Author: Shobori Ganguli
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 18, 2000
Personal dreams, the
most easily shattered, possess immense potential to hurt; the pain is however
beyond the threshold of endurance when an entire nation's dreams are shattered.
One such Indian dream
met its end on the killing fields of Kargil in May last year when the brutal
onslaught on our armed forces on our territory by Pakistani forces and
mujahideens brought home, to the utter shock of those confident of the
non-existent "traditional" Indo-Pak friendship, the dangerous games the
Pakistani establishment was capable of playing. Pakistan's misadventure
in Kargil throttled the dream of a nation that Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee had carried with him on the historic bus to Lahore in February
1999.
The Kargil nightmare
ensured that for a long time to come, India would be wary, and understandably
so, of blindly trusting its western neighbour or of dreaming about a happy
future flowing from a sense of "collective history" and a "nostalgic past
of togetherness". Today, that dream is a mere talking point in ineffectual
seminar circuits on either side of the border. For India, as a people,
the dream has soured, for some probably irreparably so. Because the
ground reality is that Pakistan's cross-border terrorism in the Kashmir
Valley continues to feast on the innocent blood of our civilians and soldiers.
The Government's decision
to abort the Indian cricket team's tour of Pakistan early next year is
an unambiguous declaration of India's unwillingness to pretend that all
is as it should be with Pakistan. India-Pakistan cricket never was,
and never will be, politically neutral. Admittedly, even in the most
peaceful of times, India-Pakistan matches have been nothing short of a
combat. Before the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) spelt the
end of innocence in cricket and wrenched skeletons out of every imaginable
celebrity's closet, the combative spirit in an India-Pakistan match used
to be overwhelmingly apparent on the face of even the most indifferent
cricket observer, be it in the stadium or in drawing rooms, in market places
or in hotel lobbies, across the country. Few can deny that the reason
for the rivalry that at times manifested itself on the field in players
exchanging verbal abuses, had everything to do with the disturbed politics
of India-Pakistan relations over the decades.
That cricket between
the two nations can be also used as a political bridge-building exercise
was apparent in February 1999 when all else having failed, it was left
to cricket to inject some goodwill into the strained relations between
the two neighbours. In fact, the Pakistan team's extended tour of
India last year was a purely diplomatic exercise, a "brought to you by
two MEAs" event. Diplomacy was visible on the beaming faces of the
two captains Wasim Akram and Mohd Azharuddin as they posed for the cameras
along side President KR Narayanan, both more than aware of their roles
as the new ambassadors of Indo-Pak diplomacy.
In fact the saccharin
sweet test series, carried through despite threats of disruption from the
Shiv Sena, diluted even the otherwise healthy combative passion that informs
Indo-Pak matches anywhere in the world. The media attention on the
feel-goodness of the event indicated that politics cannot remain divorced
from sports, either negatively or positively. It is another matter
that the rather forced bonhomie of the February series was wiped out in
one single stroke in May in Kargil when leading Indian cricketers, present
and former like Sachin Tendulkar and Kapil Dev, ruled out playing cricket
with a nation with whom India was locked in military combat.
The politically correct
are heartbroken today, wailing how sports must stay divorced from politics,
how the Indian Government's decision is a churlish snub to an errant neighbour,
how India has lost an opportunity to "make up" with Pakistan through the
series in whatever little manner possible. These mourners would do
well to recall that it was the dictates of politics and politics alone,
probably in this instance of the correct hue, that made cricketing nations
of the world boycott South Africa right through its apartheid years.
In fact it was only in 1991 when the ascendancy of Nelson Mandela signalled
the political end of apartheid that South Africa was finally welcomed as
a legitimate member of the international cricket club.
Surely if sports is divorced
from politics, South Africa under the white regime need not have faced
the isolation it did despite possessing one of the better cricket teams
in the world. Surely, few can deny that the boycott of the 1980 Moscow
Olympics by Western nations was an unadulterated political message to the
Soviet Union on the Afghanistan issue. Surely, if apartheid or Afghanistan
are reason enough to boycott interaction on the playground with a nation,
the blood of thousands of innocent civilians and soldiers is more than
reason enough for India to call off a cricket series with an offending
nation.
At the present juncture,
India cannot even dream of playing cricket with Pakistan on Pakistani territory,
pretending that its repeated appeals to Islamabad to control terrorist
violence in the Valley, which are going completely unheeded, do not matter.
Kargil may be over but the fire continues to rage, staring at us through
newspapers and television screens every day as militants and ISI infiltrators
carry on their macabre death dance in the Kashmir Valley. Can we
simply turn these images off like an automaton and flip to the sports pages
of our newspapers or switch to ESPN or Star Sports on our TV sets to catch
up with how the two nations are faring on the playground even as Kashmir
burns?
In calling off the Indian
cricket team s tour to Pakistan, the Government has in effect sent a clear
message to whosoever it may concern: Let s not pretend; the party is indeed
over. If 53 years and three military conflicts later Indo-Pak relations
continue to be as strained as they are today, the issue certainly begs
more than feel-good encounters of the sporting kind. Instead of focusing
on the correctness or otherwise of the Government's decision to call off
the series, therefore, it would be well to realise that India-Pakistan
relations today require more serious effort than what sportsmen can undertake.
Kargil, while it shattered
the Lahore bus dream, also made India realise that exchanges like cricket
series and buses could do little to drill some good neighbourly humour
into the Pakistani psyche. Admittedly, there can be no substitute
for bilateral political contact between two countries. There will
be many cricket matches to play once the inequities of India-Pakistan relations
are corrected, a responsibility which squarely rests on Pakistan's shoulders
at this juncture.
In any case, cricket
too needs to revive from the infamy of match-fixing that has drowned the
gentleman's game in shame and scandal. On a lighter vein, if at all,
the aborted test series deserves to be sincerely mourned in the bylanes
of Karachi and Chandni Chowk where bookies have lost potential millions
in a test series that never was.
