Cricket does have the potential to create friendship between the two sides, but….
Statecraft BY HAPPYMON JACOB
Indo-Pak cricket diplomacy is back in action. India has announced that it will host the Pakistani cricket teamfor a seriesof matches in December 2012–January 2013. This decision by the Indian cricket administrators, duly supported by the government of India, is indeed a welcome one. One would imagine that this is another step in the direction of normalizing the Indo-Pak ties: but there is a need to ask a few more questions about the utility of cricket matches in promoting Indo-Pak normalisation.
For the record, this is not the first time that the South Asian neighbours are engaging in cricket diplomacy. In 1987, Gen. Zia ul Haque visited India to ease tensions between the two countries: but the official explanation for the visit was to watch an Indo-Pak cricket match. In March last year Manmohan Singh invited his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani at the Mohali cricket stadium to watch the Indo-Pak World Cup semi-final: they also talked bilateral ties on the sidelines.
The critics
Apart from some security analysts based in Delhi, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and former Indian cricketer Sunil Gavaskar have criticized the government’s support for the decision to invite Pakistani team to India. Gavaskar said: “Being a Mumbaikar I feel what is the urgency when there is no cooperation from the other side."Maharashtra BJP state president Sudhir Mungantiwar argued that “there is a tremendous anger among the general public against Pakistan's role in fomenting terror in India and this decision to resume the cricket ties is against that sentiment”. We are still to hear from the Shiv Sena and the members of the other lunatic fringes!
The thrust of the critics’ arguments is the following: India should not have anything to do with Pakistan till the latter punishes the perpetrators of 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. This was precisely the ‘wisdom’ that guided the Indian response towards Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks. However, India slowly realized over time that a no-talk policy would not help India meet any of its declared objectivesvis-à-vis Pakistan nor does it force Pakistan to do India’s bidding. New Delhi’s realization came late, but it did come. It is the same logic that the critics are using today to run down the proposed visit of the Pakistani cricket team’s to India. These critics do not, however, dispute the underlying assumption that inviting the Pakistani team to India would contribute to normalizing Indo-Pak bilateral ties. The critics’ argument is that inviting the Pakistani team to India is not doing justice to the victims of Mumbai 26/11. In other words, how can you play cricket with your enemies?
That said, if one were to argue that inviting the Pakistani cricket team to India might not necessarily contribute to normalizing Indo-Pak relations, there would be some merit in such an argument. Indeed, Pakistan team’s visit to India might increase the enmity between the two sides. Cricket is religion in both India and Pakistan. Cricket can create mass hysteria in both the countries like nothing else can. More so, India-Pakistan cricket matches are portrayed as ‘wars’ and ‘battles’ by media on both sides. This mass hysteria, created by TRP-seeking media houses and profit-seeking business houses, more often than not gets identified with patriotism, infantile nationalism and pan-Indianism when the Indo-Pak ‘war’ is organized either in India or Pakistan. There is no doubt that the patriotic feelings and anti-Pakistan/India sentiments generated by ‘cricket wars’ can sustain the adversarial relations that the two sides have with each other.
In the India-Pakistan context, the biggest mistake was not getting the Pakistani players to play for the Indian Premier League (IPL) tournaments in India. The various team owners who did not select the Pakistani players for their teams put the blame on the government saying that they were not sure whether the Pakistani players would be given visa by the government. The government, in turn, put the blame on the teams saying that they were free to choose the players. The end result was that the Pakistani players felt humiliated and so did many cricket lovers in Pakistan. Why do I say that it was a mistake not to select Pakistani players in IPL teams? I say so because when the Pakistani players were part of the IPL teams in 2008, for the first time we saw ordinary Indians, patriotic or not, cheering for Pakistani players on Indian soil. Cheering for a Pakistani player on the Indian soil would have been unthinkable before the IPL began: IPL made it acceptable and normal. You could cheer for a Pakistani cricketer in full public view and go home feeling no less patriotic! Pakistani participation in IPL-2008 not only changed Indo-Pak cricketing history, but also had a positive impact on Indo-Pak relations, people-to-people to relations, that is. I had written way back in 2008 in this very column: “While the recent visit of the Indian foreign minister to Pakistan did not yield any results, the 44 day IPL cricket tournament has managed to change mindsets in the two countries.”
I do believe that ‘cricket wars’ between India and Pakistan has the potential to create unnecessary tension between the two sides with implications, albeit indirect, for their bilateral relations. However, if the government and the media houses in India can resist from promoting anti-Pakistan feelings in the run up to and during the December-January Pak tour of India, cricket does have the potential to create friendship between the two sides. Multi-track contacts between India and Pakistan are the only way India and Pakistan can create peace between their nations: after all, it is not enough to make peace between the officials of the two sides but also between the common people of India and Pakistan.
However, if India’s cricket administers and government are seriously considering Indo-Pak cricket ties as a confidence building measure, then they must do more than inviting the Pakistani team to play in India. They must do what they did in 2008: create conditions for Pakistani players to be part of the next edition of IPL. What better Indo-Pak CBM can you have than Indian cricket fans cheering for Pakistani players on Indian grounds at the cost of iconic Indian players!
(Source: Greater Kashmir, July 22, 2012. URL: http://greaterkashmir.com/news/2012/Jul/22/indo-pak-cricket-diplomacy-5.asp )
