Let Cricket Inspire India and Pakistan

Karamatullah K Ghori
Mar 24, 2004

from its birth has been a gentlemen’s sport. The game was conceived more as a social pastime for the blue blooded in a leisurely English countryside ambience. Lush green fields, warm afternoons, a high tea were considered the essentials for gentlemen—and their fair maidens—to congregate, chat and try to make the best of being together. The emphasis was on cultivating social harmony and cordiality.

Modern has traveled a long way since those halcyon days. It’s now a highly competitive sport with raw emotions and sentiments having supplanted the ‘cool cucumber’ state of mind that was supposed to rule the game. Many believe that international is no longer a sport for the faint-hearted.

Politics, by its nature, is just the opposite of . Stalwarts of the of politics, old and new, are at one that it’s not a craft for gentlemen. Pandit Jawaharlal , a past master of the of politics, was one who firmly believed that it was a refuge of rogues and scoundrels. Mixing and politics is like mixing apples and oranges.

But - politics has been a mixed bag of oddities for so long that nothing comes as a surprise to it. This is a feature so common in where nothing can be taken for granted. Unsurprisingly for this oddball, therefore, has more often been the catalyst to thaw a freeze and a talisman to turn the fortunes for politicians.

diplomacy was the one that bailed and out of a tight corner, where they had painted themselves since General Ziaul Haq’s d’etat of July,1977. Ziaul Haq took the bold initiative, in the mid-80s, to to Rajasthan’s fabled ‘pink city’, Jaipur, to witness an - Test match. His daring melted a lot of snow from the peaks of the Himalayas and the Karakorams. and started talking to each other. Later Benazir Bhutto, in her first term as prime minister, was able to build on these foundations in conjunction with Rajiv . The two of them played almost a perfect innings, greatly reducing the tension between the two arch foes and fostering mutual understanding.

It goes to the credit of Benazir, if any credit is in order, that she laid to rest the ghost of abetting the Sikh uprising in that Ziaul Haq had blessed wholeheartedly. It was cavalier of Zia that while he pretended to go through the motions of patching things up with , he was, at the same time, fuelling the Sikh revolt against New .

However, the level playing field Benazir and Rajiv had developed with obvious dedication was queered by the incipient freedom movement in the Indian-occupied , inspired and instigated, no , by the success of the Afghan against the Soviets. ’s notoriously adventurous and ambitious prime intelligence agency, ISI, saw in the Kashmiri uprising the chance of a century to get even with . The ISI sleuths and their Bonaparte bosses had always callously held responsible for the truncation of and the birth of in , thus absolving themselves of all culpability for their crime of the century.

The inordinately long and acrimonious spell of hostility begun in 1989 coincided with the last official visit to by an Indian team. The dry spell has at last run out with the current visit by the Indian team, the first in 15 years. In all this period and played very little ; and whatever was played between them under tense and highly emotive ambience was in third country venues. Even the highly acclaimed and popular Sharjah series, which attracted immense crowds to every game between and , and received the highest accolades from the Cricketing world, couldn’t escape the guillotine. The ambers of hostility between the two giants of trashed that haven of , hopefully not for good.

Nawaz Sharif was a aficionado (played club with great enthusiasm) but surprisingly made little use of the panacea that his mentor, Ziaul Haq, had used so effectively. Nawaz also had little sense. A good Cricketer first takes a good look at the wicket he is expected to play on and fashions his game according to its twists and turns. Nawaz showed a reckless disregard of his known limitations and constraints. He was a civilian in a political culture that had become militarized since Ziaul Haq. He was not a free actor on the scene. To use a metaphor, he was like a batsman sent into play with one hand tied behind his back. He was a product of that very culture and was handpicked by the generals to serve their agenda. They were the ones calling the shots and wanted him to dance exactly to their tune.

As Nawaz decided to develop his own innings he ran into the barricade of the GHQ.

It was a bold move of Nawaz to invite Atal Bihari , his Indian counterpart, to in February, 1999, to what became known as the ‘bus diplomacy’. But that wasn’t on the cards of the generals. So they quickly called his bluff by mapping out the misadventure of Kargil behind his back. The rest, as they say, is history.

General Parvez Musharraf was the architect of the Kargil fiasco that nearly triggered another between the two old adversaries. However, it is he who is now being credited with turning a new leaf in relations with and seen to be closing the book on simmering hostility that defied any cooling of passions on both sides of the divide for so long.

General Musharraf’s new role as a conciliator with may seem odd given his past track record. However, it is not novel or unusual. Nixon was a principal Communist-baiter in U.S. but took the bold initiative to put an end to American hostility to and became the architect of U.S.- understanding. This happens quite regularly on the field; a player least expected to pull his team out of the doldrums becomes a match winner.

The ongoing series between the two South Asian countries is being seen as the opening gambit in the strategy to divert attention from politics, especially the radicalization of it. In the world of the schedule of tournaments is decided by the International Council ( ICC ). In this case the current phase of - rapprochement has the U.S. standing firmly behind it and coaxing both parties to carry on the path of reconciliation.

But like progress and a happy outcome in this contest of wills and wits will be contingent on both parties abiding by some rules, any infringement of which would render the whole undertaking a non-starter.

The first and foremost rule of is that neither side tries to arrange the other’s chessboard. It is unthinkable for a side to dictate who should be playing in the other team and who shouldn’t. In political parlance this translates into non-interference in others internal affairs. It is a golden rule that must never be violated. and would both serve themselves well, and in their region, by strictly adhering to the primacy of this rule.

A game of is invariably played with umpires monitoring every aspect of the play and making sure there are no breaches of the rules of the game. Latest innovations have also introduced a ‘third umpire’ and a match adjudicator into the game for absolute clarity and fairness.

and have a history of bad and mutual suspicion to haunt any peaceful encounter between them. Left to themselves they have a tendency to stray off the track and into a thicket of mistrust of each other’s motives and interests.

But they also have a legacy of third parties arbitrating their problems and enforcing between them. The 1960 Indus Water Treaty was the first instance where a third party, in that case the World Bank, resolved an otherwise highly complex and potentially explosive issue between them. That agreement has held good for more than 4 decades and withstood two wars.

The Run of Kutch dispute over the demarcation of boundary in the southern desert and marshland between the two neighbours spilled into brief hostilities in 1965 but was settled, amicably, through international arbitration.

The Tashkent Agreement that put an end to the 1965 between the two countries is the most outstanding example, to date, of a third party successfully mediating between two parties incapable of settling their disputes peacefully.

The importance of settling the issue that has marred - relations for so long cannot be overstated. But the two by themselves have miserably failed to settle this thorny issue over more than half a century. They should, perhaps, borrow a leaf from and bring in an umpire—who has got to be honest and impartial in the sense of —to sort out the problem on the merits of each party’s case. No other attempt at resolving this highly emotive and combustible problem is likely to succeed.

The long and short of the whole argument is that and , for both of whom is more a matter of than a sport, must come to grips with the entirety of their relations in the spirit of playing . Nothing less is likely to lead them to success. The enthusiasm of their two peoples over the current series unmistakably suggests no other course.