Balochistan’s Imbroglio: A Marxist Gramscian Perspective
Saulat Nagi

The dilemma of Pakistani society is that since its inception, it has witnessed nothing but tragedies and, tragically, has failed to react to them. As Shakespeare wrote, “When sorrows come, they come not as single spies but in battalions.” And as Rosa Luxemburg especially reminds us, “Those who do not move do not feel their chains.” Unlike the Palestinians, who resist, the people of Pakistan seem addicted to their chains, always in motion yet going nowhere, having even abandoned their hope, echoing Dante’s chilling line: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” They embody what Horkheimer described in The Eclipse of Reason: “Men have been released from [concentration] camps who have taken over the jargon of their jailers and with cold reason and mad consent…contend that they have not been treated so badly after all.” This eerie normalisation of subjugation resonates with the Pakistani experience where survival, stripped of dignity, is accepted as fate. “The fault was not in our stars, dear Cassius,” as Brutus said, “but we are underlings.”
The tragedy began on the day of independence, when power slipped from colonial rulers not to the people, but to a Bonapartist-Caesarist regime led by a civil-military bureaucracy. As Gramsci warned, “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” (The Prison Notebooks, p. 211).
“If you have tears,” Shakespeare says, “prepare to shed them now.” The Muslim League, a politically hollow entity, was already dependent on its leader, Jinnah, who bypassed the elected premier in favour of his Cabinet Secretary, Chaudhry Mohammad Ali – a bureaucrat handpicked to serve as the real conduit of power. Thus began a legacy of bureaucratic dominance, as the political class – comprised of collaborators, turncoats and feudal remnants – sought relevance by aligning with this new ruling caste. In doing so, they built a prison from which they could no longer escape.
In short, we can describe this phase as Postcolonial Caesarism (1947-1958), when weak civilian parties balanced competing elites, especially the civilian bureaucracy, until its counterpart the military bureaucracy assumed a Caesarist stance, intervening as a ‘third force’.
Gramsci’s Terminologies, their implementation in Pakistan and Gramscian Reframing of Baloch Nationalism
Akin to my analysis on the Partition of the Subcontinent (Rethinking Partition in Colonial and Post-Colonial Pakistan – A talk in Stockholm), this analysis also adopts Antonio Gramsci’s concepts – Caesarism, cultural hegemony, the role of preconditions, war of position, war of manoeuvre, passive revolution and frontal attack – to reinterpret the Baloch struggle. Each historical phase demonstrates how ruling blocs in Pakistan have maintained dominance, and how Baloch resistance must construct its own counter-hegemonic preconditions. This will be beneficial for the readers to acquaint themselves with Gramscian terminologies, repeated frequently in this analysis.
For the accumulation of capital, the state is using all its resources to dispossess the masses generally and the Baloch people especially. This description is authentic, needing no proof. The irony is it is the Caesarist character of the state that has helped shape Baloch nationalism and the separatist tendencies within the province. For Gramsci, at a certain stage of history “[…]the government operated as a ‘party’. It set itself over and above the parties, not to harmonise their interests and activities within the permanent framework of the life and interests of the nation and state, but to disintegrate them, to detach them from the broad masses and obtain a force of non-party men linked to the government by paternalistic ties of a Bonapartist-Caesarist type.”
What is the Bonapartist-Caesarist form of state mentioned frequently by Gramsci? “Caesarism can be expressed in a situation in which the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner; that is to say, they balance each other in such a way that the continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction…then a third force C intervenes from outside subjugating what is left of A and B” (p. 219). Out of the conflict the emergence of a charismatic man of destiny cannot be ruled out but Caesarism “does not in all cases have the same historical significance. Caesarism can be progressive when it helps the progressive forces to triumph, albeit its victory is tempered by certain compromises and limitations.” “It is reactionary when its intervention helps the reactionary forces to triumph, in this case too with certain compromises and limitations, which have, however, a different value, extent and significance than in the former.” The ultimate result, revolution or restoration, matters. History goes forward, and no perfect restoration is possible. In the case of Pakistan, Bhutto’s era can be stated as progressive compared to all other eras until now, just as the Zia era was the most reactionary in which restoration was so regressive, and hegemony so coercive, that the country’s existence became questionable.
“ A Caesarist solution can exist even without a Caesar, without any great, ‘heroic’ and representative personality. The paramilitary system has also provided a mechanism for such compromise solution…Every coalition government is a first stage of Caesarism.” In the case of Pakistan, both the Imran and Sharif regimes were/are Caesaristic regimes, though both were/are controlled by the Bonapartes.
Bonapartism on the other hand was a term coined by Marx in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The main and important difference between these two terms is that Bonapartism contains an ideology. Louis Bonaparte advanced the bourgeois revolution while plundering the French bourgeoisie by preserving and masking the power of the narrower ruling class. Otherwise “the general historic conditions of the two types [Bonapartism and Casaerism] are the same; an equilibrium of the conflicting urban classes which obstruct the mechanism of ‘normal’ democracy – i.e., parliamentarism” (The Prison Notebooks, p. 216).
“However, the role of the countryside in this equilibrium is important. The countries where the countryside was passive as in Spain [and Pakistan of the last few decades], the generals of the landed aristocracy used the army politically to restabilise the threatened equilibrium, in other words the supremacy of the ruling class. In other countries where the countryside is not passive but the peasant movement is not coordinated politically with the urban movement; here the army has to remain neutral (up to a certain point, of course). Since otherwise it might split horizontally; instead the bureaucratic military class comes into action.”
Balochistan, a victim of a Bonapartist-Caesarist form of government
Balochistan, a victim of the uneven development of capitalism, is brutally suppressed by the Bonapartist-Caesarist government of Pakistan, which is perpetrating all kinds of atrocities against the Baloch people. It is the Caesarist character of the state that helped create Baloch nationalism and the separatist tendencies within the province.
From the inception of the country to the fall of Dhaka, Pakistan’s chequered history has been haunted by monsters. Gramsci saw monsters as transitional, emerging when the old dies and the new struggles to be born –but in Pakistan’s case, that interregnum has become permanent. The festering wound of Balochistan was never treated – healing was never the goal. The Eastern wing, alienated and ignored, finally found its Odysseus and built a separate Ithaca. The fall of the Eastern wing inspired the Baloch struggle, considering the Pakistani army’s fragility. It fulminated its struggle, beginning from political-economic rights to the possibility of separation from the state.
Transition to a Civil Government with Dented Hegemony of Praetorian Guards
If there was a transition from Jinnah’s Pakistan, it was for the worse – marked by the Bonapartist regimes of Ayub and Yahya. Bonapartism under Ayub (1958-1969) and Yahya (1969-71) was maintained under elite supremacy via populist rhetoric and technocratic rule, masking narrow class interests.
The fall of Dhaka marked the birth of a ‘new Pakistan’, broken, bankrupt, and beleaguered. For the first time, the Praetorian guards appeared weakened, nursing their wounds, with many still languishing in Indian prisons. Gramsci’s ‘caste’ – the civil-military bureaucracy – was momentarily subdued.
During the populist era of Bhutto’s Pakistan, for the first time in the country’s history, the balance of power appeared to shift – not only from the iron-fisted rule of the civil-military bureaucracy to populist civilian leadership, but also from the forces of the right to those of the left. However, Bhutto, seeking to consolidate his personal authority through class collaboration rather than class antagonism, and preferring to operate within the inherited structures of the old system, quickly rendered this shift fragile and vulnerable.
The class consciousness expressed in the 1970 elections – by the people of the former eastern wing (which soon emerged as the independent nation of Bangladesh), and in the western wing, especially Punjab – failed to evolve into a revolutionary upsurge, primarily due to the absence of a Bolshevik-style party capable of channelling mass energy into structural transformation.
The apparent victory of a socialist programme, combined with the military defeat of a hegemonic state apparatus, gave the illusion of a changed praxis. But this, too, proved a mirage. The Pakistani army’s historic defeat did, however, inspire the deprived people of Balochistan. It must be noted that the war in the Eastern wing was largely won by the Mukti Bahini – the Bangladeshi liberation forces – backed by the Indian army. The Pakistani military, trapped in monsoon-swollen marshes and unfamiliar terrain, had already lost half the war before India’s formal intervention, which merely hastened the inevitable. The success of the Bangladeshi insurgency provided renewed momentum to Baloch resistance.
Bhutto’s Caesarist decision to dissolve the Balochistan provincial government – under pressure from the Shah of Iran – became a catalyst for armed rebellion. What began in the peripheries of Balochistan gradually spread to the villages and open fields. Yet, unlike the Cuban revolution, it failed to ignite urban insurrection. Even so, the protracted armed conflict not only deepened the scars of the army’s defeat but also forced the hegemonic forces to reassert themselves more aggressively. The four-year-long confrontation (1973-77), during which, as Selig S Harrison notes, the Pakistani military suffered considerable setbacks, came to a sudden halt when Zia-ul-Haq overthrew the elected government and extended the olive branch to the Baloch fighters.
(To be continued)