Rethinking Partition in colonial and post-colonial Pakistan: a Gramscian perspective — II

Business Recorder

19-07-2025

This unravelling was accelerated by domestic and colonial unrest. The Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946—spanning 78 ships and involving 20,000 sailors—was not just a military insurrection but a class-conscious uprising that resonated with workers and students alike.
It exposed the decaying authority of the Raj and signaled a potential revolutionary convergence between the military and the masses. For Prime Minister Clement Attlee's government, this was the final blow—a clear sign that Britain no longer had the capacity to dominate India by force.
Faced with the specter of a full-scale, radicalized freedom movement, the British hastily sought to divide and exit. They forged an alliance with the native bourgeois nationalist parties, who were more interested in inheriting state power than dismantling the imperial economic structure.
Partition, then, was not an act of liberation — it was a strategic surgical division, engineered from above, using religion as a scalpel. As Eric Hobsbawm noted, it was a form of 'prophylactic decolonization,' designed to pre-empt revolutionary transformation by substituting symbolic independence for substantive emancipation.
Rethinking Partition in colonial and post-colonial Pakistan: a Gramscian perspective—I
When Nehru and Jinnah pledged allegiance to King George VI as Prime Minister of India and Governor-General of Pakistan, respectively, they did so as heads of dominions—not republics. Their governments, born of imperial fiat, marked the transfer of political power but not economic sovereignty. The subcontinent was not baptized in the blood of revolution, but in the tears and trauma of two million displaced and slaughtered subalterns. The 'tryst with destiny' that Nehru invoked became, for ordinary citizens on both sides of the divide, a descent into nightmare.
What emerged on August 15, 1947, were not liberated states but dominions—nominally sovereign but still enmeshed in the structures of imperial dependency. The term 'political independence' was, at that point, a debatable one; the states may have shed the Union Jack, but they retained colonial institutions, economic policies, and class hierarchies. Dominion status codified British domination in a new form: indirect, economic, and neo-colonial.
III. Postcolonial Caes-arism and bureaucratic supremacy (1947–1958)
The Muslim League, a hollow political entity, quickly collapsed into dependence on its charismatic leader, Jinnah. His decision to bypass the elected Prime Minister in favour of Cabinet Secretary Chaudhry Mohammad Ali marked the ascendancy of the bureaucracy. Thus emerged a new ruling bloc: postcolonial intermediaries—feudals, bureaucrats, and comprador capitalists—who constructed a system of domination from which they themselves could not escape.
This era exemplifies what we may call Postcolonial Caesarism: a fragile equilibrium among competing civilian elites, with bureaucracy as the central force until the military emerged as the decisive 'third force.' Gramsci wrote, 'The bureaucracy is the most dangerously hidebound and conservative force… if it becomes a compact body independent of the masses, the party becomes anachronistic and, in times of crisis, is voided of its social content.'
IV. Oscillations between Bonapartism and Cae-sarism
Pakistan's state apparatus, in its relentless pursuit of capital accumulation, has utilized legal, military, and ideological tools to dispossess its marginalized populations, particularly in Bengal and Balochistan. The state has often presented itself as a unifier only to suppress political contestation and centralize power in a paternalistic elite.
As Gramsci noted, 'The government operated as a 'party'. It set itself above the parties not to harmonize their interests, but to disintegrate them, to detach them from the masses and obtain a force of non-party men linked by paternalistic ties of a Bonapartist-Caesarist type.' Importantly, 'A Caesarist solution can exist even without a Caesar, without any great 'heroic' or representative personality... Every coalition government is a first stage of Caesarism.'
Pakistan continues to oscillate between direct military Bonapartism and Caesarist coalitions. Today's hybrid regimes reflect Gramsci's insight that such systems are led by dangerously unaccountable bureaucracies, dominating without legitimacy. Recent regional conflicts have momentarily revived a sense of hegemonic unity in the dominant province, where capital accumulation has occurred. Yet across the country, the dominant strategy remains accumulation through dispossession.
V. Neoliberal Caesarism in the 21st century
The post-9/11 period ushered in a new era: Neoliberal Caesarism. The Pakistani state, a security-centric, externally-aligned apparatus that prioritizes, surveillance, capital accumulation for the centre, and elite consolidation over mass welfare, gave up even the false pretence of securing the public interest by becoming totalitarian. Temporary hegemonies, bolstered by foreign aid, military partnerships and hitting back the enemy in recent skirmishes, are now being eroded by inflation, discontent, and ideological decay.
Gramsci reminds us that historical blocs are needed to offer paths toward liberation. But in contemporary Pakistan, the formation of such a bloc — a coalition capable of challenging peripheral capitalism and Caesarist rule — remains unlikely, though not impossible.
Conclusion
Rather than liberating the subcontinent, Partition entrenched colonial structures under new guises. Through Gramsci's lens, we understand Pakistan's journey not as a rupture from colonialism, but as its transformation. From Caesarism to Bonapartism, from passive revolutions to neoliberal authoritarianism, the structures of domination have remained intact—only the actors have changed. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born.' The need, as ever, is not just to interpret the world, but to transform it.--
Concluded
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025