From Wagah To Attari, Only 22 Yards

The question of whether, amidst all the strife that besets the two countries’ bilateral relations, a mere sport can bring them together, is at one level easy to answer: no. Sport can sublimate many emotions, but it cannot be a substitute for geopolitics. Cricket can be an instrument for diplomacy, not an alternative to it.

And yet there is a good argument to be made for the healing capabilities of cricket. Cricket, as a global game, features people with different ethnicities, colours, religions and creeds striving towards the same goals. Cricket, like all international sport, embodies the values of co-existence transcending political differences — a key United Nations principle. Cricket is also dedicated to the notion of ‘‘playing by the rules’’; strict adherence to the laws of cricket includes honouring the spirit of those laws, so that, for instance, the mildest show of dissent against an umpiring decision is severely sanctioned. The phrase ‘‘it’s not cricket’’ has come to be used whenever any conduct is palpably unfair, or — to recall a deplorably sexist but irreplaceable word — ‘‘ungentlemanly.’’ With all of these elements, cricket can arguably be a valuable force for the promotion of the values and principles of peace and co-existence between any two countries, India and Pakistan not excepted, as the experience of 2003-4 (of which more later) has demonstrated.

Against all of this, it is easy enough to point out that six decades of cricketing relations have done little to promote good relations between the two antagonists. If anything, the game has been a victim of politics rather than an influence on it, as proved by the eighteen year gap in cricketing relations between the two countries from 1960 to 1978, the dozen-year hiatus in Pakistani Test tours of India between 1987 and 1999, and the current stalemate, brought about by the Pakistani terrorist assault on Mumbai on 26/11.

And yet a look back at sixty years of Indo-Pakistani cricket offers tantalizing glimpses of evidence on both sides of the argument.

Before India and Pakistan played their first Test match against each other, they had already gone to war, over Kashmir in the winter of 1947-48. Yet India, guided by the statesman Jawaharlal Nehru, was anxious to leave that era behind. In the very year that the Imperial Cricket Conference admitted Pakistan as the sport’s seventh Test-playing country, India invited Pakistan to send a touring team, sandwiching a five-Test series between a summer in England and a previously-scheduled tour of the West Indies in the winter.

That first series in 1952 still bore reminders of the two countries’ recent intimacy that had not been wholly sundered by Partition. The Pakistanis crossed over to India by road; hostilities had not yet made the land borders all but impassable, as they were to become a decade later. Editorialists on both sides of the border, and civic authorities in all the Indian cities the tourists visited, went out of their way not just to welcome the Pakistanis but to express the hope that the cricket matches would become a harbinger of better relations between the two countries. When the Bombay Test took place, affluent Pakistanis took the boat down from Karachi to watch it, as they would have been able to do more routinely in the pre-Partition days. The warmth of the Indian public’s welcome to the Pakistan cricketers was commented upon by the visiting captain himself.

Most remarkably, some 10,000 Indian citizens were allowed to visit Lahore for the third Test. To do this, they had to cross a border that many had fled just eight years previously, when Partition had not just witnessed streams of suffering refugees, but many cases of trains crossing the frontier with every man, woman and children in them having been slaughtered en masse on the way.  With this recent history behind them, the fact that so many Indians were able to traverse a frontier so replete with painful memories, to walk the streets of a city that had once been a byword for multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism but had now been reduced to an all-Muslim stronghold, and in many cases to meet and embrace old friends by whom they had so recently felt betrayed and even threatened – all this was unutterably poignant. Lala Amarnath, a former test cricketer accompanying the tourists, spoke warmly of Lahore as his “home town”. The city took on a carnival atmosphere for the duration of the Test match; all other activity ground to a halt as cricket dominated every conversation. Indians (particularly those visibly non-Muslim, like the turbaned Sikhs) were warmly welcomed by Lahoris; many were offered free rides and discounted snacks, drinks and purchases. In the generally celebratory mood, no one realized it, but it would be nearly five decades before this would happen again.

The first significant change came in the nature of Pakistan itself. No longer merely a severed part of India, it was acquiring its own distinctive characteristics marked by increasing militarization and growing Islamicization. Soon after its first military coup, Pakistan’s new President, the rather grandly titled Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, also named himself the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan and consciously sought to use cricket as an expression of Pakistani national identity. Ayub’s dual roles highlighted for the first time two vital features that would come to be fundamentally important to an appreciation of Pakistan cricket – the increasing militarization of Pakistani society, including its sport; and the growing identification of Pakistani cricket with Pakistani nationalism. The instrumentalization of cricket in the service of a militarized nationalism, especially against India, became a feature of Pakistani cricket. This was followed by explicit evocations of a religious mission for cricket as well (such as when Pakistan’s captain, Shoaib Malik, publicly thanked “Muslims all over the world” for their presumed support to his team in the 2007 Twenty20 World Cup, the kind of bigoted remark that would have had an Indian captain sacked within minutes). The contrast with India was striking, and significant.

With separate national consciousness setting in, the stakes were correspondingly higher, and neither side felt they could afford to lose. A succession of drawn Tests, appalling scoring rates below 2 an over, and a complete aversion to risk, characterized India-Pakistan encounters after the initial series, which India had won 2-1. 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 almost no one minded when they did not play each other again for 18 years. When relations were finally resumed, biased umpiring, especially in Pakistan (notoriously by the egregious Shakoor Rana) meant that Indian teams felt that each time they stepped onto a cricket ground in Pakistan, they were playing thirteen men, not eleven.

The irony was that Pakistan had increasingly become good enough to win without biased umpires. When India travelled to Pakistan in 1989-90, for the very first time, neutral umpires from England officiated in test matches between the two subcontinental neighbours, considerably easing tensions on the cricket field. Off it, the story was more complicated. Pakistani regimes sought to bleed India through militancy sponsored by Islamabad, while maintaining seemingly bonhomous cricketing relations. For all his professions of good neighbourliness (and a public request to attend the Jaipur Test, which he did amidst much fanfare and talk of “cricket diplomacy”), General Zia-ul-Haq (like his successors) provided more than moral support to two groups of rebels active in India, the Khalistani terrorists and the Kashmiri mujahideen. There was of course something utterly cynical about an exercise in which General Zia visited India to watch a Test match to defuse tensions being stoked by his own intelligence services’ sponsorship of terror in India, which is why the slogan ‘‘cricket for peace’’ had a hollow ring in New Delhi. Many across the Indian political spectrum questioned the wisdom of playing cricket as usual with a country that was systematically seeking to undermine India at the same time. The hiatus in mutual tours, which scarred the late 1980s and early 1990s, was thus inevitable.

In Pakistan, in particular, cricket was expected to bear a particularly heavy burden as the embodiment of national pride against the larger (and militarily more powerful) neighbor. This became particularly apparent when Pakistan lost a World Cup quarter-final to India in 1996. The national reaction was calamitous. A Pakistani college student emptied his Kalashnikov into his TV set and himself; another fan succumbed to a heart attack. The players’ aircraft had to be diverted to Karachi to shield the players from the fury of the crowd that assembled to greet them at their scheduled destination, Lahore. The losing captain, Wasim Akram, received death threats, with some reading dark motives into his failure to play in the crucial encounter (had he played and been too unfit to make an impact, he would have been pilloried as well). A judge admitted a legal suit against the team, hinting darkly at corruption. A senior Islamic cleric, Maulana Naqshabandi, declared that Pakistan’s defeat was its penalty for having elected a woman, Benazir Bhutto, to rule; such “obscene” imitations of Indian culture were bound, he argued, to bring about such tragic results. It took weeks for the sense of betrayal and grief to die down.

A year later, the desire to see cricket serve as an instrument of diplomacy at a time of high tension prompted an Indian ODI team to visit Pakistan. They were accorded security at a level normally offered only to Heads of State, complete with snipers on rooftops: the last thing Pakistan wanted was a successful attack on their Indian guests on Pakistani soil. Nonetheless the Indians received a hostile reception in Karachi, where stones were thrown on the field by spectators, order being restored only when the match referee, a Sri Lankan, threatened the hosts with forfeiture if the crowd was not brought under control. Half a year later, both countries exploded nuclear devices. A military rivalry which had once been described by an ignorant critic as “a communal riot with artillery” had now escalated into the threat of mutual annihilation. And still the two countries played cricket with each other.

Against such a background, it was expecting too much for cricket matches between India and Pakistan to remain mere sporting spectacles. As C.L.R. James had so memorably written decades earlier, “what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” The London Times suggested, in 1999, that if diplomacy was war by other means, then cricket could prove an attractive alternative form of crisis management. This it proved to be when Pakistan won a thrilling Chennai Test in 1998-99 by 12 runs. The extraordinary triumph was generously applauded by the Indian spectators, who gave the visitors a standing ovation as they ran a victory lap around the stadium. But soon enough, the two sides found themselves playing each other in the 1999 World Cup in England while the Pakistani-instigated war over Kargil in Kashmir was going on: on the very day of India’s 47-run victory, six Pakistani soldiers and three Indian officers were killed in Kargil. Two years later, an assault by Pakistani terrorists on India’s Parliament in December 2001 reintroduced knife-edge tension between the two countries, which were poised for many months on the brink of all-out conflict.

After three years of bristling hostility verging on war, and less than five years after the bloody clash of arms across the snowy wastes that divided them in Kashmir, not to mention the 56 years of mutual tension that had marked their relationship, the two countries seemed genuinely on the verge of a real and lasting peace when India embarked on a peace offensive with its 2003-4 tour of Pakistan. The Government of Pakistan did something it had refused to do after 1955, and allowed thousands of Indians to cross the border on “cricket visas”. They were greeted effusively by ordinary Pakistanis; to be an Indian in Lahore or Karachi those days was to be offered free rides, discounted meals and purchases, and overwhelming hospitality. It was said, not entirely in jest, that large numbers of Pakistanis were going about pretending to be Indians in order to avail of these benefits for themselves. Indeed, the positive effects of the televising and reporting of the India’s cricket tour of Pakistan in 2004 helped dissolve hostility and tension by revealing to both populations, in real time, real people and real emotions (especially those displayed by young spectators of both nationalities painting their faces in the colours of both national flags). The ghosts of Kargil were buried once and for all by the cricket tour of 2003-04.

If cricket had earlier proved hostage to political fortune, it now came to symbolize a conscious attempt to make peace, since the Indian tour of Pakistan took place 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 (IPL) season of 2008. Thanks to the mixture of nationalities in each of the IPL teams, partisanship suddenly lost its chauvinist flavour. Few things in my cricket-watching experience have been as enthralling as the 100,000 strong Eden Gardens crowd roaring in support as Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar came steaming in on his debut for Kolkata against Delhi’s Indian test openers Sehwag and Gambhir. In the summer of that year, India-Pakistan 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 then 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.” Since then, Pakistani players have not participated in subsequent editions of the IPL, initially because of a Pakistani ban on their cricketers playing in India, and subsequently because no IPL team seemed willing to bid for Pakistanis. Politics had clearly again trumped cricket.

So where does this leave the prospects for cricket promoting peace between these sibling nations entwined together by history with bonds of paradox?

These are two countries whose soldiers have frequently shot at each other, where border tensions have erupted into war, and where the result of a cricket match can prompt a soldier to unleash a volley of celebratory or intimidatory fire on the Line of Control. Above all, this is a region where the fomenting of terrorism in India by Pakistan and (in Pakistani eyes) the “oppression” of Muslims by India creates in each side a moral obligation to teach the perpetrators a lesson on the cricket field. No other cricketing rivalry in the world has to contend with such a perverse mixture of elements sharpening the keen edge of competition between them.

For many years now the talk has been of war, militancy, terrorism, and even of a nuclear threat. A thaw is imminently forecast; when it occurs, cricket matches will instantly follow. But there’s the rub: cricket will follow diplomacy, not precede it. Even the warmth of 2003-4 was not a cause of better relations between the countries, but a reflection of it. And when things are unpleasant between the governments, matches that take place at times of tension, as with the World Cup encounter during Kargil, mirror the antagonism; they do not cause it.

Yet the tendency to see these matches as warfare by proxy is also unfortunate. Cricket is a sport; a cricket team represents a country, it does not symbolize it. To ask cricket to bear a larger burden than any other national endeavour is palpably unfair. There is too much at stake for both the Governments of India and Pakistan in their political relations for any serious breakthrough to be prompted by the interests of cricket. But when leaders wish to make a breakthrough, sending a cricket team can be a highly effective way of doing so. Cricket has been, and can be, an instrument of policy-makers determined to send a broader message to the general public. But if political interests can drive cricket tours, the interests of cricket will never determine national policy.

Just as there is no certitude that periods of peace will ever last, so too it is to be hoped that the period of tension we have experienced for over two years will also ebb. Currently, a cold peace prevails between India and Pakistan, one which could tip over into a hot war or turn to a warmer friendship. If normalcy comes, cricket might gradually achieve a more reasonable place in the national discourse between the two countries. Many liberals on both sides of the border hope that one day India and Pakistan will enjoy relations comparable to those between the United States and Canada – with open borders, shared culture and entertainment, free trade, even frequent migration. Healthy sporting competition would then be part of a healthy overall relationship; cricket matches between the two countries, followed with good-natured partisanship rather than religiously-inspired passion, could be the centerpiece of such a new era. I do not expect to see that kind of transformation in the foreseeable future. But it is something to hope for, and to look forward to, one day.

Shashi Tharoor is an MP and cricket lover. A shorter, edited version of this was originally published in the print edition which was replaced by this slightly longer, unedited version on March 28, 2011.