Famine, Partition, and the Conflict-State: Corruption as a Political Modality in India and Pakistan, 1940–1954

This article intervenes in corruption studies by arguing that corruption should not be understood as an episodic failure of governance or a spectacular scandal requiring technocratic or legal remedies. Instead, it conceptualizes corruption as a historically constituted and politically productive feature of rule, intensified by conflict and crisis. Focusing on the Bengal Famine (1943) and the Partition and Independence of the Indian subcontinent (1947)—the most turbulent phase in the region’s modern history—it shows how conflict reorganized state power through corruption, expanding executive authority, weakening local administration, and legitimizing exceptional governance. Juxtaposing colonial rule with the postcolonial states of India and Pakistan, it reveals important continuities in conflict-corruption across the imperial divide. Yet it also demonstrates that each state institutionalized and governed corruption differently, reflecting distinct trajectories of postcolonial state formation. By situating corruption within processes of conflict and state-building, the article recasts it as constitutive of, rather than antithetical to, modern governance.