SOCIAL SCIENTIST benevolence and protection of the Emperor should be equally extended to all the subjects without making any distinction on the basis of religion or race." Such a concept left little scope for the operation of the Shari'a. The Mughals might have been oppressive, but they contributed to the formation of the idea of India. Making the "Indo-Europeans and other Aryan people" migrants from India, indeed from the banks of the "Saraswati", appropriating the Indus civilisation for the "Aryans" by renaming it the "Saraswati civilisation", and, towards this end, pushing the date of the Rigveda back to the early Holocene period, has been one of the long-standing projects of the Hindutva groups. A recent attempt to identify a horse in the Harappa seals to prove the Aryan origin of the Harappa culture was part of the same project and was shown up for what it was, a crude dissimulation. Social Scientist has made every effort to keep its readers informed about these issues, and has accordingly published several pieces in this area in past numbers. Irfan Habib's paper belongs to this genre. It is a detailed and painstaking effort to follow the course of the "mighty Saraswati river" which no longer exists, and reaches the conclusion that it never existed. It follows that "all claims built upon the greatness of the River Saraswati are nothing but castles in the air." Finally, Malini Bhattacharya's note discusses the case of the Vrindavan widows to reach a wider conclusion, namely the sharp distinction drawn by the "anti-secularist" critics of communalism, between "religion as faith" and "religion as ideology", lacks substance: "religion as faith" provides the social substratum out of which "religion as ideology" emerges.