Shadows Across the Playing Field Read online

  Sufficient has been said to establish that the cricketing contests between India and Pakistan have been about much more than just sport. Over sixty years, they have been played against a background of an unresolved Kashmir dispute, major wars and hostilities and, in more recent times, a nuclear arms race, which have inevitably affected the frequency and the spirit of the encounters. Shaharyar Khan argues that it is politics that divides, rather than sport, and that cricket has ‘the capacity to soften or aggravate the hostility’. The book describes several occasions when cricket and diplomacy became intertwined, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. Hafeez Kardar, the Oxford-educated captain of Pakistan’s first Test team to tour India in 1952, took on an ambassadorial role, playing up the differences between the two newly independent countries and losing some Indian friends in the process. General Zia-ul-Haq’s meeting with Rajiv Gandhi, at the Jaipur Test in 1987, which helped to restore better relations after the border tensions of India’s Operation Brass Tacks, is another high-profile example. A third was the visit of Rajiv’s children, Priyanka and Rahul, to Karachi for the ODI in 2004.

  The diplomatic power of cricket has been most in evidence, however, when the peoples of the two countries have been allowed their say. The welcome given to Lala Amarnath, the Indian captain, on his return to his native Lahore in 1955, made it abundantly clear that he was still regarded as a local boy. And when the border was opened to allow spectators from India to attend the Lahore Test match of that year, the numbers who went and the welcome they received put the trauma of Partition into a different perspective. Those were the days before tougher visa regimes restricted crossborder travel to a trickle. But if either country wishes to relax the rules, their otherwise immoveable bureaucracies can still make it happen. In 2004, Pakistan granted visas in large numbers to Indian supporters on the mere presentation of a ticket and even permitted mixing in the stands. Despite the inevitable foreboding, the result was an explosion of goodwill, which played its part in building greater momentum for peace on both sides of the border.

  From the 1980s, television played an influential role in the popularization of cricket and the creation of a new cult of celebrity, putting successful cricketers in the same pantheon as film stars and providing them with equally lucrative rewards. This growing popularity was reinforced by the emergence of South Asia as a new hub of international cricket. India’s success in the World Cup in 1983 was the first sign of the new trend, which was confirmed in 1992 and 1996 when Pakistan and Sri Lanka took the same prize. From the late 1990s, with India’s emergence as a world economic power, Indian cricket began to outstrip all rivals in its financial profitability and has now become a powerful force for change. The Indian Premier League (IPL), which pits Indian state and city teams, with their international cricketers, against each other in twenty-over competitions has set new levels of expectation for television rights and players’ remuneration. It has also broken down traditional rivalries and brought Indian and Pakistani players together in the same teams to the deafening cheers of their largely Indian supporters.

  Shashi Tharoor welcomes the IPL because he disapproves of the ‘unsportsmanlike chauvinism of our crowds’ in Test encounters and welcomes the vision of Eden Gardens cheering on Shoaib Akhtar even if he is dismissing a great Indian batsman like Virender Sehwag. ‘In the IPL,’ he writes, ‘the past poses no impediment to the future.’ Shaharyar Khan is more sceptical. He understands the commercial importance of the IPL but is concerned that the popularity of big-hitting, fast-scoring cricket will supersede the Test match, which he sees as a far greater gauge of cricketing skills. Moreover, his experience of the Pakistan tour of India in 1999 and the Indian tour of Pakistan in 2004 has convinced him that the crowds on both sides of the border have now achieved a level of maturity which was absent in the 1980s. In his view, cricket has enabled the views of ordinary people to rise to the surface and to make plain their desire for peace and progress, rather than permanent hostility and skewed spending on the armed forces.

  The terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal hotel and other landmark buildings in Mumbai in November 2008, in which nearly 200 people died, and the subsequent deterioration in India-Pakistan relations, provided an immediate testing ground for such optimism. India’s planned Test series in Pakistan, due to have begun in January 2009, was called off, making it clear that much diplomatic work will be required before relations can resume their previous, much smoother, path. The subsequent murderous attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team, which generously stepped into the breach and was faced by a hail of bullets, raises even more worrying questions, not only about the future of Test cricket in Pakistan but also about the scheduling of international competitions in the entire region. Cricket may be a means of breaking down barriers but it seems powerless to stop new ones being erected.

  It is symptomatic of the chequered history of cricketing relations between the two countries that its course has been influenced by so many extraneous factors. It is not just bad light that stops play in South Asia. But this volume is also a celebration of three generations of gifted cricketers, whose skills have been admired not just at home but across the world. Of the first generation, you will read here of Hanif Mohammad’s extraordinary debut as a teenager, of Vinoo Mankad’s achievement of the fastest Indian Test double of a thousand runs and a hundred wickets (a record broken in 1979), of Fazal Mahmood, the architect of several early Pakistani victories, including the defeat of England at the Oval in 1954, and of Vijay Hazare, one of India’s greatest batsmen. By the late 1970s, when Test encounters resumed after almost two decades of hostility, a new generation had emerged which was to make an even greater mark on the international stage. Their names are a roll-call of greats from both sides of the border: Kapil Dev, the superb all-rounder, who led India to victory in the World Cup, Sunil Gavaskar, surely one of India’s greatest batsman, Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad, the velvet glove and the iron fist of Pakistan’s batting line-up, and Imran Khan, Pakistan’s most successful captain, who was idolized as much in England as he was in his own country. That intermediate generation subsequently gave way to new talent, with India apparently now in the ascendant in terms of its batting strength. Sachin Tendulkar, who invites comparisons with Don Bradman, was joined first by such fine batsmen as Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, and more recently by such extraordinary talents as Virender Sehwag, who has amassed some of the largest ever scores for his country, and Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Pakistan’s mainstay until his recent retirement was its talented and imperturbable captain, Inzamam-ul- Haq, who played many match-winning innings, supported among others by Mohammad Yousuf, formerly Yousuf Youhana, and the high-scoring Younus Khan. For India, Anil Kumble has taken many of the bowling honours, with Irfan Pathan making his own indelible mark on opponents and spectators alike. For Pakistan, Waqar Younus and Wasim Akram were the most intimidating opening bowling duo of the 1990s, while more recently, Shoaib Akhtar, the world’s fastest bowler, has proved a more than worthy successor to Sarfraz Nawaz.

  This is the fifth volume to be published in the series Cross- Border Talks in which eminent Indians and Pakistanis systematically discuss the issues which divide or absorb them. The series is published simultaneously in India and Pakistan in order to generate discussion in both countries at the same time. Earlier volumes have looked at diplomatic relations, at democracy, nationalism and the great migrations of 1947. This volume touches on all these themes tangentially but it is above all a tribute to the outstanding talent of a host of great Indian and Pakistani players. When memories of political hostilities fade, it is the highlights of their encounters which remain lodged in the memory and vouch for cricket’s abiding appeal across the political divide.

  March 2009

  David Page

  __________________

  1 . Quoted in Rajdeep Sardesai, Icons Across Borders, in India-Pakistan Cricketing Ties, (Roli Books 2004) p 33.

  2 . Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The India
n History of a British Sport (Picador 2002).

  3 . C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary, first published 1963 (Yellow Jersey Press 2005), p 248.

  fantasies and realities

  shashi tharoor

  W

  hen I was a schoolchild, and frequently bedridden with asthma, one of my favoured activities was to construct imaginary cricket teams for the solitary pastime known as ‘book cricket’. This was a game in which players battled for victory on paper, their scores determined by the page numbers revealed through the brisk and random opening of a fat book. Of the many imaginary teams I created over the years, my favourite was a team concocted out of a wholly impossible premise – that the Partition of 1947 had never occurred, and that the best players from what was now Pakistan could turn out, as their forerunners had once done, for a united India.

  What joy there was in inventing such a combined team! The legendary Indian spin quartet bolstered, as they could never be in real life, by fearsome Pakistani pacemen; the solidity of Sunil Gavaskar paired with the silken elegance of Zaheer Abbas; and two of the world’s best all-rounders, Mushtaq Mohammad and Imran Khan, bowling and batting in tandem with their Indian equivalents, Salim Durrani and M.L. Jaisimha! This would have been the best team in the world, and of all the tragic losses brought about by Partition – which sundered a country, took a million lives, displaced 13 million people, and destroyed billions of rupees worth of property – the one that my schoolboy heart felt was never properly valued was the terrible blow it struck to the prospects of what would have been the strongest cricketing country on the planet.

  Of course such dreams were idle, and part of their poignancy was knowing how impossible their realization was. When, in 1967, India and Pakistan each lost three Test series to England in England (India 3-0 and Pakistan 2-0), there was no consolation in reflecting that a combined team could have better held its own against the old colonial oppressor. This was even truer of the next pair of subcontinental touring teams in 1971 (the year India won its English series 1-0 and Pakistan lost 1-0); but even contemplating the prospect then involved recognizing that not only would the two countries never field a combined team again, but that they were on the brink of a real shooting war (which duly erupted a few months after the English cricket season concluded, and was to result in the birth of Bangladesh, hitherto East Pakistan).

  Yet, amazingly enough, my fantasy came blissfully true just once – a quarter of a century later. In 1996, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka jointly hosted the World Cup tournament, but some countries, afraid of violence on the civil-war-torn island, refused to play their matches in Sri Lanka, depriving the Sri Lankan public of cricket and their board of much-needed revenue. In response, India and Pakistan sent a combined team to play one match in Sri Lanka against the hosts, an act of subcontinental solidarity that gladdened every cricket-lover’s heart. The match was a huge success; the combined team, playing under the name of its commercial sponsors as the ‘Wills XI’, comfortably thrashed the future World Cup champions, with 33 balls to spare in a 40-over match; and all my schoolboy assumptions came true, albeit with a later generation of names. Pakistan provided both the pacemen (Wasim Akram and Waqar Younus), India both the spinners (Anil Kumble and Ashish Kapoor); the two brilliant openers were India’s Sachin Tendulkar and Pakistan’s Saeed Anwar, both record-breakers in one-day cricket; the wicketkeeper (Rashid Latif) was Pakistani and the captain (Mohammad Azharuddin) was Indian. The newly minted captain of Pakistan, Wasim Akram, cheerfully played under his Indian counterpart, and the veteran former Pakistani skipper, Intikhab Alam, managed the combined side. The final team featured six Pakistanis and five Indians, which was probably a fair reflection of the two countries’ cricketing strengths at the time, and the man-of-the-match award was won by the Indian spinner Anil Kumble for his 4 wickets for 12 runs. What made the match all the more remarkable – apart from the miracle that such a team was fielded at all – was the painful fact that India and Pakistan had not played each other at all on the cricket fields of either country for the seven previous years.

  The realities of politics on the subcontinent had frequently caused such interruptions in the two countries’ cricketing relations. For five years after the trauma of Partition, Pakistan played no international cricket, but its first-ever series as a Test-playing nation was against India, which it toured in 1952-53. India won that five-Test series 2-1, but the next two series, in Pakistan in 1954-55 and in India in 1960-61, were both turgid affairs, each ending in 0-0 draws; the two teams were each so afraid of the non-cricketing consequences of losing to the other that survival was their only imperative. The poor quality of the cricket and the worse state of the two countries’ political relations (punctuated by wars in 1965 and 1971) meant that they did not play each other again for eighteen years.

  The two countries’ long simmering hostility meant that cricketing contact was not resumed till 1978-79, when an improved diplomatic climate allowed an Indian team to visit Pakistan. It lost 2-0 (and 2-1 in the ODIs), but gained revenge the very next year, 1979-80, when a strong Pakistan team capitulated 2-0 in India. Three years later, 1982-83, India toured Pakistan and lost comprehensively (3-0 in the Tests, 3-1 in the ODIs); soon after, in 1983-84, a Pakistani tour of India that was meant to establish a pattern of an annual exchange of cricket tours between the two neighbours saw all three Tests drawn, though India won the ODIs 2-0. The exchange continued the following year with India going to Pakistan in 1984- 85 for yet another drawn series, marred by justified accusations by the Indians of biased Pakistani umpiring and ending with the assassination in Delhi of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, which led to the abandonment of the tour before the third Test and the last ODI had been played. No tour took place the following year, but when Pakistan visited India in 1986-87, it ended an all-too-familiar sequence of 11 successive drawn Tests by winning the final Test (and routing India 5-1 in the ODIs). The annual-tour plan was, for all practical purposes, dropped by this time, but India returned to Pakistan in 1989-90, in a series that witnessed the introduction, at the insistence of Pakistan captain Imran Khan, of neutral (as it happened, British) umpires, who presided over another four drawn Test matches (though Pakistan won both completed ODIs, the third being abandoned because of anti-Indian crowd disturbances in Karachi).

  The abandonment of that match presaged a further interruption in the two countries’ cricketing relations. These had occurred in waves: three tours in the first thirteen years of the two countries’ existence as independent nations, then a lull of eighteen years without cricket, then a flurry of seven tours in the next eleven years; now followed another lull, this time of eight years. This period was not completely devoid of cricket contact, though, since the two countries’ teams did meet each other at neutral venues in third countries (Sharjah and Toronto) for lucrative ODIs, and of course during the two World Cups that occurred during their estrangement (the second of which they managed to host jointly, together with Sri Lanka, at a time when they were refusing to tour each other). Normal service seemed about to resume with a short Indian tour of Pakistan for just three ODIs in 1997-98, followed by a return visit by Pakistan the following year, this time involving three Tests; but the Pakistani incursion into India’s snowy wastes above the Kashmiri town of Kargil in the spring of 1999 froze the two countries’ relations all over again, and a third lull occurred, this time of five years.

  If cricket had all too often proved hostage to political fortune, it then came to symbolize a conscious attempt to make peace, when an Indian team toured Pakistan in 2003-04 amidst a major diplomatic initiative by the Indian government to put the Kargil war behind it and restore cordiality to its relations with Islamabad. The next four years saw an annual exchange of visits restored, with talk of an ongoing peace process being matched by an efflorescence of cricketing encounters, culminating in as many as ten Pakistani players sporting the colours of Indian city teams in the inaugural Indian Premier League of 2008. In the summer of that year, India- Paki
stan relations seemed to be better than they have ever been since Partition, both on and off the field.

  The brief flowering was brutally cut short by the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 by killers sent from Pakistan – recruited, trained, equipped and financed from across the border, as many others had been before them, and in this case even guided by satellite telephone from Pakistan as they conducted their murderous rampage. Though it was not clear whether the attacks were orchestrated, or merely condoned, by elements of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, which in the past had pursued a campaign of sponsoring terrorism in India as an instrument of policy, it was clear that ‘business as usual’ was no longer possible. The first cricketing casualty (aside from the Champions’ League scheduled to be played in Mumbai itself the week after the attacks) was the scheduled Indian tour of Pakistan in January 2009. As India’s sports minister, M.S. Gill, remarked in calling off the government’s permission for the tour, ‘You can’t have one team coming from Pakistan to kill people in our country and another team going from India to play cricket there.’ Two months later, Pakistan retaliated by disallowing its players from participating in the IPL, ostensibly on the grounds of security threats to Pakistani cricketers in India, a proposition rendered more risible by the fact that the Pakistani fast bowler Mohammad Asif had just made an uneventful visit to India for an IPL disciplinary hearing days before his government announced its ban.