In the week of Narendra Modi’s swearing in as Indian prime minister, I’m reminded of a classic work of political science – Samuel P Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies, published nearly half a century ago in 1968.

In particular I’m thinking of a brief passage on India (on page 84 of the book), in which Huntington explores the apparent paradox that the country in the late 1960s was “the epitome of the underdeveloped society”, and at the same time “in terms of political institutionalization … far from backward”. This is what he writes:

“A well developed political system has strong and distinct institutions to perform both the ‘input’ and the ‘output’ functions of politics. India entered independence with not only two organizations, but two highly developed – adaptable, complex, autonomous, and coherent – institutions ready to assume primary responsibility for these functions. The Congress Party, founded in 1885, was one of the oldest and best organized political parties in the world; the Indian Civil Service, dating from the early nineteenth century, was appropriately hailed as ‘one of the greatest administrative systems of all time.’ The stable, effective, and democratic government of India during its first twenty years of independence rested far more on this institutional inheritance than it did on the charisma of Nehru.”

The rest of the former Raj was not so fortunate, and Burma’s democratic experience in the early years of independence was certainly very different. Its dominant political party was young and poorly organized, and its civil service was a weak and fragile offspring of the ICS. Even its charismatic leader had been assassinated. Still today, Myanmar does not have strong and distinct institutions to perform the input and output functions of politics.