Let Cricket Inspire India and Pakistan

Cricket 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 Cricket 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 Cricket is no longer a sport for the faint-hearted.

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

But India-Pakistan 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 Cricket where nothing can be taken for granted. Unsurprisingly for this oddball, therefore, Cricket has more often been the catalyst to thaw a freeze and a talisman to turn the fortunes for politicians.

Cricket diplomacy was the one that bailed India and Pakistan out of a tight corner, where they had painted themselves since General Ziaul Haq’s military coup d’etat of July,1977. Ziaul Haq took the bold initiative, in the mid-80s, to travel to Rajasthan’s fabled ‘pink city’, Jaipur, to witness an India-Pakistan Test match. His daring melted a lot of snow from the peaks of the Himalayas and the Karakorams. India and Pakistan 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 Gandhi. 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 Pakistan abetting the Sikh uprising in India 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 India, he was, at the same time, fuelling the Sikh revolt against New Delhi.

However, the level playing field Benazir and Rajiv had developed with obvious dedication was queered by the incipient freedom movement in the Indian-occupied Kashmir, inspired and instigated, no doubt, by the success of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets. Pakistan’s notoriously adventurous and ambitious prime intelligence agency, ISI, saw in the Kashmiri uprising the chance of a century to get even with India. The ISI sleuths and their Bonaparte military bosses had always callously held India responsible for the truncation of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, 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 Pakistan by an Indian Cricket team. The dry spell has at last run out with the current visit by the Indian Cricket team, the first in 15 years. In all this period India and Pakistan played very little cricket; and whatever cricket 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 India and Pakistan, and received the highest accolades from the Cricketing world, couldn’t escape the guillotine. The ambers of hostility between the two giants of South Asia trashed that haven of Cricket, hopefully not for good.

Nawaz Sharif was a Cricket aficionado (played club Cricket with great enthusiasm) but surprisingly made little use of the panacea that his mentor, Ziaul Haq, had used so effectively. Nawaz also had little Cricket 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 Cricket 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 Vajpayee, his Indian counterpart, to Lahore 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 war between the two old adversaries. However, it is he who is now being credited with turning a new leaf in relations with India 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 India 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 China and became the architect of U.S.-China understanding. This happens quite regularly on the Cricket field; a player least expected to pull his team out of the doldrums becomes a match winner.

The ongoing Cricket 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 Cricket the schedule of tournaments is decided by the International Cricket Council ( ICC ). In this case the current phase of India-Pakistan rapprochement has the U.S. standing firmly behind it and coaxing both parties to carry on the path of reconciliation.

But like Cricket 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 Cricket 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. India and Pakistan would both serve themselves well, and peace in their region, by strictly adhering to the primacy of this rule.

A game of Cricket 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.

India and Pakistan have a history of bad faith 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 peace 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 war 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 Kashmir issue that has marred India-Pakistan 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 Cricket and bring in an umpire—who has got to be honest and impartial in the sense of Cricket—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 India and Pakistan, for both of whom Cricket is more a matter of faith than a sport, must come to grips with the entirety of their relations in the spirit of playing Cricket. Nothing less is likely to lead them to success. The enthusiasm of their two peoples over the current Cricket series unmistakably suggests no other course.