Critically examine Hamza Alavi’s formulation of the overdeveloped State. (2009)
Hamza Alavi‘s essay “The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh” (New Left Review, 1972) carried Marxist state theory out of Europe. The post-colonial state, he argued, is neither the instrument of one ruling class nor a neutral arbiter, but a relatively autonomous apparatus inherited from colonial rule. It explains Pakistan powerfully and India poorly.
The formulation
- Colonial origin. The metropolitan bourgeoisie built a colonial state to subordinate all native classes, not one. In Alavi’s words, the colonial superstructure is “over-developed” in relation to the “structure” in the colony, because its base lay in the metropolis.
- Inheritance. Independence changed the flag, not the apparatus. With no hegemonic bourgeoisie, a military-bureaucratic oligarchy trained to govern subjects became the governing element.
- Three propertied classes. The metropolitan neo-colonial bourgeoisie, the indigenous bourgeoisie and the landed classes. The oligarchy mediates their competing but no longer contradictory interests, defending private property on behalf of all three.
- Material basis of autonomy. Echoing Karl Marx’s Bonapartism, in which an executive gains independence under a balance of classes, Alavi grounds autonomy in the apparatus and in the state’s direct appropriation of surplus through planning.
- The distinctive claim: the class that owns is not the class that rules.
The evidence
Pakistan supplied it: the Constituent Assembly dissolved in 1954 and Muhammad Ayub Khan‘s coup in 1958. Its 27th Constitutional Amendment (13 November 2025) constitutionalised the pattern — a Chief of Defence Forces consulted on naming the head of the new National Strategic Command, lifetime rank and immunity for a field marshal, and a Federal Constitutional Court above the Supreme Court. Bangladesh, Alavi’s second case, fits more loosely: coups in 1975, military-dominated rule until 1990, an army-backed caretaker in 2007–08, and in August 2024 the army chief announcing Sheikh Hasina’s exit and an interim government. Yet the election of 12 February 2026, which gave the Bangladesh Nationalist Party 209 of 297 declared seats with the Awami League barred, returned power to a party.
Critique
- Marxist refinements. John S. Saul, writing on Tanzania (1974), added the state’s ideological task of building a nation, and argued that the bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie could pursue its own class project rather than merely broker others’. Colin Leys (1976) asked what the state was overdeveloped relative to: size is not power, and relative autonomy marks capitalist states generally.
- Contingency, not inheritance. Ayesha Jalal‘s The State of Martial Rule (1990) traced Pakistan’s military dominance to post-1947 choices — the Kashmir war, an unaffordable defence burden, Punjabi dominance and the American alliance.
- The Indian counter-case. The same inheritance produced civilian supremacy, universal franchise and a mass party system. Pranab Bardhan (The Political Economy of Development in India, 1984) replaced Alavi’s triad with industrial capitalists, rich farmers and professionals, whose balance yielded subsidy-driven stalemate, not oligarchic command.
- State-centrism. Joel S. Migdal‘s state-in-society approach (Strong Societies and Weak States, 1988) shows apparently strong states captured by local strongmen; Partha Chatterjee‘s political society shows the majority bargaining with a porous state. Caste, language and religion, the engines of South Asian politics, barely appear in Alavi.
- Dated economics. Liberalisation shrank the planning surplus that underwrote autonomy; regulators, courts and organised business now share power the bureaucracy once monopolised.
Conclusion
The overdeveloped state is best read as a theory of Pakistan with portable concepts — colonial continuity and the separation of owning from governing — not a general law of post-colonial states. Where democratic institutions subordinated the inherited apparatus, as in India, it fails; where they were repeatedly aborted, as in Pakistan, it still predicts with uncomfortable accuracy.