54 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Indus and the Sarasvati and 'perhaps more of the latter' .3 Since he habitually thinks in terms of India vs Pakistan and Sarasvati vs Indus, he unduly emphasises that there are 700 Harappan sites on the Sarasvati as compared to 100 sites on the Indus and, on this basis, seeks to rename the civilisation. The factitiousness of such a comparison, however, becomes evident if one takes into account other aspects of the problem. The Sarasvati is identified with Ghaggar in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan and with Hakra in Pakistan beyond the Indian frontier and the Hakra-Ghaggar is a tributary of the Indus. None of the major Harappan sites like Harappa, Mohenjodaro and Dholavira is located on the Hakra or Ghaggar. According to R.C. Thakran, who has conducted extensive surveys in Haryana and the neighbouring areas, there is no evidence of Harappan culture in Ambala and Sirsa districts where the Ghaggar is an important river.4 Similar exercise undertaken by M. Rafique Mughal attests to the existence of much larger number of mature Harappan sites and strikingly smaller number of late/or post-Harappan sites in the Cholistan desert (Bahawalpur) in Pakistan. Thus far more urban sites appear on the Pakistani Sarasvati than on the Indian Sarasvati.5 But the effort to rename the civilisation of the Indus valley after the lost and elusive Vedic Sarasvati is going on unabated so as to establish the superiority of the Sarasvati over the Indus and is thus adding a communal dimension to the Harappan and Vedic studies as also to the history of the Punjab.6 All this, of course, has the blessings of B.B. Lal, who is responsible for giving a distinctly right-wing shift to Indian archaeology.7 The situation unmistakably reminds us of the political abuse of archaeology in Nazi Germany where Hitler and his National Socialist Party' s ideologue Alfred Rosenberg drew much inspiration from the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna who laid the foundations of an ethnocentric German prehistory.8 An extremely ugly face of communalism is also seen in the ongoing unsavoury controversy centring round what has been described as 'forced* mass religious conversions. The Hindutva forces, in their bid to aggravate religious conflicts in the country, argue that Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam and Christianity in the past and therefore they have to be reconverted so as to take them back into the Hindu fold. But such an assertion has no basis in our history. There is, for example, hardly any evidence to suggest that the early Aryans who came to the north western India and subsequently moved eastwards forcibly imposed Vedic religious practices on the autochthonous elements even