New Delhi, July 30 -- For most of the last decade, if you wanted to find someone in Pakistan arguing that the country should stop pretending its history began in 712 AD with Muhammad Bin Qasim, you had to go looking for a handful of newspaper columnists and one out-of-print academic book. Today you can just watch a cabinet press conference. Government ministers now talk about the Indus, about Harappa, even about Sanskrit, with a comfort that would have been unthinkable in Pakistani public life twenty years ago. The question worth asking isn't whether this shift is real. It's why it took a water dispute to produce it.
The complaint itself is not new. Pakistan has had its own internal critics of historical amnesia for decades - they were simply never in government.
In 1993, the historian K.K. Aziz published a book that went through 66 Pakistani textbooks line by line and concluded that what students were being taught wasn't history at all, but what he called national mythology dressed up as fact. His argument wasn't that Pakistani history was too critical of the state. It was that there was barely any real history in it - that the pre-Islamic past, including the civilisation that gave the country its name, had simply been edited out because it didn't serve the story the state wanted to tell about itself. The book sold poorly, was never adopted into curriculum reform, and Aziz himself reportedly said he'd written it for posterity rather than for his own moment. He wasn't wrong to hedge his expectations. Nothing changed.
The columnist Nadeem Paracha picked up the same thread years later, tracing how the Zia-era curriculum didn't just neglect the Indus Valley but actively relocated Pakistani identity's point of origin to Arabia - a move critics at the time called an attempt to Arabise a population that had, inconveniently, mostly descended from people who were neither Arab nor originally Muslim. The physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy made a related argument from a different angle: that replacing a broad History curriculum with an ideologically narrower "Pakistan Studies" didn't just distort the past, it trained a generation out of the habit of questioning anything at all.
None of these were fringe cranks. They were a historian, a widely read columnist, and a physicist with an international reputation. And none of them moved the needle, because the problem was never a lack of scholarship. It was that no government had a reason to listen.
When India suspended its participation in the treaty following the 2025 Pahalgam attack, Pakistan suddenly needed a version of the Indus that belonged to it - not just as a river system it depends on for agriculture, but as a civilisational claim, something older and more legitimate-sounding than a bureaucratic water-sharing agreement. Around the same time, officials who would once have avoided the subject started talking openly about Hindu ancestry and pre-Islamic heritage. A defence minister acknowledging that most Pakistani Muslims descend from Hindu converts. An information minister calling the nation children of the Indus. A tourism budget for restoring Taxila and Harappa that didn't exist a few governments ago.
Layer onto that the country's harder problem: a reputation, fairly or not, tied to instability and extremism, and very little in the international press to counterbalance it. An ancient civilisation is good material for a rebrand. It photographs well. It gives visiting diplomats something to admire besides a security briefing. None of this makes the archaeology less real - Mohenjo-daro is still one of the most significant Bronze Age sites on earth, regardless of who's currently using it to make a point. But it does mean the heritage is being reached for now because it's useful, not because the argument Aziz was making thirty years ago finally landed.
There's a version of this that would be straightforwardly good news: a country finally making peace with the full span of its own past, teaching it honestly, funding its preservation because the past is worth preserving rather than because it's worth marketing. That would be the vindication Aziz, Paracha and Hoodbhoy were arguing for all along.
But a heritage ministry restoring ruins and a Pakistan Studies curriculum that still begins its story with the arrival of Islam are not the same government decision, even when they're made by the same government. Nothing about the current tourism push requires Islamabad to revisit what children are actually taught in school, and so far nothing suggests it has. You can fund the excavation of Harappa and still teach a version of national history in which Harappa barely exists as anything more than dirt beneath the flag. The site gets a budget line. The story stays the same.
That gap is the actual test of whether anything has shifted. Not whether officials can name-drop the Indus Valley Civilisation in a press conference - that's cheap, and increasingly it's obviously strategic. The test is whether the textbooks Aziz spent a career cataloguing ever get rewritten to include the fifty centuries of history that came before the seventh. Whether "Pakistan Studies" gives any ground back to something closer to just "history." Whether a state that spent decades building an identity in opposition to its own pre-Islamic past can hold both stories at once - the Indus civilisation and the founding ideology - without one having to quietly cancel out the other.
Owning a ruin is a matter of geography. Owning a past is a matter of what you're willing to teach your own children about where they came from. Pakistan has, for the moment, worked out how to do the first. Nobody serious is claiming it's worked out the second - including, if their earlier writing is any guide, the very Pakistani writers who first noticed the problem.
Civilisations are not public relations campaigns. They cannot be invoked only when they enhance a nation's international image and quietly ignored when they complicate its founding narrative. If Pakistan truly wishes to reclaim Panini, Harappa and the Indus as part of its inheritance, the real test lies not in speeches abroad but in classrooms at home. Heritage earns legitimacy not by being displayed before foreign audiences, but by being honestly taught to one's own children.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is a Member Secretary of IGNCA
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.