The Colonial Legacies of Authoritarianism in South Asia

Despite glaring contradictions between stated ideals and ground realities, there is no greater legitimizing force in politics today than democracy. Yet the rhetoric of democracy remains starkly at odds with its manifestations the world over. The rise of right-wing demagogues using populist slogans to exclude migrants from the Global South or target religious minorities at home has provoked an outcry against the “democracy deficit.”

But such prejudicial and undemocratic practices are hardly a new occurrence. The historical antecedents of the contemporary disconnect between democratic aspirations and authoritarian repression are traceable to myriad sources, especially the legacies of colonialism. Colonial rule was notable for extractive institutions, paraphernalia of laws to preserve order, measures for social engineering, and deploying varying levels of coercive power against subject populations. 

Instead of promoting the freedoms and socioeconomic aspirations that motivated the nationalist struggle against colonialism, the post-World War II global order entrenched the oppressive and inequitable structures and policies of colonial states. Throughout the Cold War, one developing country after the other in Asia, Africa, and Latin America succumbed to some form of military authoritarianism, with the tacit consent of Washington and its allies in the advanced capitalist world. Platitudes about the United States’ commitment to promoting democratic values globally have never prevented Washington from supporting military dictators and authoritarian rulers when it has suited its policy goals.

The situation is no different today. India, the world’s largest democracy, has fallen precipitously on the freedom index and is now commonly referred to as a flawed democracy, if not an “electoral autocracy.” There is overwhelming evidence of discrimination and targeted violence against India’s Muslim minority under the incumbent government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, most disturbingly in Kashmir, where people have been comprehensively denied basic human rights since at least August 2019. 

This did not prevent U.S. President Joe Biden from rolling out the red carpet for a man once denied an American visa for the organized killing of Muslims under his watch in the state of Gujarat in February 2002. The attractions of India’s huge market and its potential role in checking China’s march to dominance in Asia trounce any democratic concerns Washington might harbor. 

The situation is quite different when it comes to the United States’ former wayward ally Pakistan, whose military authoritarian state structure Washington has done much to help strengthen, most decisively during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Islamabad’s pro-China tilt clashes with Washington’s geopolitical goals, making it a convenient target for periodic restatements of commitment to democratic principles that the United States’ own policies have served to undermine. 

Despite impressive macroeconomic and social indicators, Bangladesh is also not immune from U.S.-led Western pressures to correct the imperfections in its electoral democracy.

There is a need to go beyond self-serving rhetorical claims about democracy and authoritarianism. The two are not antithetical opposites but part of the same spectrum, defined by an ongoing tussle between the forces of popular resistance and state-supported political dominance. In the context of South Asia, the rhetoric of democracy and development in late colonial India, as the late David Washbrook so admirably showed, constituted an important dimension of the ideological legacies of the states that replaced the British Raj. 

A quintessential example of bureaucratic authoritarianism, the colonial state’s rhetoric of democracy aimed at no more than creating representative institutions where the privileged few could experiment with the art of governing in their own interest. Its rhetoric of development attempted to create an infrastructure most suited to the preservation and promotion of privilege. Any concept of citizenship emerging from a legacy of bureaucratic authoritarianism could hardly avoid the distortions and misfortunes of the colonial era. 

In addition to bequeathing non-elective institutions of state, colonialism left behind a very particular notion of communalism, the pejorative “other” of nationalism. There can be no permanent majority in a democracy. By defining majority and minority based on religious enumeration of its subjects, the British colonial state in India spoiled the prospects of democracy and the achievement of equal citizenship from the very outset. And late colonial and post-colonial nationalism – if not the derivative of colonial discourse, then certainly its beneficiary during the final stages of the struggle for state power – made strident inclusionary claims that wished away the very fact of cultural difference. 

Those who refused to subscribe to the dominant idioms of this inclusionary nationalism ran the risk of being branded “communal” and marginalized, if not altogether excluded, from the legitimate boundaries of the “secular” nation-state. While the communitarianism of a religiously defined majority could by this discursive sleight of hand be elevated to the status of the “nation,” the defense of religiously informed cultural identities by minority communities earned the stigma of particularism and, more insidiously, disloyalty.

Democracy and development were the two legitimizing principles on offer when “nations” making singular claims of allegiance acquired state power. But unlike their predecessor, post-colonial states needed to establish legitimacy by fulfilling the democratic and economic aspirations of their citizenry. For much of South Asia’s post-colonial history, India, with its mix of formal democracy and covert authoritarianism, fared better than Pakistan and Bangladesh, which toiled under lengthy spells of overt authoritarian rule. Democracy in India may not be the normative ideal outlined in the constitution, but in flourishing as it has despite political conflict, it lays bare the structural and ideational dilemmas confronting the nation-state. 

Secularism as the antithesis of religious communalism may seem like vintage Congress ideology. But without the regional bases of support to command a national majority in Delhi, the grand old party has become an obstacle to the emergence of more dynamic federal realignments in India. This is what created the space for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to use the Hindu majoritarian card to wrest state power in New Delhi. Some quarters opposed to the BJP favor deploying the idea of secularism as an antithesis of democracy to block the advance of those who consider both secularism and democracy dispensable in the greater cause of a Hindu Rashtra; they essentially jettison the first in hopes of defending the latter. 

The temporality of democratic versus authoritarian trends is not unique to India.

In Pakistan, where long years of military-bureaucratic rule have been the norm, the battle to redefine the institutional balance within the state structure is central to the future of its ramshackle democracy. During 2008 and 2017, the authoritarianism of old appeared to take a back seat in the face of stronger democratic impulses and intractable economic problems. 

This was a positive development that, together with concerns for accountability, gave rise to an unprecedented form of judicial activism. The emergence of the chief justice of the Supreme Court as the fourth element in the uneasy power equation between the chief of army staff, the president, and the prime minister could hardly be uncontentious. But however popular a prime minister, and defiant a chief justice or a president, the chief of army staff is still the final arbiter in Pakistan. 

Such a delicate power equation impinges adversely on relations between the center and the regions and is especially precarious in the absence of agreed rules of procedure. With political parties more prone to fight among themselves than to unite in opposition to khaki-clad authoritarianism, Pakistan’s state of martial rule marches to the beat of its own rhythms. But it, too, is constrained by a crushing debt burden, the prospect of sovereign default in the absence of much-needed structural reforms, and, above all, widespread protests.

Its 2017 domestic economic woes and the imperatives of global politics combined to lead to the ouster of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who enjoyed majority support in parliament, and his disqualification for life by the Supreme Court on a trifling technicality – he had neglected to declare a modest income in his nomination papers. In the 2018 elections the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) led by the cricketing star and national icon, Imran Khan, was openly supported by the military establishment. 

The gambit proved to be ill conceived. From being “on the same page” in “a hybrid” regime, Khan fell afoul of the army chief over promotions to key positions within the military establishment, such as the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence. The fall of his government in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in April 2022 plunged Pakistan into a political crisis from which it has yet to recover. 

Members of the PTI resigned from parliament and took to the streets behind Khan to protest the “conspiracy” to bring down his government. Violent protests by PTI supporters targeting military installations after Khan’s arrest earlier this year only served to further strengthen the coercive powers of an authoritarian state. The establishment moved to arrest PTI members and plans to charge them in military courts. Meanwhile, the PTI itself came under such relentless pressure that it split in two, with a number of its legislators founding their own party after publicly disavowing Khan.

Amid the crippling effects of the pandemic on an already struggling economy, Pakistan’s political uncertainty delayed the infusion of funds from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), leading to the rupee’s freefall against the dollar and crippling inflation.

Questions of political legitimacy also plague Bangladesh’s brittle but relatively more successful transition away from military authoritarianism. The bitter rivalry between the Bangladesh National Party and the Awami League, two parties that have alternated as government and opposition for the past three decades, are reminiscent of Pakistan but with key differences in the level of direct interference by the military establishment in politics. The Awami League has asserted its dominance in the last decade and a half. 

Tarnished and fragile, democracy in South Asia is alive but struggling to uphold ideals that are visibly out of synch with reality. 

India may be rising on the global ladder economically and strategically, but self-congratulatory narratives about high growth rates are based on the spectacular success of the super-rich, not the vast majority of India’s citizens, for whom living conditions are harsh and employment prospects grim. The nexus between Modi’s government and its capitalist allies on the one hand and the fusing of state power with the brigades of the militant right-wing Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) on the other has created a poisonous brew. 

An undeclared emergency of the kind prevalent in India, particularly Kashmir, is far more dangerous than the declared emergency Indira Gandhi imposed from 1975 to 1977 because of the legitimacy modern democratic trappings lend to the politics of a malevolent populism. The lynching of those suspected of eating or carrying beef, the forcible unveiling of Muslim women, and curbs on the call to prayer as well as its performance in public spaces reveal the extent to which India’s secular credentials have been damaged since the election of Modi’s government. 

The future is bleak, if not utterly hopeless. 

There is an urgent need to go beyond the fascination with procedural democracy and performative acts to win legitimacy and find ways to rethink how respect for a variety of communitarian identities might be reconciled with the rights of citizenship, liberated from the stranglehold of the post-colonial nation-state. This is easier said than done. 

Many of the colonial state’s authoritarian features have been perpetuated in post-colonial South Asia, and in some instances strengthened. The controversy over the law of sedition in India – the infamous Section 124 (A) of the Indian Penal Code, inherited from colonial times – is a good example. It was deployed against an array of freedom fighters, including Mahatma Gandhi in 1922, for his inspiring articles in “Young India.” Despite enlightened calls for the repeal of the law, the Indian Law Commission recommended recently that it should be made more stringent. The United Kingdom has done away with its own sedition laws and a high court judge in Pakistan struck it down too, but the erstwhile jewel in Britain’s colonial crown still flaunts it as a sovereign prerogative, calling into question India’s much vaunted democratic credentials.

Another glaring continuation from the colonial era is the resort to preventive detention. In 1919, Mahatma Gandhi had launched his first all-India mass movement against the proposal by Sidney Rowlatt to transition wartime ordinances designed to imprison Indians without trial into peacetime legislation. These were, in Gandhi’s terminology, “lawless laws,” and he dubbed the first Rowlatt Act of March 1919 as a “black act” passed by a “satanic government.” Irony of ironies, exactly 100 years later the Rowlatt Act was back with a vengeance in the form of the amended Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 2019, which empowers the government to proclaim an individual to be a terrorist (previously, the law focused on terrorist organizations). 

However, it would be a mistake to only blame the current regime for declaring brazen exception to the genuine rule of law. Independent India’s first preventive detention law fashioned on the colonial model was enacted by its provisional parliament as early as 1950, with that paragon of democracy Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act introduced in India’s Northeast later that decade, and in Kashmir since 1990, took its cue from a colonial enactment used to crush the Quit India rebellion of 1942.

More significant than the continuation or reenactment of specific “lawless laws” is the inheritance of over-centralized state monoliths with unitary ideologies of sovereignty from the colonial predecessor. A renegotiation of the federal equation is urgently required within each state of South Asia to creatively accommodate a myriad of internal diversities. Free and flexible federal states of union are the sine qua non for diplomatic breakthroughs in pursuit of peace and prosperity across the subcontinent. Freedom from the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule needs to be re-imagined 75 years after formal political independence.