by James Astill
The match was by no means over. After a flurry of lower-order hitting, Pakistan needed only nine off the last over to win. But they were seven wickets down and one of their poorest batsmen, Naved-ul-Hasan, was on strike. The Indian seamer Ashish Nehra bowled beautifully. Naved and his partner, the wicketkeeper Moin Khan, could scramble only four off his first five balls.
This left Moin needing to hit a six off the last ball to win. The crowd was boiling over, everyone remembering the time in Sharjah in 1986 when Javed Miandad had done just that. But Moin, a much lesser player, heaved and was caught. India had won. But the game had been magnificent.
Pakistan’s score of 344 was the highest by a team batting second in a one-day game; and the 693 runs scored that day the highest combined total in one-day international cricket. Enraptured by the drama, the emotion, the deafening expressions of goodwill, I foolishly wondered whether I had just witnessed, played out on the cricket field, a turning point in one of the world’s deadliest rivalries.
The thought persisted as the series progressed. It never regained the emotional heights of Karachi, but the Indians were received warmly everywhere. They went next to Rawalpindi and Peshawar, where Pakistan went 2-1 up in the one-day series.
More than 50 Indian journalists accompanied the team on the ‘cricket visas’ that Pakistan had made easily available. Every day they filed back to India reams of heart-warming stories, of intense cricket and warm welcomes. Most of the rest of the time they spent in Pakistan’s bazaars, looking for carpets, dried fruits and spices, things that had once flowed freely down the Grand Trunk Road, from Kabul to Chittagong. ‘Huge, huge, huge shopping in Pakistan!’ laughed Sharda Ugra, then of India Today. ‘It was wonderful. I remember going from Delhi to Lahore for the first time, and thinking “My God! So this is how people in Delhi must have been like once.” You know, well mannered, courteous, helpful and all that. Only the vegetarians suffered.’
The two concluding one-day games were held in Lahore, in the city’s 60,000-seater Gaddafi Stadium, the biggest in Pakistan. It got its name in 1974 to thank Libya’s dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi, for a speech he gave supporting Pakistan’s right to nuclear weapons. But if that was an illustration of General Zia’s efforts to orientate Pakistan away from South Asia and towards the Middle East, the Lahore one-dayers represented a counter-tug, signalled by the presence of 8,000 rambunctious Indian fans.
The usual suspects of India’s cricketerati were among them, including film stars and politicians. So was a more beguiling presence: Dina Wadia, the 85-year-old daughter of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Estranged from her father even before Pakistan was created, on account of her marriage to a Parsi industrialist, she had visited the country only once before, for her father’s funeral in 1948. She now returned with her son Nusli and grandsons Ness and Jehangir to watch the cricket and visit Jinnah’s mausoleum.
It was in many ways an appropriate visit, for the Wadias, Jinnah’s unwanted relations, were among the original Parsi patrons of Indian cricket. They would soon maintain that tradition by buying a stake in the Punjab IPL side, though it is hard to think Jinnah would have approved of the IPL any more than he approved of the Wadias. He was a man of conservative tastes. Then again, as a liberal democrat, he would not have approved of a military dictator naming Pakistan’s biggest stadium after an Arab despot either.
India won the first of the Lahore games, brilliantly chasing down 293. That put the series at 2-2 with one game left. I drove down from Islamabad to watch, but it was a disappointing game. The Indians batted first and also scored 293, which the Pakistanis never looked remotely like getting. They lost early wickets, including three to Irfan Pathan, a 19-year-old Gujarati fast bowler, who radiated boyish delight in the game. When Inzy got out, caught on the boundary by Tendulkar, Pakistan were 87 for five, and the series was all but over.
I remember little more of the game, but I will never forget the crowd. It was less euphoric than in Karachi, but memorable for a different sort of entente. This time the Indian and Pakistani fans were not segregated. Scanning one of the smarter stands, I watched as Punjabis from either side of the border laughed, screamed and harangued each other. The men, middle-class Pakistanis and Indians, wore the same sports shirts over the same ample paunches and servant-ironed jeans. Their Punjabi wives wore the same costume of salwar kameez and showy jewellery. It was hard to tell Pakistani from Indian.
I also remember Musharraf, who was watching the game from the VVIP gallery, rising to salute the crowd. It cheered raucously as the dictator snapped to attention – because all Punjabis, whether Indian or Pakistani, like a man in uniform. But I thought this was a strange sight at a cricket match.
The Test series, which India won 2-1, attracted less attention. None of the games was close or drew much of a crowd. Pakistanis are even more out of love with Test cricket than Indians. As a result, the cricket series slipped down the Pakistani news agenda, for which there was great deal of competition at this time. On the eve of the cricket tour, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, Abdul Qadir Khan, was revealed to have been hawking bombs to North Korea. Meanwhile Musharraf, having recently survived two jihadist assassination attempts, had declared a crackdown on the Islamist militant groups his army had previously nurtured. A new war in the tribal region of Waziristan, where Pakistan’s army were battling jihadist fugitives from Afghanistan, was at the same time going disastrously.
In an echo of the 1980s, the mounting troubles on Pakistan’s northwest border underlay Musharraf’s sudden enthusiasm for making peace with India. Flagging Pakistani support for the insurgency in Kashmir was another sign of that change. In 2004 around 1,800 people were killed there, less than half the record toll of three years before. By 2012 the death toll was down to 117.
Quite how earnestly Musharraf wanted peace, future historians will decide. Yet there was clearly more than political expediency to Pakistan’s warm welcome for the Indian players. It was a sign that many Pakistanis had had enough of the old antagonism. After a decade of political upheaval, Pakistan was enjoying a period of stability under its fourth army dictator. The economy was buoyant. Despite the bad news from the north-west frontier, there was a new optimism among middle-class Pakistanis, including many recently returned from Dubai, Britain and America. They were in no mood for war with India.
Pakistanis had also, unbeknown to most Indians, started seeing a lot more of India. Musharraf – in what remains the single lasting achievement of his rule – had liberalised Pakistan’s media in 2002. This led to a flood of Indian news programmes and Hindi dramas and films appearing on Pakistani television. And many Pakistanis were impressed by the new Indian affluence they revealed. Middle-class Pakistanis spoke wistfully of the opportunities to be had in Mumbai and Bangalore. Reports on India’s perfidy in Kashmir, hitherto a staple of Pakistani news, became increasingly rare.
Hence the enormous goodwill shown towards the Indian cricketers. It was more than starry-eyed fandom. In fact India-style celebrity worship scarcely exists in Pakistan: though its people love cricket as Indians do, they make much less of their cricketers. Even the most revered Pakistani players can be seen out and about in the shops and restaurants of Islamabad and Karachi. Indian players cannot live anything like so freely in Mumbai and Kolkata. They would get mobbed by sobbing fans. Pakistanis, by contrast, would consider such behaviour absurd.
On a flight from Lahore to Islamabad, I once bumped into the all-rounder Shahid Afridi. He is not a great cricketer, but he can be a thrilling one. ‘Boom Boom’, as Pakistanis call him, has hit three of the seven fastest one-day centuries, including the fastest, a crazy thrash of 102 runs off 37 balls against Sri Lanka in 1996. He was a teenager at the time. With the exception of Imran Khan, who holds an exalted place in Pakistan (and may one day be its prime minister), there is no more popular Pakistani cricketer. Yet in the intimate confines of a small Pakistan International Airlines plane, no one gave Afridi a third glance. As he disembark
ed, the purser showed no hint of recognising him. As Shahid waited for his bag to appear on the carousel at Islamabad airport, only one slavish cricket fan went up to shake his hand, and that slavish fan was me.
By contrast, when four Indian cricketers paid a visit to one of Pakistan’s best private universities, the Lahore University of Management Studies, they must have felt at home. A crowd of well-heeled students, representatives of Pakistan’s small English-speaking elite, screamed like Beatle-maniacs when the cricketers appeared. The Indian party included Lakshmipathy Balaji, a journeyman Tamil medium-pacer who the Pakistani crowds had, for some reason that no one quite understood, taken to their hearts. ‘Balaji! Balaji! Balaji!’ the students chanted as the Indians made their entry. It was an echo of Indian-style celebrity kerfuffle – an augury, perhaps, of how Pakistan’s media revolution was changing the country.
The question-and-answer session that followed was also revealing. Rahul Dravid, another in the Indian party, sounded a diplomatic note: ‘I did not come with preconceived notions. I told myself I would come with an open mind and I have liked what I have seen and experienced.’ Then Balaji brought the house down. Asked what he liked about Pakistan, he grinned and said, ‘the girls here are really pretty.’ A more interesting question was asked by a small boy, who had been brought along by his elder sister: ‘You’re a Muslim,’ he said to the fast bowler Irfan Pathan, ‘so why aren’t you playing for Pakistan?’
Seven years later, Irfan was sitting on the bed in his Delhi hotel room, wearing his Delhi Daredevils practice kit. The room was neatly filled with running shoes and brightly coloured breathable fabrics, the luggage of the peripatetic sports star. It was his home for the duration of the fourth IPL season.
We had been reminiscing about the 2004 tour. Leaving aside the cricket, Irfan had two vivid memories. One was of the crowd in Karachi. The other was of the question he was asked by that impudent boy in Lahore. ‘He was very young, very innocent, probably 12 or 14,’ said Irfan, in his smooth, Bollywood-accented English. ‘He didn’t know what it was he was asking.’
Yet it was a question that went to the heart of Pakistan’s troubled identity. It was one that Indian Muslims had been asked too many times. And whether the boy knew it or not, it also had a special significance for Irfan, which no Indian could miss.
Just over two years before that now-famous tour, in February 2002, Irfan’s home state of Gujarat had suffered one of the worst bouts of communal killing since India’s partition. It began on a Wednesday at 7.43am, when a train called the Sabarmati Express stopped in Godhra in eastern Gujarat. It was bound for Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s biggest city, and was laden with Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, where they had been campaigning for the government to raise a temple to Ram over the rubble of the Babri mosque. Much of what followed is contested. Yet it is certain the train was stoned by a Muslim mob and that a fire broke out on it, in which 58 of the passengers, including women and children, were incinerated.
Gujarat’s recently elected BJP government called an official day of mourning the next day, which allowed the bodies of the dead pilgrims to be carried in slow funeral processions through the streets of Ahmedabad. In the state of India most roiled by Hindu–Muslim violence, this was tantamount to inciting the violence that duly ensued.
Mobs of livid Hindus attacked Muslim areas in almost every Gujarat town, including Ahmedabad, Baroda and Rajkot. Muslim women were raped, forced to drink kerosene and set alight; their children were hacked to pieces with swords. The police failed to stop the violence. There were reports that in some places they were leading it. Members of the government were also involved. A BJP member of Gujarat’s state assembly handed out swords to the rioters, urging them to ‘kill those bastards’. Her boss, Gujarat’s BJP chief minister Narendra Modi, was reported to have insisted on the Hindus’ right to ‘vent their anger’. In many places, Muslims retaliated; but they accounted for most of the dead. In all, perhaps 2,000 were killed.
Irfan was 17 at the time and living in a small mosque on the edge of Baroda. He had grown up there, along with his elder half-brother, Yusuf, who would follow him into the Indian team. Their father, Mehboob Pathan, was employed to look after the mosque and deliver the Muslim call to prayer five times a day through its crackling loudspeakers. If any Muslim cricketers can be said to have had their allegiance to India seriously tested, it was the Pathan brothers.
Irfan did not like talking about the violence, certainly not to a journalist. ‘Obviously, a lot of people created a bad name for Gujarat in 2002,’ he told me, ‘you know, what with what happened and everything ... I would rather not go into it because it was just a bad phase, which is gone past now. And even then I really don’t think there was an issue with the people who lived around us, in the temple behind our mosque. We were all together, we never had any issue.
‘The trouble came from ... I don’t know where it came from ... it’s very unfair to say those people, I mean those our friends and those our neighbours who were from different religion ... We never had any trouble from them.’
It was a shame. For fear of courting controversy, Irfan wouldn’t say what his family had endured during the riots, in which more than 500 mosques and Sufi shrines were destroyed or damaged. Therefore he couldn’t tell me about the kindness of his Hindu neighbours either.
Yet just as Azharuddin’s captaincy had been an important consolation for put-upon Indian secularism, so would Irfan be. Less than two years after the massacres in Gujarat, in December 2003, he made his Test debut for India in Adelaide. His left-arm swingers were raw but fast and hugely promising. It was not long before informed pundits were calling him India’s best seam-bowling prospect since Kapil Dev. According to Irfan’s father, Gujarat’s tainted chief minister telephoned to congratulate him on having such a fine son. ‘Irfan aapka hi nahin, hamara hain!’ he said: ‘Irfan is not yours, but all of ours!’
Given Modi’s reputation for Muslim-baiting (he once referred to relief camps for the Muslims made destitute by the riots as ‘baby-producing factories’), this was remarkable. It might also recall the rabble-rousing Thackeray’s double-edged accolade to Azharuddin, that other ‘nationalist Muslim’. Yet Irfan, a strikingly modest Indian celebrity cricketer, is not Azhar. And India, despite what many feared in the aftermath of the riots, is not Gujarat.
With the BJP also in power in Delhi at that dreadful time, many Indians looked into the future and saw a saffron haze. The prospects for Hindu nationalism looked excellent. The BJP’s core supporters were anxious middle-class Hindus, a constituency that was growing rapidly with India’s economy. Many feared that India’s secular foundations were crumbling, with perhaps grim repercussions for Indian Muslims.
But those fears now look exaggerated. Soon after the 2004 India–Pakistan series, India held a general election, which the BJP was expected to win. But it lost to Congress, which formed a coalition government under the premiership of its old economic reformer, Manmohan Singh. The reasons for the result were complicated, as Indian electoral outcomes always are. They included the disgruntlement of millions of poor villagers who had seen little benefit from India’s recent growth. But this was also a reminder that die-hard support for Hindu nationalism was much smaller than many had suspected, perhaps representing only a tenth of the electorate. And India’s rising middle class was not, after all, flocking to increase that number. The doom-mongers had underestimated India’s accommodative traditions. They also overlooked the condition most associated with middle classes the world over, which is stability. The BJP has remained out of power ever since and, though it may soon return – so corrupt and ineffective have Congress’s subsequent governments been – it will not be by attacking Muslims. That, it is now clear, puts off more Indians than it pleases.
Meanwhile the fortunes of India’s 180 million Muslims have started looking up a bit. The community is still wretchedly poor. In 2006, according to a high-level commission, only 4 per cent of Muslims above the age of 20 were grad
uates or diploma holders, compared to 7 per cent for the population as a whole. Their share of public-sector jobs was ‘abysmally low’, including just 4 per cent in the police. Yet poor Muslims have, like all Indians, benefited from the increased opportunities that India’s growth has delivered. Labour migration from eastern India, which has a high proportion of poor Muslims, to the flourishing cities of Maharashtra and Gujarat is running at a record high.
Indian Muslims also have useful new role models, following an encouraging rise in the number of Muslims playing cricket for India. During the first decade of the 21st century, seven of India’s 43 Test players were Muslim. Most, like Irfan and Yusuf, were lower-middle-class strivers. And more such Muslim stars will rise, ensuring that Indian Muslims will be even less likely to support Pakistan, which these days far fewer do. In January 2011 the Pathan brothers, no longer resident in the family mosque, were given three-year contracts to play in the IPL, together worth $4 million a year. That sort of money is a powerful incentive for all poor Indian cricketers, whether Muslim or Hindu.
‘This is such a great country,’ Irfan said, ‘that if you are good at something, no matter your religion, you will get there. I’m proud to be an Indian and I’m proud to be a Muslim and I’m proud of the way I’ve been brought up in the mosque. And I can say that in the seven years I’ve been in the limelight not a single fan has come up to me and said something about me being a Muslim. Not once. Abusive, yes, that can happen when you play badly. But that is just a fan getting upset with a cricketer. It has nothing to do with religion. I’ve never had a fan come up and make me realise I’m anything other than a cricketer.’
‘Would you ever want to talk in public about Islam?’ I asked. Irfan seemed intrigued by the idea.
