State, imperialism, and the national question in Pakistan

Situated at the gateway of South and West Asia, the Pakistani state has garnered significant geostrategic rents from global and regional powers through much of its history. US imperialism has been its primary external patron, facilitating a dominant role for the military, which, in turn, has presided over an uneven developmental regime based on the extraction of resources from, and suppression of, ethnic peripheries. This imperialist-backed and militarised regime has been sustained by a confessional ideology of the state. Accordingly, the national question in Pakistan has remained heavily contested for most of its history, the dominant idiom of unitary state nationalism resisted by ethnic–linguistic nationalisms ‘from below’. Alongside the US, China has also been a major benefactor of the Pakistani state. Following its emergence as a global power, China's footprint in Pakistan, including its long-suppressed peripheries, has grown markedly. Chinese development assistance, while distinct from US imperialism's decidedly more militaristic role in Pakistan, has nevertheless engendered significant disaffection within peripheral regions such as Balochistan. In varying degrees, the US and China continue to buttress the militarised state apparatus while deepening Pakistan's external dependency. By critically analysing the histories and geographies of imperialism and the national question in Pakistan, this paper interrogates current articulations of Marxism and ethnic-nationalism; while anti-imperialist popular fronts comprising Marxists and ethnic-nationalists were highly influential during the Cold War, the present conjuncture is characterised by growing fragmentation. Under this backdrop, the paper considers the potentialities for the Leninist inheritance on the national and colonial questions to inform progressive political strategy in the present and near future.