Pakistan is one of the two successor states to British India - India being the other one. India, by the standards of developing Asian countries, is a success story as far as functional democratic institutions and political stability. It's by and large a more ethically-challenged version of Westminster. Pakistan, by comparison, has been run more like a Central American banana republic or a post-monarchical Middle Eastern state. It's had a revolving door of reactionary military strongmen, occasionally punctuated by a populist civilian leader like one of the Bhuttos or their allies.
Both countries became independent with the same democratic and civil institutions - structures that had been put in place during British rule. So why did India end up being so much higher functioning than Pakistan? How did Pakistan end up having more in common with its neighbor to the west than with its neighbor to the east?
I don't like the direction Nehru took India on the economic front (which India is paying for till the present day) but I must give him credit where credit is due. He laid the foundation for a stable democracy and thankfully that has continued to this day. Why Jinnah failed at doing that is a very good question and I don't have a good answer to that. It should also be noted that after independence from Pakistan, Bangladesh has also been a fairly stable country despite facing much greater challenges than Pakistan.
It should be noted that Nehru was alive and ruled India well into the 1960s, whereas Jinnah was dead in 1948. This left a leadership vacuum. That's one of many reasons for the divergent trajectories.
Another big reason: General Muhammad Zia-al-Huq (well, in terms of understanding contemporary Pakistan and its...um...issues with extremist doctrines of Islam influencing/being used to justify the oppressive political situation).
Though how much of "Islamization" was interrelated with and inseparable context-wise from the Soviet-Afghan War (same year, FWIW, as the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Iranian Revolution-geez, 1979 sure was crazy in the Islamic world! 
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Not really a rhetorical question, btw-I'm curious about this.
Zia ul-Haq was a symptom of Pakistan's problems, not a cause. I guess my question is, why has there never been a military coup in India and why does the military exercise so much more power and influence in Pakistan than it does in India? Why are Pakistan's democratic institutions so much weaker than India's even though they both started off in more or less the same position in 1947?
