ABSTRACT
The foundations of government in the Indian subcontinent were built by an external power, the British Empire. India and Pakistan became independent as democracies as the result of a progression in the “Indianization” of representative institutions, and the struggle for independence with the British, in which both the Congress and the Muslim League chose to play by British rules. They petitioned parliament, organized legally, joined in governing councils, and – after Gandhi – generally respected the law even as they broke it. Parliamentary democracy in its British form was happily accepted. There was no discussion of the possibility of adopting an alternate form of regime. Although this limiting of choice of regime seems to have been based on endogenous forces, it is also true that British decolonization was intended as liberation of the citizenry of the colony as a whole.
