Not All Violence Is Colonial: The Dangerous Drift of Post-Modern Solidarity – Yanis Iqbal

With the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and renewed India-Pakistan tensions following the Pahalgam attack, there is a growing temptation to apply the framework of colonial violence (so viscerally visible in Palestine) to diverse geopolitical contexts across the Global South. This impulse, while rooted in a genuine desire for global solidarity, has often led to postmodern readings that lose sight of colonialism’s specific historical role. The word “postmodern” is used here to indicate a style of theorizing that relies on metaphorical sameness instead of concrete, differentiated analyses. According to Fredric Jameson, postmodernism creates a “culture of the simulacrum” in which “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.”

This metaphorical drift is not incidental: it emerges from the social conditions of late capitalism, which deprive us of “historicity” and fragment collective memory into consumable images. In such a condition, theoretical discourse increasingly treats one phenomenon as standing in for another. Instead of situating it within the global economic order it helped build, colonialism is increasingly treated as a vague metaphor for any kind of state repression or national power. But colonialism is not just violence but a central mechanism for integrating peripheral regions of the world into a global system of extraction, domination, and accumulation. 

Nowhere is the postmodern reading more evident than in contemporary scholarship on Kashmir, where colonialism is often invoked not as a specific historical system but as a moral or psychological structure that drives all forms of domination. Such approaches, while rhetorically powerful, risk collapsing the very distinctions between imperial centres and peripheral states, between settler genocide and internal repression, which are essential for a rigorous anti-imperialist analysis.

In recent years, scholars such as Hafsa Kanjwal, Goldie Osuri, Ather Zia, and Suvir Kaul have powerfully intervened against state violence in Kashmir, deploying the language of colonialism to critique India’s occupation and its suppression of dissent. This invocation of colonialism seeks not only to expose the authoritarianism of the Indian state but also to reframe its practices within a moral language of global solidarity. In Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation, Kanjwal advances the argument that India’s governance of Kashmir is not merely repressive but colonial in nature, marked by the denial of sovereignty, racialized governance, extractive development, and comprador collaboration. Her use of terms like “postcolonial colony” and “Third World imperialism” is meant to provoke recognition that postcolonial states, too, can behave in ways structurally and ideologically akin to colonial statesempires.

Kanjwal is careful to insist that India’s coloniality is not a metaphor but a concrete political condition. “What does it mean,” she asks rhetorically, “to act like a colonial power instead of being a colonial power?” Yet even as she presses this point, she concedes that the comparison with British colonial rule is meant to illuminate overlapping logics rather than identical structures. This ambivalence signals a broader conceptual tension in most post-modern critiques: the migration of colonialism from a historically specific world-systemic project into a moral or structural metaphor applied across contexts of domination. What begins as a denunciation of specific violence often ends in a general theory of power untethered from material conditions.

This slippage is especially evident in the work of Osuri and Zia, who define the “core of colonial and imperial imperatives” as the “violent subjugation of bodies for the exploitation of resources and the greed for territory.” While ethically compelling, such formulations risk collapsing the analytic distinction between colonialism as a mode of global racial-capitalist accumulation and the more general phenomena of coercion or state repression. By moralizing colonialism into a transhistorical syndrome, this approach renders the term applicable to virtually any act of violence or domination, erasing the geohistorical distinctions between metropoles and peripheries, between settler-colonial extermination and postcolonial state violence.

Suvir Kaul offers a more historically grounded account, tracing continuities between British and Indian statecraft, particularly in border management, bureaucratic rationality, and militarized governance. He rightly emphasizes that the postcolonial Indian state did not emerge in a vacuum, and that imperial modes of control left deep psychological and institutional imprints. This view aligns with a broader body of literature on the affective and epistemic afterlives of empire. Frantz Fanon, for instance, documents how colonial mystification – through narratives that naturalize cultural inferiority and justify civilizational hierarchy – does not vanish with political independence but resurfaces in the postcolonial state. Although the anti-colonial struggle initially “makes any attempt at mystification…virtually impossible” by exposing the violence underpinning colonial order, Fanon cautions that nationalist elites can restore mystification by portraying new social hierarchies as essential to the nation. In his words, this redirection of revolutionary energy can culminate in “ultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism,” even in “a genuine ethnic dictatorship”

While these perspectives capture how empire lingers in the attitudes and self-understandings of postcolonial populations, their over-extension can result in the conflation of affective inheritances with structural continuity. By framing postcolonial governance as a refined iteration of colonial logic, Kaul ends up foregrounding mentalities over transformations in sovereignty, legality, and accumulation. The point is not to deny that imperial ideology left residues, but to emphasize that the shift from colonial to postcolonial rule involved a fundamental reconfiguration of the political economy.

As Max Ajl writes, postcolonial sovereignty “put a stop to colonial income deflation,” halted colonial famines, reversed food-grain decline, and arrested deindustrialization. Crucially, it placed “the process of development of the productive forces under the control of petty bourgeois elements that tended to the basic needs of the formerly colonized population.” These are concrete gains for human dignity often dismissed by narratives that flatten all postcolonial nationalisms into mere continuities of elite rule. Without attending to these material breaks, we extend the concept of coloniality too far, explaining domination in terms of inherited affects while ignoring how postcolonial power operates through its own rationalities and constraints.

It is precisely this idealist logic that culminates in Kanjwal’s claim that postcolonial states are “inherently colonial” because they assert territorial sovereignty. Theorists like Stathis Gourgouris (whom Kanjwal has cited elsewhere) epitomize this move, redefining colonialism not as a historical project of European world domination, but as a metaphysical condition of the nation-form itself. While the term colony has older etymological roots in Graeco-Roman and medieval contexts, referring to forms of settlement, military outposts, or the export of civic communities, its modern valence, particularly since the rise of European overseas empires, has been defined by capitalist extraction, racial domination, and imperial sovereignty.

In classical usage, colonies referred to civic affiliation, city founding, or mutual citizenship, but in modernity they became terms of centralized domination, racialized hierarchy, and imperial extraction. As Lorenzo Veracini notes, “terminological consistency may hide false friends”; the adoption of these terms by modern empires reflected not a continuity of practice but a projection of classical education and ideological self-fashioning. It is this historically distinct formation that this article refers to when critiquing the abstraction of colonialism from its material foundations.

For Gourgouris, however, colonialism becomes the nation’s existential drive to territorialize and discipline the Other – a psychic logic of identity-formation in which all nationalism is, by definition, a form of colonization. In this schema, colonialism is no longer a historically bounded phenomenon but a permanent feature of human identity. Gourgouris speaks of “the colonization of the subject,” whereby rituals, flags, and national narratives inscribe coloniality onto the self.

To recover analytic clarity, it is essential to re-anchor the debate with a materialist understanding of India’s position in the capitalist world-system. India’s actions in Kashmir, while deeply coercive and anti-democratic, must be situated within its specific trajectory as a postcolonial state, not a colonial one. Terms like “sub-imperialism” or “postcolonial colony” risk collapsing the particularities of India’s sovereignty into generic oppositions between power and powerlessness. As Aijaz Ahmad observed, “the colonial question is quite different from the nationalities question in a state that is itself a post-colonial sovereign state.” This distinction matters. India is not a colonizer in the European sense; it is the inheritor of a contradictory colonial legacy, grappling with the project of forging unity across caste, religious, linguistic, and regional differences.

Irfan Habib rightly reminds us that Indian nationhood was not a return to some primordial cultural essence but the construction of a modern solidarity. The national form, for all its contradictions, marked a historical rupture from the hierarchies of pre-modern social organization and the brutalities of colonial rule.

The task, then, is not to deny the Indian state’s internal contradictions, but to ask whether they justify the disintegration of postcolonial sovereignty. Those who believe they do often imply that the nation-form itself is fundamentally exhausted, that it is just another version of coloniality and no longer worth struggling within or for. Yet this claim demands scrutiny. Are the enduring realities of caste, class, and regional oppression sufficient to declare the national project obsolete? If empirical failure alone determines political legitimacy, then nearly every postcolonial democracy would stand condemned. Such a view detaches these institutions from their origins in anti-colonial struggle, reducing them to mere instruments of domination rather than sites of ongoing contestation.

The incompletion of the national project is undeniable, but incompletion alone is not a warrant for secession. The relevant question is whether the contradictions of the Indian state foreclose the possibility of democratization. If they do not, then rejecting the national form outright risks discarding one of the few frameworks through which redistribution, rights, and solidarity can still be meaningfully imagined in a fractured global order.

The Kashmir case illustrates why postcolonial sovereignty cannot be abandoned so readily. As Christopher Snedden argues in Independent Kashmir: An Incomplete Aspiration, while an independent Kashmir is “possible in theory,” in practice, it would face immense structural constraints. Sandwiched between Hindu nationalist India and Islamist Pakistan – both nuclear powers with hardened claims – Kashmir’s geostrategic location renders real autonomy implausible. Snedden is blunt: “This region will never be free as long as these combative nations exist in their present structures.”

The logistical obstacles are equally severe. Kashmir would be “snowbound for periods of time each year,” with land and air access vulnerable to control by neighboring powers. Basic state functions (border regulation, airspace management, customs infrastructure, defense) would be exceptionally difficult for a fledgling, resource-poor state surrounded by volatile regimes. As Snedden concludes, “Obtaining independence would be very difficult to achieve and to sustain.”

Secession, then, is no automatic path to emancipation. On the contrary, it often produces elite-led statelets aligned with global imperial interests. For example, Kosovo’s 2008 secession from Serbia, heavily backed by the US and NATO, created a polity economically dependent on Western aid and militarily integrated into NATO’s strategic architecture. Its leadership, largely drawn from former guerrilla elites, governs through patronage while facilitating foreign capital. The result is less a sovereign state than a Western protectorate, with a local elite mediating imperial interests.

As Lenin and Luxemburg insisted, the principle of self-determination is never absolute; its meaning is determined by class forces and historical context. The mere multiplication of states does not equal liberation.

Rather than treating sovereignty as a zero-sum logic, where the empowerment of one group necessitates the fragmentation of the whole, it is more generative to conceive of sovereignty as unbundled and plural. Federalism, legal pluralism, and regional autonomy, while imperfect, offer institutional forms for negotiation without replicating the violent ruptures of partition. The experiences of Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh should caution us against romanticizing secession as inherently emancipatory.

A similar caution must inform our understanding of imperialism. Calls to label India an emerging imperialist or even sub-imperialist power collapse the real structural constraints of the capitalist world-system. India, a country with a population of 1.4 billion, cannot become a “core” imperialist power without upending the global flow of surplus value. The current system is premised on a small number of countries in the Global North extracting surplus from a vast, low-wage periphery. If India were to truly become a core country in the global capitalist system, it would mean gaining access to the massive surplus value currently extracted by the existing core countries in the Global North.

But that would require those countries to give up a large share of their profits, something that would threaten their own economic and political stability. The other option would be for capitalism to find entirely new ways to extract even more surplus from the remaining periphery. But it’s hard to imagine how this could happen on the scale required without sparking widespread rebellion, ecological collapse, or a breakdown of the system itself. In short, the structure of global capitalism makes India’s rise to true imperial core status highly unlikely, unless the system as a whole is radically transformed or pushed to an unsustainable crisis.

Empirically, the evidence does not support the idea of India as a net receiver of global surplus value (net value gained through unequal exchange in global trade). Rather, as Andrea Ricci has shown, India transfers more value to the imperialist bloc (North America, the Eurozone, Western Europe, East Asia (excluding China), and Oceania) than it receives. Their capital exports do not translate into systemic surplus extraction, and they lack the financial, military, and technological apparatus required to establish hegemony over weaker economies. In other words, they are semi-peripheral at best. The idea that India engages in limited capital export or regional conflict does not qualify it as imperialist, unless we water down the term so thoroughly that it loses all analytic power. If every regional war or economic expansion is labelled imperialist, the concept becomes indistinguishable from ordinary capitalist competition.

To conclude, postcolonial sovereignty is not merely symbolic; it has arrested colonial famines, reversed deindustrialization, expanded public health, and reoriented development toward domestic needs. These gains, however partial or uneven, cannot be dismissed as continuity in disguise, as another variation of coloniality. To mistake the contradictions of the postcolonial state for proof of its colonial essence is to abandon the terrain on which anti-colonial and democratic struggles were, and still are, waged.

Kashmir’s suffering is real, but solidarity must not be built on theoretical shortcuts. India’s actions there are best understood not as the rebirth of colonialism but as the product of its own fraught postcolonial trajectory, marked by federal tensions, communal anxieties, and uneven democratization. To theorize these problems as inherently colonial is to foreclose more generative political imaginations: of federal autonomy, regional self-rule, and cross-border solidarities that do not require the erasure of postcolonial sovereignty.

What is needed is not a general theory of domination but a historically specific critique of how power operates in given contexts. Only then can we build solidarities that are not just rhetorically resonant but politically effective.