The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan by Sajjad Akhtar Aasim;

Author:Sajjad Akhtar, Aasim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

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Structural transformations through time and space have produced new middle-class subjects while transforming the hegemonic apparatus itself. In Gramsci’s words, a hegemonic apparatus in any particular conjuncture ‘creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge’. In no uncertain terms, the digitalised field of politics represents a new ideological terrain that is transforming consciousness – of self and the social world at large – through novel methods of knowledge.7

I have argued that contemporary middle-class hegemony has been preceded by two distinct moments in Pakistan’s history that have also been hegemonised through a middle-class political subject. All three moments have corresponded to both an idealised as well as a practical manifestation of the ‘public’, within which, in turn, all historically specific forms of ‘the political’ have taken form. In a nutshell, neither the ‘public’ nor ‘the political’ is static; in fact, as I will discuss presently, the quest for hegemony is a struggle between multiple ‘publics’ as much as competing conceptions and political practices.

My point of departure is Nancy Fraser’s seminal critique of the Habermasian ideal-type ‘public sphere’ in which nominally ‘equal’ citizens engage in voluntary deliberation and thereby buttress processes of democratisation.8 Actually existing western society, Fraser asserts, has been historically constituted through sexist, racist, class and other structures that continue to shape social relations, and, therefore, access to the public sphere. She proposes the alternative normative ideal of multiple publics so as to ensure a meaningful voice for the ‘unequals’ that comprise contemporary capitalist society.

Read as a general critique, Fraser’s argument can ostensibly account for any number of societal contexts. Yet, the specificity of the (post) colonial public sphere demands interrogation in its own right. Habermas’ conceptualisation of the public sphere was, after all, based exclusively on Europe’s distinct experience of bourgeois modernity. Kaviraj notes that ‘in Indian society there was a rich repertoire of concepts of common responsibility, obligation, action, that did not share the characteristic features of bourgeois publicity like a recognisable source, proper authorization, impersonality, legality, state sanction, and clear ascription of individual responsibility’.9

The colonial interregnum, then, brought into existence distinct norms and practices of publicity that had little organic basis within Indian society per se, instead imposing ‘from above’ officially-mandated norms that corresponded to the dictates of state and capital. Pride of place in the officially constituted public sphere was of course accorded to the men of letters that were ‘Indians in blood but English in taste’, at least some of whom, it is worth reiterating, hailed from big landed families.

This explicitly insular domain corresponded to sanitised forms of ‘the political’; less than 12% of the total population was entitled to vote in provincial elections held in colonial Punjab under the 1935 Government of India Act.10 Eventually, the contradictions of colonial statecraft and its associated legal instrumentalities – rooted in a hybrid property rights regime in which capital accumulation was interwoven with the geopolitical imperatives of Empire – exploded the ‘official’ public sphere from within. Both a

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