I am for one enjoying this tamasha from day one. Their claims and counter claims mean nothing in evolutionary milestone. Just by hijacking their ancestry they will not be able to plug all the holes.
I think we are totally failing to get the point.
In my personal opinion, which is shared, incidentally, by many Pakistani liberals, Jinnah set out to create a reserved homeland which would be a Muslim-majority preserve. He landed up with a partitioned country, an outcome that he may have had in mind from the outset, but had not considered to be his only option. In this, whatever the constitutional form the new entity took, his basic premise, repeated from time to time, seems to have been that no law would
clash with the fundamental principles of Islam - a very far cry from a commitment to an Islamic state.
Unfortunately, it is all too easy to slide under the table without the support of a strong figure of authority. Liaqat Ali Khan was not a strong figure. The slide started with him, with the passing of the Objectives Resolution, and continued.
At the same time, the quest for an identity other than Islamic has been a part of Pakistan's cultural life from the outset. One of the strongest inputs came with Aitzaz Ahsan's articulation of a separate cultural entity on the banks of the Indus, in his book the Indus Saga And The Making of Pakistan.
I want to reproduce an excerpt on the Book out of "The London TIMES' LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: LONDON (August 8, 1997) "Indus man's resistance" : The question of Pakistani identity is fraught with paradoxes and ambiguities. Unlike its nearest neighbours - most notably India, Iran and China - it has no grand narrative of cultural heritage; created to serve a historical and political need, it has continuously to invent, and reinvent, its own story. Is Pakistan a religious state, or an ideological construct? Does it, in spite of their much-articulated difference of religious identities (which have come to be seen as ethnicities), owe its cultural heritage entirely to India, of which it is often considered an amputated limb? Or, in the rising tide of fanaticism that threatens to engulf some of its Muslim neighbours, is it fulfilling a long-neglected agenda of returning to spiritual roots in the Arab or Middle Eastern world? These questions are addressed, with a dense and often bewildering proliferation of detail, by Aitzaz Ahsan in The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan. Ahsan is a lawyer, which makes the breadth of his historical, sociological and cultural research all the more impressive.
It is this quest that we are witnessing in this thread and in others, and that makes them hold out doggedly for a complete and unalloyed link with the IVC, however opposed to the facts that might be. It behoves us to enter into any discussion on this topic with sensitivity and a delicate touch (would that I followed my own advice at all times!).
Perhaps this thread too calls for a great deal of generosity when considering not only the arguments, but also the tactics accompanying the presentation of these arguments.
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