The Indian prime minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has done another deed that will not be lost on all peace loving people in India and Pakistan. In the face of reports that Pakistan remains at risk from terrorist attacks, especially in the wake of the steps taken by the government of General Pervez to cleanse its Augean stables, he has brushed aside the reservations of the Indian establishment and some members of his own party, and given the green signal that everyone in India and Pakistan, including the two Cricket Boards, were eagerly anticipating. The Indian cricket team will visit Pakistan next month. One can gauge the Pakistani public’s response to Mr Vajpayee’s decision from the TV interviews taken in the streets of the country: everyone has praised him for taking a step that is surely going to improve relations in a sector that India holds dear — people to people relations. This is happening after 1989, the year that marked the beginning of trouble in Kashmir and forced the two countries to allow sport to become a victim of politics.
The question of security was first raised tentatively by the Indian captain Saurav Ganguli. Later, the chief of the Board of Control for Cricket India (BCCI), Mr Jagmohan Dalmiya, asserted that no one would be forced to tour Pakistan. An Indian team of security experts then visited Pakistan and looked up the venues and found them to be okay, barring a few adverse observations on the venues at Karachi and Peshawar. Then Mr Ganguli conceded that no one in his team had objected to the tour and that he was willing to take the team to Pakistan. Suddenly, all the misgivings gave way to a feeling of confidence. Of course, Pakistani and Indian cricket enthusiasts have never accepted the need for any of the bans in the past. In fact, over the past decade, whenever the topic came up, the Indian government lost support at home among lovers of cricket. Indian fans realised that Pakistan had visited India once and that India had to make a return visit to a country, even though the reports from there were not always good. But everyone was in favour of taking the risk. Now Mr Vajpayee has made us realise that you can do nothing positive unless you are prepared to take some risk.
Risk can also be balanced by economics. There is big money in Indo-Pak cricket and this is so especially in India, which has venues to stage at least five test matches and crowds to overfill the stands. On the last occasion when our cricketers played in India everyone came away with enough money to build houses. The Boards got their share of the money and became solvent. In the case of the BCCI, it was put well on the way to becoming the richest Board in the world. In recent times, apart from commercial considerations, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) wanted a return visit to enable it to come out of its ‘jihadi’ eclipse. It tried its best, with the help of Islamabad, to get India to come; but to no avail. As other tours too got cancelled, the PCB sank into financial trouble. It threatened repeatedly to complain to the International Cricket Council (ICC) but the atmospherics with India were bad after 9/11 and got worse during the subsequent standoff between the two countries. So it was not simply a case of Pakistan not qualifying as a venue; it became a question of India getting the next Pakistani tour. In this context, Mr Dalmiya was always game to play but always at cross-purposes with the government in New Delhi. Meanwhile, the people in India and Pakistan were increasingly sure that they wanted the tours to resume. They were not interested in talking about any risk factor.
In the event, clearly thereal persuasion behind the Indo-Pak cricket green light is bilateral rivalry. It originates in politics but, like all sports, it gets transformed into goodwill and ultimately becomes a Confidence Building Measure positively affecting politics itself. The fact that Pakistan is keen to play a very strong Indian team that defeated it decisively in the last World Cup is extremely significant. On the Indian side, after the team’s recently concluded tour of Australia, the crisis of confidence in the Indian cricketers regarding Pakistan has been banished. Now the Indian team is the favourites and Bishen Singh Bedi no longer thinks that Indian players have a ‘mental block’ about Pakistan. That is why the Pakistanis are practising frantically with left-arm fast bowlers to cope with the Zaheer-Nehra-Pathan left-arm trio. Yet, the ‘jazba’ or the will to win on the Pakistani side, continues to be the exciting factor in the new Indo-Pak cricket relationship.
The ‘clash’ is the magical aspect of the game. The two sides somehow must remain capable of defeating each other to retain the interest of their big fan following. Pakistan’s cricket team may be in a state of eclipse after its New Zealand tour, but its ability to surprise with bowlers like Shoaib Akhtar remains intact. The cricket-watchers of India and Pakistan have learned to admire each other’s cricketers despite the rivalry in the field. Just as Imran Khan used to be an icon in India in his heyday, Sachin Tendulkar is a hero in Pakistan and his latest statement that he will very much be in the team going to Pakistan has exhilarated the Pakistanis. That is why it is very important now that the cricketers should behave with extreme caution and tact in the field, knowing that the game is going to play an important role in the improvement and normalisation of relations between the two countries.