POLITICS-SOUTH ASIA: Cricket is War by Other Means

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Mar 3 2003 (IPS) - No sporting event can better prove the Orwellian thesis – that games between national teams are a ”continuation of war by other means” – than a clash on the cricket pitch between eternal rivals India and Pakistan.

”We did what we could not do on the battle field,” Suhel Seth, advertising whiz and commentator on public affairs, said, summing up the public mood in India following Saturday’s sizzling Cricket World Cup encounter at Centurion Park, South Africa, in which India convincingly outplayed Pakistan.

From Islamabad, Pakistan’s disappointment was reflected in the lament by college student Zehra Ali : ”We always hate losing to India, but this time the media projected as if we are definitely going to win and this has caused much of the heart burning."

Saturday’s encounter, closely watched in India and Pakistan, was the first meeting of the South Asian rivals in nearly three years.

After Pakistan’s loss, there were dark allegations that the Pakistan cricket team had been paid money by bookies to lose the match to India. Protesters in Rawalpindi city, sister city to the capital Islamabad, demanded that the team members be instantly hanged on return.

Spectator passions ran high partly because the nuclear-armed neighbours spent most of last year with their troops, totalling a million men and their deadly toys, in ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ confrontation on their common border. Subsequently, they were persuaded to stand down by top-level shuttle diplomacy led by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Considering the violent incidents involving ordinary civilians that erupted on the border soon after the results of the cricket match became known, it is just as well that the troops demobilised, and the warships and fighters returned to peacetime locations late last year.

At the Husseiniwala border post, several people were reported injured on both sides Saturday as Pakistanis and Indians who had come to watch the retreat ceremony by border troops resorted to pelting each other with stones.

The daily retreat ceremonies by Pakistani Rangers and India’s para-military Border Security Force (BSF) at border posts, particularly at the Atari-Wagah crossing, regularly draw hundreds of spectators who cheer their respective sides on as they go through an exaggerated military ritual complete with mock ferocity and anger.

Selected for their height, men from either side snort, stamp their boots and glare at each other menacingly with hands on their hips, before finally flinging open the gates or slamming them shut with as much violence as they can muster – symbolising the hostility that spills into the sports arena and everywhere else.

Last month, the border guards watched as the top envoys of each country driving overland back home after being expelled – the two countries have banned overflights by each other’s civilian aircraft.

In February 1999, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee symbolically crossed the border in a bus to sign the ‘Lahore Declaration’ with then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pledging to ”intensify efforts to resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir” and also ”refrain from intervention and interference in each other’s internal affairs”.

Hardly had the ink dried on the document when the Pakistani army, displeased with the deal, opened up armed hostilities on the border at Kargil, leading to an undeclared but full-scale war that stopped only on the intervention of then U.S. President Bill Clinton.

By October 1999, Sharif was ousted in a military coup led by Gen Pervez Musharraf. Relations with India deteriorated so much so that two countries refused to meet each other even on the cricket field, much to the disappointment of promoters who see dollars in the rivalry.

Crowd-pulling test matches between the two countries, revived after a 10-year gap as a gesture conducive to the success of Vajpayee’s Lahore initiative, were again withdrawn.

In 2001, India banned matches with Pakistan, wrecking commercial prospects at such ‘neutral’ venues as Singapore, Sharjah and Toronto. It has also banned its team from playing in Pakistan.

The promoters hype up the rivalry. Some years ago, the sports channel Star-ESPN billed a planned match in Australia between the two countries as ‘qayamat’, which roughly translates from the Urdu and Hindi as ‘apocalypse’.

At home, Vajpayee’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has had to take notice of the sentiments of its fanatic supporters such as the Shiv Sena (god’s army) in Maharashtra state, where it has taken to ripping up cricket pitches to stop Pakistani teams from playing.

Saturday’s win was described by young New Delhi cricket fan Malini Dutt as ”sweet revenge” for a Pakistani win over India in the June 2000 Asia Cup tournament in Bangladesh.

That was the last occasion when the two teams actually got to meet each other in between diplomatic impasses and open warfare.

According to cricket icon-turned-politician Imran Khan, who led Pakistan to World Cup victory in 1992, the game itself has suffered because of the years that have gone by without the two sides getting to play each other.

Khan, in India over the weekend, told a television interviewer from Star News channel that it would be better for the two countries to release ”pent-up feelings on the cricket field rather than on the battle field”. Although people like Khan would like to see politics stay apart from cricket, both countries have for decades used withdrawal of permission for tours to score political points often on the specious grounds of security for their teams.

Khan called the tit-for-tat refusal by governments to play cricket ”childish” and said the game could be used to mend bilateral ties rather than add to the tension between them.

But any game between Pakistan and India, including hockey at which both once excelled, is so riddled with historical and religious sub-texts that spectators in each country worry more about not losing to the ‘enemy ‘ country than winning the tournaments themselves.

Pakistan was created in 1947 as a homeland for the sub-continent’s Muslims by departing British colonials who, often accused of exacerbating religious strife through a divide-and-rule policy, also left behind the cricket legacy.

Said Ramesh Malhotra, whose parents fled what became Pakistan during the traumatic 1947 partition: ”Who cares about winning the World Cup? What is important is that India has maintained its record of always thrashing Pakistan in a World Cup meet.”