Primordial parting

The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan

by Aitzaz Ahsan

Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1996

413 pages

There has been a school of Pakistani writers which has held that the partition of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan had more to do with the inability of two different civilisations to co-exist than with the religious incompatibility of Hindus and Muslims. This belief is echoed by Aitzaz Ahsan in The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan when he writes: "The essential differences between Indus and India are civilisational and cultural. These differences (are) deep-rooted, primordial and many. To restrict the differences merely to those of religion is to refuse to comprehend the issue. Fundamentalists on both sides of the border are doing just that, and thereby exacerbating tensions and acrimony."

Mr Ahsan's book analyses the Indus and Indian civilisations to make the argument against those who believe that it is just a matter of time before Pakistan and India become one again. The writer contrasts what he calls the "Indus man" with his neighbour in what is present-day India. The beginnings of a separate culture in and around the Indus is traced all the way back to the Aryan invasion and slowly, as the centuries progress, a distinct civilisation evolves. The creation of Pakistan becomes a historical and cultural inevitability.

This view goes much beyond the standard Two-Nation Theory of Hindu-Muslim mutual exclusivity. Mr Ahsan posits that religion was not what led to Pakistan and that perhaps provides another outlook on the schism that appeared between East and West Pakistans within a year of independence and also puts in perspective the as yet-unresolved ethnic strife in Karachi.

Mr Ahsan uses his thesis to explain the failure of political government in Pakistan in the context of the influence of Indus civilisation. "From the anarchy of three long centuries he has learnt not to entertain—nor does he manifest—any great expectations of his rulers. The latter, therefore, have a field day. Dictatorships can subsist for long periods without great resistance." By the author's reckoning, rulers of the future will be like the rulers of the past and the ruled "have become dumb because they have witnessed executions and great brutality."