This is a question that has multiple answers depending on your political leanings, because there are multiple ways of understanding the decolonization process that occurred (some might say still is occurring) in the 20th century. If you ask me, it mostly has to do with the different situations at independence and the later geopolitical context. I do have to be a curmudgeon and say that Britain had a lot of colonies, and many do also have thriving democratic traditions. The Caribbean, especially, is a place where electoral, parliamentary politics have held together with as much cohesion as India.

However, I am only really familiar with India and British Africa, so that’s what I’ll be talking about. I will start by pointing out that India had a strong parliamentary tradition that went back decades by 1948. Consultative councils of Indians had been in existence since the 1860’s, and while these bodies had very little power, they gave the Indian elite a place and a model through which to organize politically. The independence process was led by a highly organized, ostensibly liberal-democratic party (the Indian National Congress of Gandhi and Nehru) that dominated a very diverse movement. Parliamentary politics appeared as a natural extension of a political model with which the Indian political class was familiar. Furthermore, the majority of parties, including India’s vibrant communist movement, were to some extent willing to accept the terms of debate. Even then, though, India’s post-independence democratic credentials are not stainless. Nehru undertook multiple internal military operations to suppress democratic demands of regional populations, for example in Nagaland and Kashmir. Any democracy that needs to kill people in order to stay together has a tenuous hold on that name. Furthermore, there was a period between 75-77 where the constitution was effectively suspended by Indira Gandhi.

There is, however, no denying that the parliamentary tradition that began in the 19th century in India has had enormous staying power. By contrast to this deep history, in most of India’s peer British colonies in Africa, parliamentary participation in imperial government by colonized people was relatively recent where it existed and even more farcical than in India. These legislative councils were puny and had very little voice, let alone power. As a result, the movements which won independence, like Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP (Convention People’s Party) in Ghana or TANU in Tanzania, did not necessarily see a multiparty, parliamentary regime as an effective way of creating (what they understood to be) democratic/popular government. Additionally, the independence of many African states was an affair that was highly orchestrated by the Empire itself, and in the years to come the European colonial powers and the US would take a very free hand interfering in African politics from Biafra to Zimbabwe. So, when we think of many military/otherwise antidemocratic regimes — Mobotu’z Zaire, Rhodesia and South Africa, Yakubu Gowon in Nigeria, and so on — we are in some way talking about neocolonial governments. This meddling by the world’s colonial governments, for whatever reason, was not undertaken as directly in India.

These are all pretty broad strokes statements so I wasn’t sure how to cite within my text. For my knowledge of India, I am mostly drawing on a book by the British historian Perry Anderson called “The Indian Ideology.” For further reading on African independence, I would refer you to “The British Colonialist School of African Historiography and the Question of African Independence,” an essay by Walter Rodney.