Anti-Imperialism vs Geopolitical Binaries in the Latest India-Pakistan War
A new anti-imperialist programme in Pakistan will either be of a “pluri-national consciousness” or it will be nothing.
Image: Dhaka Tribune
Republished from Interventions (Antipode Online)
On 22 April 2025, armed militants killed over 20 tourists in the Indian-occupied part of Kashmir. In response, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Delhi accused Pakistan of supporting “cross-border terrorism”, while unilaterally cancelling long-standing water-sharing treaties and preparing for military action.
On May 7th, with the war drums beating and vengeful nationalist sentiments whipped up by a frenzied private media, the Indian military launched “surgical” strikes on civilian and military infrastructures inside Pakistan. Dozens of Israeli-made surveillance drones also swarmed major Pakistani cities. The Pakistani military, reeling from a historic crisis of public legitimacy and itself an enthusiastic purveyor of (sub)national oppressions and brutalised peripheries, responded with downing Indian fighter jets and coordinated attacks on military infrastructure inside India.
With the conflict escalating dangerously towards a nuclear war, world powers (especially the US and Saudi Arabia) eventually intervened after four days of on-and-off fighting to secure a ceasefire on 10 May.
In the din of military strikes and counter-strikes, however, the fundamental question of the occupation and colonisation of Kashmir was all but lost. But not before the Indian aggression and Pakistani junta’s counter-measures had generated intense debate among Lefts on both sides of the Radcliffe Line.
I wrote the two short interventions below on social media with regards to Left debates in Pakistan on the conflict. Many on the Pakistani Left situated (and sometimes reduced) the conflict to the new Cold War and encirclement of China by the US. Others sought to portray—and, indeed, glorify—the Pakistani military (and its alliance with China) as saviours against Zionist-allied Hindutva fascism.
The first intervention was in the form of strategic theses for an anti-war position, just as the first Indian missiles struck within Pakistan. The second was a reflection post-ceasefire as different fractions of the Pakistani Left took account of the previous two weeks, while others (especially from Pakistan’s “core”/dominant Punjab province) hardened their positions in support of the military (and China) as bulwarks against Hindutva expansionism.
Taken together, I hope these interventions portray the conceptual and political stakes of concrete geographical analysis in a moment marked by resurgent imperial and national questions at multiple levels. Indeed, the stakes of situated analyses could not be higher in the context of a rapidly shifting world order, with the very real prospect of complete human ruination as currently being carried out by the Israeli-US combine in Gaza and threatened, via nuclear war, in South Asia.
Theses on the (Latest) India–Pakistan Conflict (May 7th, 2025)
Let us be clear about a few things:
[1] India is, in a very precise sense, a sub-imperialist power which acts as a regional hegemon. This is obvious enough in the evolution of monopoly corporate capital in India, its close alliance with the state and banking capital, its search for external investment outlets simultaneous to domestic super-exploitation, and their very real economic-military alliances with the US and Israel. Its society and state is also now under thorough control of the most dangerous fascism in the world.
[2] Pakistan (or the Pakistani ruling bloc) would like to be a sub-imperialist power and regional hegemon in its own right. Fortunately for all of us, it is not in such a position currently. Their sub-imperial ambition is obvious enough in their historical role as regional satraps of US imperial (mis)adventures, in their equal part-hand in the decades-long destruction of Afghanistan, and now the close involvement of domestic monopoly-military capital in initiatives such as “Green Pakistan” and their angling to become regional partners of the new Cold War-US mineral grab.
[3] Kashmir is an occupation and an obvious (neo-)colonial situation. In a colonial situation, all modes of resistance are on the table. The same is true for Balochistan in Pakistan.
[4] The use of the language of “terrorism” with regards to violence in these colonial situations is insidious. It is borrowed from imperial vocabulary and furthering of (sub-)imperial aims.
[5] In such a situation, with two active/aspirant sub-imperial powers sitting on a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over, the responsibility of the Left on both sides of the Radcliffe Line is enormous. This is especially so on the Left from “core” areas of these states: both to resist war patriotism and to clarify to domestic popular classes the fundamentally colonial situation (e.g. in Kashmir) which this war situation is growing out of and also silencing/exacerbating.
[6] In this regard, parts of the Left in both countries’ “core” regions, with their open or cryptic support of war hysteria (e.g. the CPI and CPIM’s statement supporting “surgical strikes” in Pakistan), are making a historic mistake.
[7] This is, in fact, precisely the time to ask the basic Marxist questions rather than fall into the rapturous procession of “national unity”: What are the organised interests behind war? Who benefits from it? What are the social questions suppressed by warmongering?
[8] In Pakistan’s case (I am not knowledgeable about day-to-day Indian politics), this was made obvious, among other things, by the insidious language adopted recently by that liberal chauvinist Nadeem Paracha: when he mocked the biggest peoples’ movement in Sindh’s recent history over self-determination and water rights, by asking them to “change course and now march towards New Delhi”.
[9] The Left has to take principled positions which further the cause of peace and self-determination. These may not necessarily be popular positions (for now)—be that on war, internal colonialism, and external sub-imperial ambitions. To feed into war hysteria openly or cryptically at this point, is precisely to suppress such social questions and to hang our heads in shame in the court of history.
On “the Concrete” and the Season of Bad Analogies (May 14th, 2025)
A significant part of the Left in Punjab (mainly from the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party, HKP, and concentrated in Lahore) took openly supportive, bordering on jingoistic, positions with regards to the Pakistani military during its recent confrontation with Hindutva delusions. This war patriotism was justified in turn through invocations of “concrete analysis”, all hingeing on reading and reducing the moment to geopolitical alliances and the new Cold War.
The intellectual moves made to justify these positions are suspect. Their political implications even more so.
The “concrete” has a very precise meaning in philosophy. It is a method whereby any phenomenon is broken down and then understood in its multi-sided complexity, in light of the multiple elements which go into its making. In Marx’s exact words: “the concrete is the concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse”.
In light of this, to invoke geopolitical rivalry and the new anti-China Cold War (which is very real) but then reduce everything happening between Indo-Pak to this singular pole (in the name of “principal contradiction”) is not concrete analysis. It is in fact an ideological operation in the precise (and pejorative) sense that Marx talks about: to take an aspect of reality, one part of a whole, and to generalise it to the whole totality.
In the case of our Lahore comrades, this kind of ideological operation has resulted in a situation whereby all their analyses now sound the same. In a mirror image of the usual Trot analysis, the “always ready-for-revolution proletarian masses betrayed by ‘Stalinist’ bureaucracy” are now replaced by the always-ready formula of Chinese ascendancy and the US-India-Israel nexus.
All situations, instead of lending themselves to careful consideration, become cosplays of geopolitical rivalry: “the night”, as Hegel once caustically remarked, “in which all cows are black”.
This faux-concreteness has itself spawned a season of bad analogies-by-association/alliance. India and Israel have a budding military alliance, so Pakistan is…(presumably) Palestine? And thus, the Pakistani military is fighting…an anti-colonial war? This, of course, has not been said openly by the Lahore Left, but it is the logical conclusion of their analysis.
Analogies by comparison and alliance can only take us so far. This is where actual concrete analysis is needed. For such an understanding, one cannot divorce the current moment from its multiple determinations and all actors have to be seen in their specific history.
For example, despite the budding India-Israel alliance, Hindutva is not Zionism. Indeed, in many ways, Hindutva is a much more dangerous fascism than Zionism—much more deep-rooted, much more endogenous to India, and, most importantly, much less directly dependent on US imperialism. The delusions of India’s mainstream media and “progressive” intelligentsia, in full display recently, are but one indication of this.
Similarly, Pakistan is not Palestine. It is an aspirant (not actual) sub-imperial power, with a ruling bloc whose alignment with China is not principled but part of its permanent dance over the hot coals of various foreign and (sub-)imperial patrons—a grotesque dance itself born out of its congenital social weakness.
Indeed, a concrete analysis reveals that the Pakistani ruling bloc stands on two legs: externally, on imperial dependency, and internally, on national oppressions and uneven development. These two legs of the Pakistani ruling bloc are constitutive of each other, linked in a dialectical (i.e. lazim-o-malzoom) manner. One cannot deal with the anti-imperial national question in Pakistan without dealing with the pluri-national questions within (and vice versa).
This is precisely why the war patriotism of the Lahore Left is not just intellectually suspect, but borders on the politically myopic.
It has no consideration of the fact that this conflict has given the Pakistani military—at its lowest ebb of public legitimacy in at least two decades—a new lease of life. That a regaining of Pak army legitimacy means, amongst other things, that hell is going to rain down in (peripheralised) Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. That simultaneous to waging a “defensive”, “anti-fascist” war against Hindutva, they were raining down drones on their own people in Janikhel Bannu, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Indeed, there is no consideration of the existential anxiety and the visceral hate that images of Pakistani fighter jets induce among those from the peripheries.
Before the Lahore Left dismisses this as another “peacenik” or “liberal pacifist” position, let me emphasise that a concrete consideration of Pakistan’s ruling bloc, a focus on the internal contradictions and national oppressions through which it reproduces itself, is not simply a moral question of identity and recognition: it is a strategic question.
That Pakistan needs an anti-imperialist programme of sovereign development is without doubt. At minimum, this would entail rural and urban land reforms, reorienting production towards social (as opposed to export) needs, rebuilding ecologically sustainable agro-industrial linkages, and public direction of finance and investment—all of this in turn requires a managed default on onerous, mostly Western-denominated foreign debt. That the break-up of the unipolar world and China’s rise as an alternative source of finance and technology transfer offers openings for such a programme of anti-imperialist de-linking is also without doubt.
But the question, as ever, remains: on what social basis and constituency can such a programme be carried out?
We know from long and painful experience, and even the recent manoeuvres around minerals conferences, that the Pakistani ruling bloc is opportunistic in its engagement with the US, China, and other powers. It uses its linkages with foreign actors to buttress its own power and further national and class oppressions. No external alliances here are innocent. Nothing is simply reducible to geopolitical cosplay.
Only a popular programme of national consciousness, based on Pakistan’s diverse working masses, will have the strength to manoeuvre in the changing world-system and negotiate with emerging powers (such as China) in democratic and mutually beneficial ways. Only such a programme of national consciousness—which is “not nationalism” and is “national, revolutionary, and social” at the same time—can operate on the terrain of the “national” without falling into closed forms of identity. Indeed, it is only such a socially- and geographically-attuned national consciousness that can form the basis of a concrete internationalism.
For this, we must understand the character of Pakistan’s popular classes, who are constitutively polycultural and multi-national. Their national oppressions and differences are very real: they cannot be wished away through discursive and top-down populist manoeuvres.
In fact, as a veritable tradition of anti-colonial thinking has taught us, “labour in the white skin cannot be free while it is chained in the black”. The question of colonial-national oppressions and of dealing with difference internally is crucial for making a new popular subject, which is our only hope for a serious anti-imperialism. Indeed, if difference is not worked through “from below”, it will be dealt with “from above” (i.e. by ruling classes) with ruinous consequences for popular politics.
Without dealing with national oppressions and working through difference in the process of actual struggles, therefore, oppositional movements in “core” Punjab will be condemned, at key moments, to join that procession of “national unity” which breathes new life into a crisis-ridden ruling bloc. This is precisely the move that HKP comrades have made in the recent conflagration (and which, for example in a different context, Sindh nationalists make on Afghan refugee issue—I have written about this elsewhere).
By mis-identifying the fault lines of the Pakistani ruling bloc, by foregoing therefore the very real project of forging a new “national-popular”, it is on the terrain of mainstream Pakistani nationalism that the “core” Left of Punjab inevitably finds itself. This is a project condemned to deliver popular masses into the laps of an expanded, but still elite-centred nationalism—in short, as the left-wing of Pakistani militarism.
Pantomimes of concreteness may offer a pantomime of power to an emaciated Left and to those sitting in Lahore. But to reduce questions of the longue durée to the immediate reaction economy of social media, to reduce questions of the social to that of merely and only the geopolitical, and to reduce questions of strategy to morality, makes for neither revolutionary analysis nor revolutionary practice.
A new anti-imperialist programme in Pakistan will either be of a “pluri-national consciousness” or it will be nothing.
Ayyaz Mallick is an academic and member of Awami Workers’ Party, Karachi.