Why did India Become a Democracy and Why did it Remain Democratic? A Survey of the Literature and Some Comments to the Scholarly Debate

Abstract

The nature of political regimes in South Asia has always constituted a puzzle within the political science discipline. In particular, the emergence and consolidation of a democratic regime in India situated in a region with culturally similar countries dominated by mostly non-democratic regimes has been difficult to explain using the standard explanatory factors from different strands of democratic theory. India is either being seen as being too poor, too illiterate, socially and culturally too traditional and ethnically too fragmented to be a likely candidate for a stable parliamentary democracy. In comparison, political developments in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka have been in much greater conformity with the standard prescriptions of the prevailing theories of preconditions for parliamentary democracies.