I don’t have a horse in this race. I’m not pro-India or pro-Pakistan. I don’t consider either to be allies of Britain who we can trust. But let’s be realistic - India is the fourth largest economy in the world simply because it has the largest population in the world. On GDP/capita, a far more meaningful measure, India sits somewhere in the 120-140 range.
India’s GDP/capita is still less than half Ukraine’s, even though Ukraine has been fighting an all-out war for three years, many of its major cities are in ruins, vast numbers of working age men are fighting (and dying) instead of contributing to the economy and millions of women and children (about a seventh of its peacetime population) have fled the country.
And there is a vast amount of historical scholarship which discusses India’s superior inheritance at the point of partition, and traces the roots of subsequent developments in both India and Pakistan back to that moment. This isn’t a controversial opinion.
It is a fact that India got 77% of the land, 82% of the population and 90% of the industrial base, including the huge TATA steelworks of which Pakistan received no equivalent. And of course, the land Pakistan did get was awkwardly split between East and West Pakistan, separated by thousands of kilometres of Indian territory.
It’s hardly surprising that post-partition, with the tensions over Kashmir added into the mix, Pakistan was left feeling extremely vulnerable - and that consequently in those vital early years, the Pakistani government spent 50% of their national budget on defence (taking money away from nation-building / economic projects and strengthening the army, a factor behind Pakistan’s subsequent military coups). This is also a key part of why the Pakistani government began engaging with militant/terrorist groups in the first place - as a buffer against pro-Indian movements in Afghanistan, because of course, if Afghanistan was to fall under Indian control, Pakistan would be surrounded.
India also had a massive head start on nation-building relative to Pakistan, a contributing factor to the relative success of democracy in India. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress had been establishing and spreading the idea of an Indian nation for decades before Partition. The Muslim League’s campaign for an independent state couldn’t perform an equivalent role for Pakistan because it failed to become the dominant party and disintegrated shortly after independence - due largely to the fact that it had very weak roots in the regions that became Pakistan (many of its politicians were from Uttar Pradesh, which of course stayed in India).
So many of Pakistan’s challenges can be traced back to the circumstances of partition - a vicious circle from which they never escaped. That’s not to say that Pakistani leaders hold none of the blame for Pakistan’s failures - I’m simply acknowledging that they began from a far worse starting point than India.