Chapter 6 focuses on the electoral alliances that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) forms with violent sectarian actors in Punjab province. Using a combination of extensive fieldwork and data on party organization and electoral candidates, I demonstrate that the PML-N is an organizationally weak party lacking a captive support base in Punjab’s political landscape of shared sovereignty. Because it has limited presence at the local level, the PML-N must rely on pre-existing, influential patrons who manage microlevel clientelistic structures and can function effectively as electoral intermediaries between the party and potential voters. Historically, these patrons have been landed elites. The PML-N has allied with them, often giving them party tickets on which to contest elections, in exchange for their vote bank. In recent years, anti-Shia sectarian actors associated with violent nonstate armed groups have started to challenge the influence of these traditional elites in many electoral arenas. As these violent actors have gained local power, they have replaced traditional elites as patrons and electoral intermediaries for the PML-N. In exchange for their help getting local votes, the PML-N turns a “blind eye” to their violence, resulting in their further entrenchment and empowerment.

In this chapter, I show that existing theories of colonial legacies in South Asia cannot explain the full spatial variation of Maoist control in India. I engage with alternate explanations by Verghese (2016) and Iyer (2010) and show empirical and conceptual weaknesses in their arguments. Different types of colonial indirect rule created the ethnic inequalities and weak state capacity that are exploited by the Maoist rebels to foment insurgency and need to be included in the theoretical framework to explain this spatial variation. I develop a general theoretical framework of how colonial indirect rule can create opportunity structures in the form of weak state, ethnic mobilization networks in the form of excluded ethnic groups with grievances, and how these structural conditions are then exploited by rebel leaders who provide ideological frames of rebellion to start and sustain rebellion. While none of these conditions is sufficient to produce rebellion, rebel agency in the form of ideological frames in conjunction with such opportunity structures and ethnic networks is a jointly sufficient condition to explain insurgency. My theory conceptualizes rebellion as part of a long-term process of state formation unlike the current myopic frameworks of civil war theory.