Post-Colonial Statism and Crises of Representation

Abstract

Abstract The structures of inequity and crises of representation in South Asia in the 1950s and 1960s that laid the groundwork for reordering populist mobilization are the focus of this chapter. It first lays out the statist politics of India under the hegemony of Congress rule. Despite solemn obligations that the post-independence state and political system would address inequalities evident in colonial rule, both industrialization and programs for community development in the countryside benefitted a small elite—bureaucrats, industrialists, dominant proprietary groups, and the political elite—excluding workers, peasants, and the emerging middle class. In Pakistan, under Ayub Khan’s statist regime, parallel elite structures existed in cities and in the countryside, with similar exclusionary consequences. The chapter concludes with an overview of the subnational reordering populism of the Awami League under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in East Pakistan, leading to the independence of Bangladesh.