Children of the Indus
In an exclusive interview for The Friday Times, lawyer and veteran political activist Aitzaz Ahsan talks to Ziyad Faisal about the experiences and methods which formed the basis for his well-known theory of the Indus people and Pakistani history.
Arrested, yet again
How has your theory of the Indus identity been shaped by your personal experiences?
I think it was substantially shaped by my personal experiences: in the sense that what impressed me most since my childhood – and later agitated me most when I found that we were depriving ourselves of it – was the plurality of this society. The social fabric of Pakistan, despite Partition, was so magnificently plural. We had with us Hindu students and Christian students. There were, alas, no Sikh classmates but there were elders who remembered the Sikhs quite fondly. There were relatives among the Sikhs on the other side of the border. And the plurality gradually began to dwindle, culminating in Zia-ul-Haq’s policies. We had very large and very vibrant Christian and Parsi communities in Lahore, but they were leaving the country by the 1980s.
An interesting incident which hit me was a conversation with the mother of an English friend, during my first year at Cambridge. I had gone to stay with them for a long weekend, and the first time I met her, over dinner, Auntie Beatrice asked me where I was from. I told her I was from Pakistan. She asked where Pakistan is located: you must remember that this was 1965, and not as many people abroad knew about Pakistan as they do today. I told her Pakistan was north-west of India. She remarked “Oh, you are the ones who broke away from India!” and I confirmed it. She asked why we felt the need to break away. I told her it was because we were not Indians. So she asked “Very well, you aren’t Indians. So then, what are you?” to which I replied that we are Muslims. She then asked if there were no Muslims in India, and I told here that there were indeed many Muslims there. She asked “Are they Pakistani?” to which I replied in the negative. She asked if the Arabs are Muslims, to which I replied “Yes”. The friendly, cajoling cross-examination went on, and she asked if the Arabs are Pakistanis. I clarified that Arabs and Pakistanis are not the same people.
At this point she asked me a question which continued to haunt me ever since: “We have established that you are Muslims, but neither Indian nor Arab. So what are you?”
Later in Zia’s time, when the minorities of Pakistan came under greater threat and doctrines of exclusivity were legislated, I found myself serving long tenures in jail as a political prisoner. It was there that I had the luxury of time and reflection. I began to reflect on who I was, and what my identity was. If we were Indian, why had we parted ways with India? If I was not Indian, then what was I? I came to a conclusion which was substantiated by my readings: the bibliography of The Indus Saga will testify to the research I carried out. I came to the conclusion that rivers, throughout time, have sired and sustained civilisations. So if the Indus goes on a path different from the Ganges and its tributaries, then the Indus and the Ganges valleys will sire and sustain different civilizations. Peninsular India will be distinct due to its own rivers too. That is where it clicked: I felt a sense of self-confidence. I knew that I was thinking in the right direction, and I just had to discover and unravel the truth and evidence for it. The more I reflected on it, and the more I read, the more evidence I got, so as to be able to write The Indus Saga.
It is therefore a quest to discover the identity of the Indus person – and mine own.
Aitzaz Ahsan with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1976
What sort of conditions were you held in during imprisonment? Were these conditions conducive to reflection and study?
In prison I was sometimes in solitary confinement, which was bad. Sometimes I had very good company: very elegant and generous political prisoners. We are speaking of the elite among political prisoners, such as the late Syed Muhammad Kaswar Gardezi, the late Abdullah Malik, Mian Mahmood Ali Kasuri, Dr Mubashar Hassan and IA Rehman.
I always had access to books. Interestingly, every prisoner was allowed two books a fortnight. I used to distribute cartons of K2 cigarettes in exchange for fellow prisoners’ signatures: requesting books which I needed. We were allowed any volume, as long as it did not refer to the contemporary political situation in a militarised Pakistan. So they were very generous in allowing us access to books from the pre-1947 era. I still have with me many books that I carried with me through jail. I had bookshelves in my cell. So I was able to do a lot of reading and research during my time in jail.
So perhaps you can relate to Nehru’s experience in jail? He too found himself and his people while he was in a colonial jail.
Well, rather ambitiously (and perhaps not without a certain degree of vanity), I choose in the very preface of my book to enter into a contest with Jawaharlal Nehru. He believed in the oneness of India – the Akhund Bharat. For him, Bharat was one from Kabul to Cape Comorin and from Assam to Balochistan. Defined by the mountains and the ocean, this subcontinent was one unit to Nehru, as it was to Vivekananda and even to others, going back to ancient times. Even the epic Mahabharata talks of India as one from Kashgar to Ceylon.
So you could not find yourself in this grand vision of history, which sees India as a very broad region incorporating within itself so many ethnicities and religious groups?
No, I have a more territorial concept of such matters, which I consider a more realistic vision of history. But what I was contesting was also a certain dogmatic foundation of history, one which saw Pakistan being created the day the first Indian became a Muslim. I found a more solid basis for Pakistan as having originated in ancient history, rather than the time of Muhammad bin Qasim. I felt it was essential to give a certain degree of confidence to my generation and coming ones: that Pakistan was a stable entity whose roots pre-date religious conversions. Its rivers had nurtured a pluralistic polity since time immemorial, and this was distinct from the Indian polity.
Aitzaz Ahsan in the Senate, 1998
Are there any particular historians and schools of historiography that most influenced your own view of history?
Marx as a historiographer was very important to me, apart from being a social scientist or a so-called prophet of future economic developments. His dialectical conception of history, derived from Hegel, became a tool for me to discern our own history. To that extent, the Marxist method, but not the argument, is the one that I employ.
But there was a diverse array of historians and political analysts that helped me come to my conclusions. There was Sibt e Hassan, in “Maazi ke Mazaar” and “Moosa se Marx tak”. Romila Thapar is a very objective historian. There is DD Kosambi, who was basically a mathematician, but gave very perceptive analyses of ancient history based on the Marxist method. From Professors Ahmed Hassan Dani, Mubarik Ali and K.K.Aziz I obtained clarity of thought.
Graduation at Cambridge in 1967
The dialectical method has been a heavy influence for me. But while using this method, I read a lot. And most of what I read was not by Marxist historians. Perhaps 90 percent of what I read was not by Marxist historians. So I used a tool of analysis, but the facts I collected and the realities I wrote about were substantiated not necessarily by Marxist historians.
Is The Indus Saga more of a response to our own flawed historiography or to mainstream Indian historiography?
Initially it was more a response to fundamentalist visions of history within Pakistan. But I had to confront, obviously, the other perspective too. I saw the concept of a Maha Bharat as being false too. When The Indus Saga came out in 1996, it also entered the Indian market, but was exported there from here in Pakistan. It became controversial there, as Indian scholars began to write against it, except Khushwant Singh and Subhas Chakraborty. Many wrote against me, flogging me for the sacrilege of providing a basis for the division of “Mother India”. They asked things such as “If Pakistan’s creation was justified, then why did Bengal break away?” but for me it merely substantiated my territorial theory. For me, it is territories which make states and polities, not dogmas. Bengal had a different history, a different territory and consequently a different civilisation, no less distinct from us than Turks or Indonesians. Happily we are all Muslims, but culturally and civilisationally different.
Bushra Aitzaz during the struggle against the Zia dictatorship
Could this have been an oversight also on the part of the founders of Pakistan, perhaps?
In the enthusiasm of the Pakistan movement, during that short span of history, religion was the foremost impetus and emotion for very many people. But in the long span from prehistory to post-modernity, when you look at history as an extended continuum, then you find that territoriality and rivers define civilisations.
When I speak of the Indus civilisation, I do not refer merely to Mohenjodaro and Harrappa – that is a dated conception. For me, the Indus civilisation has been a polity distinct from India in a continuum from the earliest times until today.
With Benazir Bhutto in 1990
How do you view contestations of Pakistani identity from within Pakistan? How do you reconcile Pashtun, Sindhi, Baloch and other competing nationalisms with your conception of Pakistani identity?
These are all, for me, sub-nationalities within the Indus people. They are distinct and this is important, but they create a weave of plurality and diversity. A nationality does not necessarily have to be based on absolute uniformity. These different shades weave into each other gradually: Sindhi to Seraiki to Punjabi to Potwari to Pashto, or Sindhi to Balochi and Brahwi – these are all layers of the Indus people.
Going back to ancient history, you see that the Vedas were written in the Indus region. If you take, for instance, the Rig-Veda and compare it to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and you will see some crucial differences. The gods are different, the men are different, the culture is different and the attitudes are different.
The Indus attitude is one of brash impetuosity: coming to conclusions before having properly reasoned them out. This is a national characteristic which continues in us to this day.
The man of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana is reflective. The very discourse in the Gita is a discussion between a god and a warrior on why a war must be fought, what a just war is. The man has to be convinced with logic and reason to go into that war.
The Vedic man is boisterous and consumerist. The Gangetic man is frugal. You can see the distinction between the Indus person and the Indian person stretching far back into history, reflected in the epic myths themselves.
If the Indus people can be so clearly defined based on geography, as you have attempted to, then why is it that a rejection of Indian-ness is still so integral to Pakistani nationalism and identity?
The point at which this rejection of the Indian identity should have been most extreme in us was the decade immediately after Partition, a process marked by rioting, killing and mayhem. And yet, this was the decade-and-a-half which was a time of the most comfortable relations between India and Pakistan. That is the time when Indian movies used to play easily in Pakistan. Pakistani pehelwans and cricketers competed in India. We signed the Indus Water Treaty. The “un-Indian-ness” was not so necessary, and there was a great degree of comfort between the two countries.
The circumstances which changed all this came with the military take-over in 1958. Armies, particularly since the emergence of democratic systems, have had no political, moral or constitutional right to take over. They have to create or craft their legitimacy once in power. The only thing they can do is to base the tenuous legitimacy of their rule on perceived threats to national security. Now this implies two things.
With Benazir Bhutto in court, 1997
First, you have to convert the state (from whatever it is) into a national-security state, to justify military rule. In Pakistan, we had the conceptual basis for a social welfare state until the military take-over of 1958. After that, we began to move towards a national-security paradigm.
Second, when you start justifying yourself on a need for national security, then you have to also find an enemy.
So you feel that this threat has been more manufactured than existential?
Now it is established that we went to war in 1965. That was the impulsion of the national security establishment. Drumbeats of war began, with “Crush India” stickers on cars, patriotic songs like “Ay puttar hattaan tey naen vikde” enchanted and enthused us with great nationalistic fervour.
Whatever we won or lost in that war, one thing is clear: we did not gain the objective for which Ayub Khan had gone into war, i.e. to liberate Indian Occupied Kashmir. We simply stood where we stood. We managed to save Lahore. Without a doubt, the soldiers fought bravely, for instance Major Aziz Bhatti, an icon in military history. But our higher military command, including Field Marshal Ayub Khan, had started the war to achieve a certain objective. Did we fulfil it? The answer is “No”.
Do you feel it is tragic that when one questions the mainstream narrative of Pakistani history, one’s loyalty to Pakistan is called into question, especially these days?
Yes, it is tragic. The official narrative is narrow and exclusive. The hardcore, official narrative cannot be sold to a member of a minority religious group of Pakistanis. You start by saying that the state is governed by (or partial towards) a particular religion. The moment you start with that, you negate completely what Barrister Jinnah, the Quaid e Azam, had said in his address to the Constituent Assembly on the 11th of August, 1947. He had said that your religion has nothing to do with the business of the state.
And now, based on the constitution, your President has to be Muslim. The 18th amendment to the Constitution, for all its positive aspects in terms of devolution of power and provincial autonomy, has also added the stipulation that the Prime Minister must be Muslim. With this, you are excluding the children of lesser gods from aspiring to the highest offices.
In this sense our official narrative is narrow and exclusivist. You begin to view society not as a diverse, interwoven fabric, but as a single weave. Tensions within one weave are inevitable.
So you have a doctrine or narrative that Islam and Muslims will have a preferred status, contrary to the Quaid’s exhortations. People like to bring up various things he said, but his most important speech was that of the 11th of August, 1947. This was where he laid out the Grundnorm for Pakistan. Had the Quaid lived, and had he had the opportunity to pilot a constitution through the Constituent Assembly, his co-pilot and author would have been a Hindu – Jogendra Nath Mandal, the law minister. The Quaid’s foreign minister belonged to a community which we have declared non-Muslims since, the Ahmadis.
The Quaid had the concept of a pluralistic Pakistan: a state which will not go into the question of the religion of individuals. By adopting discriminatory laws and practices we have negated the idea that every citizen is a son or daughter of this state. If there was ever an “ideology of Pakistan”, it was laid out in the Quaid’s speech to the Constituent Assembly.
In 1971, the concocted “ideology of Pakistan” properly emerged as the mullahs (as represented by elements such as the Badr and Shams brigades) and the military came onto the same page. As a consequence of the 1971 war, we lost East Pakistan.
In the Zia-ul-Haq era, we became an essential piece of a jigsaw puzzle of global conflict. We became the piece of the puzzle where the Soviet Union met with a resistance which, while fierce and passionate, was well-oiled with Saudi and American assistance. It was here that the initial betrothal between mullahs and military became a proper union. The jihadis became an arm of the Western world and then of the Pakistani state.
As a stalwart of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), how do you view the party’s historical role? How far did Bhutto’s discourse appeal to you?
Bhutto took nationalism to a great height. He became the acclaimed hero emerging from the period after the 1965 war. He inspired the youth with his speeches, and I was among those influenced by him. There were multiple dimensions to his charisma. One of these was, of course, anti-Indian sentiment. Another was his anti-imperialism. And then there was, of course, his socialism.
We found this heady discourse very inspiring. We saw ourselves as leftists.
Even in my letter to Yahya Khan, refusing to join the civil service after having qualified for it, I wrote that I was not prepared to serve a military government. I wrote that I would not jeopardise my talent and integrity by serving such a regime.
Had Bhutto been a Jamaat-e-Islami nationalist, he would not have attracted me. But Bhutto was a combination of many things. His vision was of a more open society, where the disadvantaged, such as minorities and women, would see a change in their status. This is what we aspired to.
Were you able to reconcile the anti-Indian sentiment with your pluralistic vision of history and the Indus identity?
I was young at that time. I was nineteen years old during the 1965 war, so I was certainly gripped by the nationalistic fervour prevalent at that time. We went to forward defense positions as young people. We dug trenches and hailed the soldiers. It was a time which did enrich me in a way. As Wordsworth says,
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”
We saw ourselves as defending our territory and heritage. Bhutto emerged as a man who was not prepared to buckle even at Tashkent.
Did you ever feel the need to re-assess your youthful view of Bhutto and what he represented, perhaps in light of your later understanding of a more pluralistic heritage?
Yes, but Bhutto was succeeded by another very charismatic person: his daughter. She truly embraced plurality and diversity. She was a much softer incarnation of Bhutto’s thought, more in tune with my own inclinations. My own PPP was formed more in opposition to the military-fundamentalist regime of Zia-ul-Haq.
Ziyad Faisal is based in Lahore. He may be reached at
ziyadfaisal@gmail.com
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