To play a little bit of Devil's Advocate I'd point out 3 things:
1. It took quite a while for India to have a change of power.
2. Pakistan WAS more loyal to the West during the Cold War.
3. India didn't pursue sensible economic policies until fairly recently.
The rest doesn't really come as much of a surprise. Racism is much more recent phenomenon than we'd like to think.
Could you expand on your first point? Was the transfer of power in India more tumultuous than in Pakistan? And wasn't all the chaos a result of Britain agreeing to partition?
You are absolutely right about your third point. But you should consider the way the Indian polity back then viewed capitalism. They conflated capitalism with colonialism and didn't want to be too close to the US as they felt they only wanted to replace Britain as the overlords of India. And then there were all the arcane rules that shackled businesses in chains. Yet it is interesting that Pakistan hasn't grown any more rapidly than India even while being the friends of the capitalist west.
Also if the British hated the Brahmins so much, why didn't they actually try to curtail their power and try to enpower the lower classes by educating them and such? The British tried to implement education for the masses but they were only able to raise the literacy rate from about 5% in the late nineteenth century to 12% in 1947. Today India's literacy rate is 66% and among those under 24 its 82%. Of course the reality is that the British didn't care how the lower castes were doing, rather they just used their crusade against the Brahmins to gain moral high ground for their own immoral actions. They didn't do anything to stop the Zamindari system, rather they extended it into tribal territory and thus destroyed the autonomy they enjoyed through antiquity and even under the Mughals.
And what do you mean that racism is a recent phenomenon? Do you think the British weren't racist towards Indians and Hindus in particular, including even the lower castes.
My first point was simply that India has been dominated by a party (or one might say a dynasty) for most of the post-war era. That isn't really different from Sweden, as far as party goes, of course. Still, the article sounds as if India is a model democracy. To me, a model democracy wouldn't have three generations of the same family holding the premiership and the same party being in power for too long.
Being friends of the west of course isn't the same as pursuing western policies. I'm obviously not making the ridiculous claim that Pakistan is in any way better than India.
I'm not sure whether the paragraph about brahmins has anything to do with me. Regardless, I'm not contesting it.
My third point was probably a bit badly worded. What I meant is that racism is a recent phenomenon in contrast to being a thing of the past, not that it emerged recently. I realized that in typing it but couldn't be bothered to change it then.
