Pakistan was made in a great hurry. Only seven years passed between the adoption of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940, when a two-state solution for the future of India was presented by the Muslim League (ML), and the passage of the Indian Independence Act of July 1947 by the British Parliament. During these seven years, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the ML mobilized Muslim sentiment by arguing that Muslims of India, because of their religion and culture, constituted a separate nation, and that they required a separate state so that they could progress, unhindered by the majority Hindu nation. This argument was historically inaccurate and un-supported by history and ethnic reality, but it seized a great many Muslims, especially in central India, where they constituted a minority.
India and Pakistan acquired their independence through a constitutional transfer of power and not through revolutionary insurgency. In this sense, they stood for the continuity of the British-initiated constitutional process to provide for responsible government, however limited in practice, with the Government of India Act of 1919. The respective constituent assemblies set up under the Independence Act were responsible for preparing new constitutions and, in the interim, functioned as federal legislative assemblies within the jurisdiction of the Government of India Act of 1935. The leaders of both the Congress Party and the ML were constitutionalists, lawyers by training, and experienced in the constitutional evolution of undivided India under the British. Yet the subsequent history of the two constituent assemblies reveal in one case (Pakistan) how little reflection had gone into the making of a constitutional order, and in the other (India) how much thought had been given to constitutional issues prior to achieving independence. It took the constituent assembly of India twenty-seven months to prepare and enact the Indian constitution, a document that built upon the constitutional experience of British India. In contrast, the constituent assembly of Pakistan arrived at a political gridlock and was dissolved by the governor-general, Ghulam Mohammed, in October 1954. It took another two years for a second constituent assembly to draft a constitution for Pakistan, which two years later in 1958 was abrogated by the military government of General Ayub Khan.
Pakistan's tormented political history, when contrasted with the relatively healthy development of representative democracy in India, points to the initial failure of constitutionalism. Two important and related consequences of this failure were the entrenchment of the viceregal system and the widening of ethnic and regional differences.
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