Somewhere in the record of the India-Pakistan negotiations of the early 1970s sits a small scene that S.D. Muni recalls in his autobiography, and it deserves to be better known.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Larkana landlord whose family estates lay a short drive from the mounds of Mohenjo-daro, was showing P.N. Haksar relics of the Indus Valley Civilisation, presenting them with evident pride as the antiquities of his land.

Haksar, Indira Gandhi's principal secretary and the sharpest mind on the Indian side of the table, asked the obvious question: if we are inheritors of the same ancient civilisation, five thousand years old and indifferent to Radcliffe's pencil, why do you keep up this talk of a thousand-year war with India? Bhutto, after all, was the man who had stood in the Security Council in September 1965 and vowed that Pakistan would fight India for a thousand years.

He had no real answer then. Pakistan has no real answer now, and the question has become newly urgent, because half a century later Islamabad's ministers have suddenly discovered that they are, in the words of Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, the children of the Indus.

An identity built for a purpose

The discovery is not innocent, and to see why one has to ask what work identity does for the Pakistani state. Pakistan was not carved out of a pre-existing nation; the nation had to be manufactured after the state arrived, and it was manufactured out of negation.

The two-nation theory held that Muslims and Hindus were separate peoples who could not share a polity, which meant the new state's legitimacy rested on being permanently and demonstrably not-India.

Official historiography therefore began the national story in 712 CE with Muhammad bin Qasim's landing in Sindh, cultivated genealogies pointing towards Arabia, Persia and Central Asia, and treated everything before the arrival of Islam as somebody else's past. K.K. Aziz called this the murder of history. Farzana Shaikh has made the deeper point that Pakistan never settled whether it was a homeland for Indian Muslims or an Islamic state, and that this unresolved question, not India, is the source of its chronic anxiety.

A state unsure of why it exists must keep producing reasons, and each strategic crisis produces a new one. The thousand-year war was one such reason. The Indus Valley Civilisation is the latest.

There has always been a small Pakistani literature straining in this direction, and its central text is Aitzaz Ahsan's The Indus Saga, published in 1996. Ahsan contended that the Indus basin had functioned as a distinct civilisational zone separate from Gangetic India for six millennia.

He argued that “Indus man” possessed a temperament and history fundamentally different from his Gangetic counterpart. Consequently, Partition merely reinstated an ancient boundary rather than creating a new one.

It is an elegant retrofit, and it collapses on the first serious question: who made Pakistan? Not Indus man. The demand for Pakistan was weakest where Pakistan was created and strongest where it was not. The movement's nursery was Aligarh, its constituency the Urdu-speaking ashraf and salariat of the United Provinces, its intellectual capitals Lucknow, Allahabad and Delhi, its architectural memory the Indo-Islamic cities of the doab, Agra and Faizabad among them.

These were men of the Gangetic plains, heirs of an empire whose monuments still stand on the banks of the Yamuna, and when their state came into being they crossed into the Indus valley as muhajirs and brought their language with them. Urdu, a Gangetic tongue of Delhi and Lucknow, was then imposed as the national language on the actual peoples of the Indus, over Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi and, fatally, Bengali.

The language martyrs of Dhaka in 1952 and the Sindhi rioters of 1972 were, on Ahsan's own logic, indigenous peoples resisting a transplanted Gangetic idiom.

His schema cannot digest the fact that the founders of the Indus state were Gangetic to the bone, because admitting it would concede that Pakistan was made by migration and ideology, not discovered in the soil.

How many buyers does Indus Man have?

The honest answer is: almost none, and those it has are the ones the state fears most. Within Pakistan the Indus Valley Civilisation has been the symbolic property of Sindhi sub-nationalism. G.M.

Syed built the imaginary of Sindhu Desh around Mohenjo-daro precisely because it predated and provincialised the Islamic state, and recast Raja Dahir, the Hindu king who fell to Muhammad bin Qasim in June 712, as the indigenous hero resisting an Arab invader.

For the establishment in Rawalpindi and Lahore, this made the Harappan past not an asset but a threat, which is why it stayed out of the textbooks for seven decades. The religious parties have no use for pre-Islamic jahiliyyaas national heritage.

The Punjabi mainstream was raised on the 712 CE origin story. Beyond a thin liberal intelligentsia and the Sindhi nationalists whose claim the centre is now quietly appropriating, there is no constituency in Pakistan for whom the seals and citadels of Mohenjo-daro carry any emotional charge. A national myth without believers is not a myth; it is a press release.

And the state itself cannot decide whether it believes. In April 2025, days before the Pahalgam massacre, Army Chief General Asim Munir told an overseas Pakistanis convention in Islamabad that Pakistanis differ from Hindus in every possible aspect of life, religion, customs, traditions, thought and ambition, urging parents to teach their children the two-nation theory, and called Kashmir Pakistan's jugular vein.

Within months, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif was conceding on record that the ancestors of most Pakistani Muslims were Hindus, Tarar was proclaiming the children of the Indus, and the National Defence University's think tank was publishing papers on the Indus as the civilisational spine of Pakistani identity.

These positions are not in tension; they are mutually annihilating. If Pakistanis are the children of the Indus and the descendants of converted Hindus, the ontological separateness on which 1940 rested dissolves, and Muhammad bin Qasim becomes the invader of the nation's forebears rather than its founding father.

If Munir is right, Harappa is somebody else's ruin. A state cannot venerate both the conqueror and the conquered as ancestors and expect anyone to salute.

The river behind the rhetoric

What resolves the puzzle is timing, and the timing points to water. India placed the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 in abeyance in April 2025, after Pahalgam, and it is only since then that Pakistan's leadership and strategic community have begun invoking Mohenjo-daro and Harappa while discussing the water dispute, in a deliberate effort to lift the question from a technical water-sharing arrangement to one of civilisational continuity: not merely that Pakistan needs the Indus, but that Pakistan was built around the Indus.

This is heritage as lawfare.  Pakistan’s case hinges on a treaty argument contested with hydrological data and legal texts, terrain on which its position is vulnerable.

 A civilisational argument, however, is fought with pathos and lacks the binding authority of an arbitration panel.  India’s position, in contrast, has been consistent and unassuming: blood and water simply cannot coexist and restoring the treaty requires Pakistan’s verifiable abandonment of cross-border terrorism. 

The pity is that the bill for this serial myth-making is never presented to the men who draft the myths. It is presented to the ordinary Pakistani, who has now been handed a fourth or fifth national origin story in a single lifetime. His grandparents were told in 1947 that they belonged to a nation defined by faith and consummated by hijra.

His parents were schooled under Ayub's curriculum boards and then Zia's Islamised textbooks, in which history began at 712 and the Hindu was the civilisational other.

He himself watched the army chief reaffirm all of this in April 2025, and then watched the defence minister of the same government tell him his ancestors were Hindus and the information minister tell him he is a child of a Bronze Age river civilisation his textbooks never mentioned.

Each revision was announced with equal certainty and served a strategic need rather than any truth about the people asked to believe it.  The failure of the first myth led to Bangladesh’s secession, while sectarian militancy flourished in the fertile ground of the second.

  A citizenry cannot be expected to reinvent its ancestors every time Rawalpindi’s threat perception changes. Haksar’s question to Bhutto remains pertinent and has sharpened: a state unable to explain the thousand-year war when claiming a separate civilisation struggles to do so now that it claims a shared one. 

Until Islamabad provides an answer, these relics remain on display rather than forming the nation’s foundations.

*Harsh Pandey is a PhD Candidate at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and a Life Member of the Delhi-based Centre for Peace Studies.