A country does not usually discover a new name on social media. Yet for the last few days, a suggestion by Pakistani history communicator Faisal Warraich turned into something larger than a branding exercise. Warraich proposed that Pakistan consider “Indus” as an alternative civilisational name – not necessarily a replacement for Pakistan, but a way of acknowledging that the country’s story did not begin in 1947.

The idea travelled because it touched a nerve. “Islamic Republic of Indus” appeared in posts, memes and arguments. Some treated it as a playful thought experiment. Others heard in it an overdue recovery of a past that official history had often compressed into the arrival of Islam, the Pakistan movement and Partition. Critics, especially in India, saw an attempt to appropriate a civilisation that spread across much of north-western South Asia.

By Kanwal Sibal’s logic, postcolonial borders would sever every new nation from the civilisations that preceded it.South Asians & Diaspora

By Kanwal Sibal’s logic, postcolonial borders would sever every new nation from the civilisations that preceded it.

Then Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. gave the debate a different centre of gravity:

“Very much loving the new Islamic Republic of Indus trend on Pakistani twitter. The Indus has always been the backbone and single unifier of Pakistan. Hopefully this will reverse the damage that has been done to our lion river and restore its delta. If Indus is Pakistan’s backbone, its delta is our very foundation.”

The most consequential sentence in that post was not about renaming the state. It was about restoring the river.

The argument is easy to trivialise as a contest over who “owns” the Indus Valley Civilisation. It becomes more serious when framed as a question of inheritance. What does a modern country inherit from the territory within its borders? Does a change of religion cancel earlier history? And does the birth date of a state determine the age of the memory it may claim?

The Indus debate is therefore not only about Pakistan’s past. It is about the kind of nation Pakistan wishes to become. The anxieties surrounding Pakistan’s embrace of the Indus and its cultural roots surfaced with unusual........

© Daily Times