern states is estimated to be about $4,000. It is roughly 250% higher in Southern—$10,000.
Uttar Pradesh accounts for about 17% of India’s population but has only 9% of its industrial jobs. Over half of all factory jobs in India are in six states, including five on the peninsula. Only one of the 11 companies making products for Apple is in the North, while six are in Tamil Nadu. In an October 2022 edition, The Economist noted the difference between Goa and Bihar in terms of economic development was like that between southern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa:
If the two states were countries, Goa’s annual output per person would put it among upper-middle-income economies; Bihar, by contrast, would still be years away from leaving the low-income category. The average Goan is ten times richer than the average Bihari.
The Economist
Over 40% of Indians, or as many as 600 million people, live in the poorer north, north-west, and eastern states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh. The populations of poorer states have also been growing much faster. Bihar’s population grew by an estimated 16.5% during the 2010s, while that of Uttar Pradesh rose by 14%. The populations of Maharashtra (west), Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu (south), India’s second-largest economy, increased by under 10%.
In 2011, Bihar accounted for 25% of India’s population, and the South 21%. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar contribute just 3% of India’s corporate and income-tax revenues, while the South contributes a quarter. The GDP per person in the South has grown to 4.2 times greater than in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, compared to 3.3 in 2011-12. Kerala’s average resident has an annual income per person of $9,300 compared to just $2,000 for Bihar.
In 1966, Walter Crocker in his book Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate fleshed out the South’s better standing. He wrote that the South has superiority in certain important things, including its relative lack of violence and anti-Muslim intolerance. He noted the South has little taste for Hindu revivalism. He regretted that South India had counted for too little in the Indian Republic, while calling it a waste for India as well as an unfairness to South India. Six decades later, not much has changed.
