My name is Pakistan: I was an Arab yesterday, a Harappan today

Pakistan has suddenly fallen in love with its pre-Islamic past. The very civilisation it spent decades dismissing as an age of jahiliyyah — a dark era supposedly redeemed only by the arrival of Islam — is now being celebrated as Pakistan’s glorious heritage. While Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Takshashila and Gandhara have overnight become objects of national pride, Panini, Porus and Chanakya are suddenly being claimed as esteemed ancestors.

The obvious question is: what has changed? Has Pakistan suddenly become liberal? Has its ruling establishment undergone a civilisational awakening and finally reconciled itself with the land and history that predated Mohammed bin Qasim?

Truth is often stranger than fiction.

If anything, Pakistan today is more Islamised, more ideologically rigid and more radical than at any point in its history as a state. The military establishment remains the supreme arbiter of national identity, and Field Marshal Asim Munir has projected perhaps the most overtly ideological military leadership since General Zia-ul-Haq. This is the same establishment that continues to define Pakistan primarily through religion and perpetual hostility towards Bharat.

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Contradiction is not Pakistan’s weakness. It is its governing philosophy.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah lived like an English gentleman, drank alcohol, ate pork and smoked incessantly, yet he founded Pakistan whose political legitimacy increasingly rested on Islamic identity. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto cultivated the image of a socialist moderniser, but that did not stop him from constitutionally declaring Ahmadiyyas to be outside Islam and making Islam the state religion of the country. His daughter, Benazir Bhutto, became the darling of the ‘liberal’ West even as Pakistan emerged as the principal incubator of the Taliban.

Nawaz Sharif projected economic pragmatism while further institutionalising Islamic legislation, including blasphemy laws and the Shari’ah Bill. General Pervez Musharraf “did not blanch at whiskey, danced when the mood was upon him”, as Steve Coll writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars, yet remained convinced of the Taliban’s indispensability. Then there was Imran Khan, who blamed fahashi (vulgarity) for rape and sexual violence, while, according to his biographer Christopher Sandford, he frequented famous nightclubs in Britain and Australia and enjoyed courting women.

In Pakistan, the notions of personal liberalism and political Islam have long coexisted. If so, then why cannot the pre-Islamic past coexist with institutionalised jihadism?

For decades, Pakistan consciously severed itself from its own civilisational roots. Its official historical narrative effectively began in AD 712 with Mohammed bin Qasim’s conquest of Sindh. Everything before that was reduced to an uncomfortable prelude. The Indus Valley Civilisation was acknowledged archaeologically but rarely embraced without apology.

Takshashila attracted tourists but never stirred Pakistan’s national imagination. Panini and Chanakya stood in stark contrast to the official heroes of Pakistan — from Ghori to Ghazni.

Pakistan sought legitimacy through an imported historical imagination stretching westwards to Arabia rather than eastwards towards the civilisation that had flourished on its own soil. As VS Naipaul observed in Beyond Belief, for a Pakistani, “his land was of no religious or historical importance; its relics are of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred”.

This explains why Pakistan can now celebrate its pre-Islamic past while continuing to describe Mohammed bin Qasim as the country’s “first official citizen”. Pakistani author Nadeem Farooq Paracha writes in Points of Entry: “Even though allusions to Qasim being the ‘first Pakistani’ can be found in various publications after 1953, he was first officially adopted as the ‘first citizen of Pakistan’ in Fifty Years of Pakistan published by the Federal Bureau of Pakistan in 1998.”

Ironically, it was the supposedly ‘liberal’ Nawaz Sharif who presided over this official endorsement of Qasim in 1998. Twenty-eight years later, under his brother Shehbaz Sharif, Pakistan is reclaiming its pre-Qasim past.

The reason is not ideological moderation, but geopolitical utility. For Pakistan, Harappa has become both a diplomatic asset and an economic resource. Ancient civilisation attracts tourists. It secures UNESCO funding. It strengthens cultural diplomacy. Above all, it lends international legitimacy while softening Pakistan’s global image. A country associated with terrorism suddenly becomes the custodian of one of humanity’s oldest urban civilisations. No public relations campaign could achieve such a transformation.

More revealing still is the enthusiasm with which Western governments have embraced this narrative. Australia and Britain have both announced support for what they describe as Pakistan’s cultural heritage. On 19 June, Australian High Commissioner to Pakistan Timothy Kane visited Takshashila, describing it as part of Pakistan’s “rich heritage”. Five days later, British High Commissioner Jane Marriott announced heritage funding through the UK’s Cultural Protection Fund, declaring: “Pakistan’s cultural heritage is extraordinary and worth protecting!”

On the surface, this appears noble and admirable. Ancient heritage deserves preservation wherever it exists. But geopolitics is rarely that innocent.

The West has long understood that civilisations are strategic assets. Control the historical narrative and you influence political legitimacy. If Pakistan becomes internationally recognised as the principal inheritor of the Indus Civilisation, Bharat’s own civilisational claims inevitably become diluted.

It is, therefore, hardly accidental that Sir Mortimer Wheeler published Five Thousand Years of Pakistan in 1950. Nor is it surprising that Western institutions routinely portray Bharat as a flawed democracy, with the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute classifying it as an “electoral autocracy”. Bharat has often been presented as both a flawed democracy and a flawed civilisation. Pakistan, by contrast, long enjoyed Western patronage despite serving as the factory of global jihad.

Pakistan’s attempt to appropriate Bharat’s civilisational inheritance — with considerable encouragement from sections of the West — thus has a deeper politico-strategic purpose. A recent article in Pakistan’s leading English daily Dawn by Majid Sheikh illustrates this perfectly. Sheikh argues that Harappa was fundamentally “Pakistani”, while Vedic civilisation belonged exclusively to Bharat. Employing a familiar Marxist historiographical framework, he writes: “The invading Vedic Aryans worshipped the ‘cow’ reflecting their rural disposition. The Indus Valley folk venerated the ‘Bull’ as can be seen from so many artifacts discovered over time.”

He further claims that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation “looked down upon ‘cow worship’”, using this argument to suggest that contemporary Pakistan’s treatment of cow reflects indigenous culture rather than Islamic practice. Yet no such cow-versus-bull distinction exists in the Vedas. The Rig Veda repeatedly describes both Indra and Agni as “the bull”. Similar imagery appears throughout the Mahabharata and the Puranas.

Sheikh’s political agenda becomes even clearer when he invokes the familiar North-South divide in Bharat — a colonial-Marxist construct now appropriated by sections of missionary and Dravidian politics. He places Pakistan and southern Bharat together against the alleged hegemony of the Aryan north, arguing that Dravidians originally inhabited Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan before being pushed southwards by Aryans. Thus, Pakistanis and Dravidians supposedly share a common historical cause.

Such arguments rest on the discredited Aryan invasion framework — a colonial construct later amplified by Marxist historiography.

More importantly, the Indus Valley Civilisation is no longer confined to the Indus. As historian Michel Danino writes in The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati, “at the time of the 1947 Partition, the known Harappan sites numbered about forty; with two exceptions, they were located in newly created Pakistan: more precisely, in Pakistan’s Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan”. He continues: “By 1960, the number of these sites had reached about 100; to 800 in 1979; and 1,400 in 1984. In 1999, the US archaeologist Gregory Possehl, who has excavated Harappan sites and wrote prolifically on the Indus civilisation, published a gazetteer of about 2,600 sites. A more recent list adds up to over 3,700, and hardly a week or month goes by without some new settlement being reported.”

Danino further notes: “If we limit ourselves to the mature phase, Baluchistan has 129 sites against 108 in Sind, where Mohenjo-daro is located. Gujarat has 300, while the Sarasvati basin has 360.”

Today, the largest known Harappan site is Rakhigarhi in Bharat, while hundreds of mature Harappan sites are distributed across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab. Many scholars therefore increasingly refer to it as the Indus-Saraswati Civilisation or just the Saraswati Civilisation.

To separate Harappa and Mohenjo-daro from Rakhigarhi and Lothal, therefore, is historically untenable. Equally untenable is the claim that the Harappans and Vedic people represented two mutually exclusive civilisations. Such assertions owe more to contemporary politics than to historical evidence.

Pakistan’s newest identity should, therefore, be recognised for what it is: not a rediscovery but a rebranding exercise. Yesterday, Harappa represented jahiliyyah. Today, it symbolises cultural renaissance. Yesterday, Pakistan claimed descent from Arabia. Today, it claims descent from Mohenjo-daro. Tomorrow, if strategic interests demand it, another identity may emerge. For Pakistan’s ruling establishment, identity is not sacred. It is transactional.

New Delhi cannot afford to dismiss this as harmless symbolism. Civilisations, after all, are not defeated only on battlefields. They are also defeated in museums, university departments, school textbooks, international conferences and, more importantly, UNESCO dossiers. Lose the narrative, and future generations inherit someone else’s history. It must, therefore, engage this debate through rigorous scholarship, archaeological research and confident civilisational storytelling. If it does not tell its own story, others will tell it instead — and not necessarily truthfully.

As for Pakistan, it is not the first time it has changed its costumes. It has done this before and will do so in future as well. For the time being, however, let’s enjoy the latest show being organised by Islamabad with the West’s generous support: ‘My Name Is Pakistan: I Was an Arab Yesterday, I Am a Harappan Today.’

(The writer is the author of ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ and ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)