by James Astill
‘If the time comes, yes, I’d definitely like to tell the world, not just the media: “Read the Koran, do what it says and teaches.” My belief in Allah is always there. You know, I want to make sure before I die that I tell the world this is such a beautiful religion and what’s happening around the world is not right. Because Allah has said it – only He is going to give life, take life, as well as only He is going to control the world. We only come here to the world to pray, to do the right things.’
‘Do you pray much yourself?’
Irfan looked slightly sheepish. ‘I do pray, but I would like to be a bit more prayer-friendly.’ He said. ‘But definitely, me and my whole family, we believe in Allah big time.’
Between 2004 and 2007 India and Pakistan came closer to making peace than ever before. Their leaders and officials met regularly, to discuss differences and forge agreements. Telephone hotlines were created, rail, road and air connections expanded, and visa regimes relaxed. Thousands of Indians and Pakistanis visited each other’s countries for the first time.
Draft agreements were reached on the countries’ outstanding territorial disputes: including over the Siachen glacier and even Kashmir. The latter would have involved, more or less, settling on the status quo, which is what India has wanted all along. By the time I moved to Delhi with The Economist, in early 2007, commentators in both countries were predicting peace by the end of the year.
But then the diplomatic wheels fell off. Protests against Musharraf broke out in Pakistan, causing a year of political turmoil, during which the bilateral process stalled. By the end of it, Musharraf was in exile in London, Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s most popular leader, had returned from exile in Dubai and been assassinated by jihadists, and Nawaz Sharif, her long-time opponent, was also back home. Completing this round of Pakistani musical chairs, after an election in February 2008, Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari, a louche Sindhi feudal lord tarnished by allegations of gross corruption, was installed as president.
He at least wanted to make peace with India. But that hope died in November 2008, with the three-day rampage through Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists. The peace process was ended – and so, for the time being, was India–Pakistan cricket. Since India’s dramatic tour of Pakistan in 2004 there had been three more closely fought series, played in both countries, including nine Test matches of which India had won two, lost two and drawn five. These fixtures were also lucrative; advertisers had spent nearly $70 million on the 2004 series, roughly three times the usual figure for a bilateral India series. But, after the terrorist attack, India’s next tour of Pakistan, planned for the spring of 2009, was cancelled. ‘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,’ said India’s sports minister M.S. Gill.
Most Indians assumed Pakistan’s army was behind the Mumbai attack. It was carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a jihadist group with strong ties to Pakistan’s generals. But the government of Manmohan Singh showed restraint. It did not threaten war. Nor was there a backlash against Indian Muslims. Days after the attack the BJP took out frontpage newspaper advertisements in Mumbai and Delhi that depicted a blood-spattered backdrop and the words: ‘Brutal terror strikes at will. Weak government unwilling and incapable to fight terror ...Vote for the BJP.’ Four state elections were looming. But the Hindu nationalists won only one, in Madhya Pradesh, and for reasons that had nothing to do with Islamaphobia or Pakistan.
It was just possible that Pakistan’s army was not to blame for the attack: because its former jihadist proxies were now running wild. By 2007 Pakistan’s main cities had become battlegrounds. Islamabad, a Himalayan refuge for rich Pakistanis and foreign diplomats, was seeing bomb blasts every few weeks. The Marriott hotel, where I stayed during frequent visits from Delhi, was blown up by suicide bombers, killing 54. A grenade was tossed over the wall of a nearby Italian restaurant where I often ate, killing a Turkish woman and wounding a dozen others. The terrorists were probably from Waziristan, from which an Islamist insurgency had now spread across Pakistan’s north-west frontier. By 2010 almost 40,000 Pakistanis had been killed in a decade of terrorism and insurgency. Many wondered how long the country could even hold together.
The national cricket team, for so long a source of Pakistani pride, was also having difficulties. In 2006 Inzamam’s Pakistanis were penalised for allegedly scratching the ball to make it swing during a Test match in England, and were so angry they walked off the pitch and conceded the match, leading to a huge international rumpus. Inzamam was later cleared of deliberately altering the condition of the ball, but penalised for bringing the game into disrepute by his protest. Ball-tampering was an old problem in cricket. Yet the tour was also notable for a newer one, as signalled by the head of the Pakistani cricket board, Dr Nasim Ashraf.
‘There should be balance between religion and cricket,’ he said, after the team had returned home. He referred to reports that Inzy’s religiosity was getting out of hand. The captain and most of his team had started celebrating runs and wickets by dropping to the wicket in prayer. Net practices were turning into prayer sessions, which continued late into the night before a big game. There were allegations that the team’s younger players were being pressurised to join in. ‘There should be no pressure on players who don’t pray regularly or any compulsion on them to do it,’ said Ashraf.
The Islamisation of Pakistani cricket reflected how Pakistani society was changing. Yet it is said to have started with a tragedy. In 2001 the infant daughter of the Pakistani opening batsman Saeed Anwar died after a long illness. Saeed was distraught. He sought comfort in a stringent, missionary school of Islam, Tablighi Jamaat. Impressed by his example, several of his team-mates, including Inzamam, Saqlain Mushtaq and Mushtaq Ahmed, also grew their beards and began attending Tablighi gatherings in Raiwind, a town outside Lahore.
This injection of piety into the team led to controversy. In September 2005 it was announced that Yousuf Youhana, a rare Pakistani Christian cricketer, had converted to Islam and would henceforth be known as Mohammad Yousuf. Pakistani Christians, members of a small and much put-upon minority, were devastated. Yousuf’s family disowned him. Unabashed, and now sporting the longest beard in cricket, Yousuf scored nine centuries in 11 Test matches the following year. For many Pakistanis, this was a high-level endorsement of his decision.
But providence did not prevent further scandals, often involving the Rawalpindi Express. There was no danger of him turning fundamentalist. Shoaib, a poor boy from Rawalpindi, was an incorrigible larrikin who liked bowling fast, fast cars and, yes, fast women. He had been in and out of trouble his entire career, for almost every imaginable misdemeanour: for calling an umpire a ‘twat’, for throwing a bottle into a crowd, for ball-tampering, for attending a fashion show on a Muslim holiday. Shoaib seemed to resist authority as a matter of principle.
That was often apparent during the momentous 2004 series against India, which saw clashes between Shoaib and his captain. After he had turned in several poor performances, Inzy more or less accused his star bowler of not trying. Shoaib also got into hot water for fighting a policeman at the Gaddafi Stadium. The legality of his bowling action was meanwhile questioned by newspapers.
That led me to an interesting assignment, one sunny mid-April morning at the Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium. The last Test of the series was due to begin there the next day. And I had arranged to meet Shoaib, as he completed his match-day preparation, and have a bat against him. My crazy idea was that this would nicely enliven an article I was writing for The Economist on the biomechanics of fast bowling.
The Indian and Pakistani players were congregated on opposite sides of the Rawalpindi ground. Under the eye of their New Zealander coach, John Wright, the Indians were going through a rigorous fielding drill, racing between bright orange practice cones. Most of the Pakistani players were lounging on the turf beside a pair of tattered nets, snoozing and chatting. There was no sign of Inzy or th
eir team coach, Javed Miandad. Shoaib, training alone, was meanwhile pelting around the boundary.
When he had finished his run, he came over, his barrel chest heaving and drenched with sweat, and apologised for keeping me waiting. Waving away my request for a helmet (which he had promised me in advance) Shoaib then pointed me to the business end of one of the nets. His teammates, briefly curious, fell silent and watched as he ran in to bowl at me. He bowled pretty fast – fast enough to knock the stumps right out of the ground, which he did twice. But Shoiab was bowling much below his full tilt, and, as I relaxed a bit, I found I could play the ball fairly comfortably. It was a wonderful, Walter Mittyesque experience, in surreal circumstances.
There was no chance one of the Indian bowlers would have indulged my request. Their coachers, perhaps rightly, would never have allowed it. Moreover, cocooned in their celebrity isolation, Indian cricketers are much harder to befriend. Getting in touch with Shoaib, by contrast, had been a doddle. I had got his mobile number from a friend at the Pakistan Cricket Board. And when I had called him, out of the blue, and suggested my idea for a net, he had simply laughed and suggested this time and place. As I was thanking Shoaib for his indulgence, my heart still thumping with fear, he suggested we meet up some time soon for a drink.
I wished he hadn’t. Because I would not then have boasted of my new celebrity friendship, at a party a couple of nights later. And my friends, a gang of high-living Punjabis, would not have persuaded me to invite Shoaib around there and then. I duly called him up, and he answered the phone in a voice thick with sleep. Looking at my watch in horror, I suddenly realised it was long after midnight, and he was in the middle of a Test match against India.
‘Thanks, man,’ said Shoaib, thickly. ‘Normally I’d be up for that. But the problem is we’re not supposed to go out during a Test ... But, man ...’ continued the Express, interrupting my anxious apologies, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any ladies with you?’
He was great fun, but indicative of the indiscipline that plagues Pakistani cricket. Over the next five years, before his retirement during the 2011 World Cup, Shoaib was fined and banned at least four times – though often subsequently exonerated on appeal. His alleged indiscretions included using steroids, attacking his new-ball partner, Muhammad Asif, with a bat, and criticising the Pakistani board. He missed more cricket than he played, due to bans, injuries and, ahead of the 2009 Twenty20 World Cup, a nasty case of genital warts.
Pakistani cricket was meanwhile beset by more serious blights. One was terrorism. To replace the cancelled 2009 Indian series, the Pakistani board had prevailed upon Sri Lanka to tour Pakistan instead. It promised their team ‘presidential-style security’. But as the Sri Lankan team bus was on its way to the Gaddafi Stadium, it was ambushed by jihadists. Six Sri Lankan cricketers were wounded by gunfire and eight Pakistanis, mostly policemen, were killed. Pakistan would henceforward be off-limits to foreign cricketers and it was hard to imagine when they might return. The other main affliction was match-fixing.
Pakistani players were in the thick of the allegations that came to light in 2000: an inquiry by a Pakistani high court judge, Malik Mohammad Qayyum, found two players, Salim Malik and Ata-ur-Rehman, guilty of fixing (though Malik later persuaded a Pakistani court to exonerate him). The judge also recommended that six others be censured for failing to co-operate with his enquiry, including Wasim Akram, a great fast bowler to whom Qayyum later regretted having been too lenient. ‘I had some soft corner for him,’ he admitted. ‘He was a very great bowler and I was his fan, and therefore that thing did weigh with me.’ But it hardly mattered: Qayyum’s recommendations were largely ignored by Pakistan’s cricket board, a body which can make the BCCI seem an orderly custodian of the game. Unsurprisingly, rumours had persisted that Pakistani cricketers were still buyable.
Such rumours lurked in the background of a more outrageous controversy in the Pakistani team. During the 2007 World Cup, held in the West Indies, Pakistan’s British coach, Bob Woolmer, was found dead in his Jamaica hotel room. A pathologist’s report suggested he had been strangled, and his former charges were questioned by local police. A few of the players were questioned twice. They had been knocked out of the World Cup, by Ireland, just a few hours before Woolmer’s death. This was a remarkable upset, leading to open speculation that the coach had been murdered after twigging that the match had been thrown. A subsequent police report suggested Woolmer had died of natural causes. But the coroner kept an open mind, ruling that the cause of his death was unknown.
It seemed Pakistani cricket could hardly fall further. Yet it did. In March 2010 the PCB, to the surprise of many, announced it had imposed life bans on Pakistan’s two best players, Mohammad Yousuf and Younis Khan, banned a third, the former captain Shoaib Malik, for a year, and banned or fined another four of the Pakistani team. This was its response to a disastrous tour of Australia, in which the players had been trounced and often at one another’s throats. But the bans were nonetheless absurd, and soon overturned. To no one’s surprise, most of the sanctioned players were back playing for Pakistan within a few months.
Mismanaged, unruly and denied their share of IPL riches, Pakistan’s cricketers were becoming increasingly demoralised and resentful. What happened next appeared, in retrospect, almost inevitable. Pakistan’s decimated side embarked on a tour of England, under the captaincy of Salman Butt. Against a fine England side they were well beaten in the first two Tests, at Trent Bridge and Edgbaston. In the third, at the Oval, the Pakistanis, with their usual flickering brilliance, punched back. They won the Test by three wickets, partly thanks to Mohammad Amir, a wondrously talented 18-year-old fast bowler, who bagged five in the second innings. That set up the series for a dramatic finish, to be played out at Lord’s.
Yet the drama that eventually transpired there had little to do with cricket. On the third day of the game, on 28 August, the British Sunday tabloid the News of the World ran an exposé of Butt and Pakistan’s opening bowlers, Asif and Mohammad Amir, alleging that they had conspired to bowl two no-balls to order earlier in the game.
Such selective fixing, known as ‘spot-fixing’, which is much easier to engineer and harder to detect than a rigged result, was the new corruption in cricket. It was arranged after one of the newspaper’s correspondents, a British Pakistani posing as a member of an Asian betting syndicate, paid Butt’s British agent, Mazhar Majeed, £150,000 in marked banknotes in return for a promise to fix matches. To prove his power, Majeed predicted that in the first innings of the Lord’s Test the first delivery of the third over and the sixth delivery of the tenth over would be no-balls. These were duly delivered.
The first no-ball, bowled by Amir, was so flagrant and so untypical of the bowler that one television commentator, Michael Holding, all but accused him of corruption on the basis of it. Holding, a former great West Indian fast bowler, struggled to hold back tears as he did so. After first denying the undeniable, all three players were banned from cricket for between five and ten years. They were subsequently tried by a British court, convicted of corruption and sent to prison – in Butt’s case, for 30 months. In a separate case, Pakistan’s best spinner, Danish Kaneria – only the second Hindu to have played for Pakistan – was arrested by British police on suspicion of spot-fixing while playing for Essex. He was subsequently banned from playing in England and sidelined by Pakistan.
By the time Pakistan’s cricketers travelled to India for the 2011 World Cup (which Pakistan was originally supposed to have co-hosted), they were depleted and disgraced, the emissaries of a cricketing pariah. Even their new captain, Shahid Afridi, described them as a ‘broken team’. The Pakistani cricket board was also humiliated. In the aftermath of the ‘spot-fixing’ exposé – which the PCB had at first sought to deny – it had been warned by the ICC to clean up Pakistani cricket or face serious sanctions. Never had cricket seemed more apposite to a nation’s fortunes.
Indian cricket was meanwhile sweeping all before it. The BCC
I was not about to be admonished by the ICC: it bankrolled it. India’s cricketers, with bank balances swollen by IPL loot, were among the world’s richest sportsmen. Ranked No. 1 in the world in Test cricket, they were also in fine form. As usual, every Indian expected India to win the World Cup; and that was a reasonable expectation. Yet the Pakistanis, as is their wont, also performed far better than anyone expected.
They beat Sri Lanka, Canada, Zimbabwe and Australia to reach the semi-final, against India in Mohali, which I watched in Nizamuddin bazaar. At one stage they looked on to win that game, too. Batting first, India hit 260, a middling sort of a score, which they owed to six dropped catches. Tendulkar, who made 85, was dropped an astonishing four times. In their reply, the Pakistanis started well: after 23 overs they were 100 for two. But then they lost a flurry of wickets and the scoring-rate dipped. In the end, it was not even close. The Pakistanis were all out in the last over of the innings, 29 runs short.
Afridi, who had been the bowler of the tournament – with 21 wickets at less than 13 runs apiece – was tremendously dignified in defeat. ‘First of all I’d like to congratulate the Indian cricket team and the Indian nation for this great victory, and wish them all the best for the final,’ he said, standing on the Mohali pitch. The Indians were less delicate. As they proceeded to Mumbai, to play Sri Lanka in the final, their opening batsman Gautam Gambhir vowed to dedicate a possible World Cup victory to the victims of the 2008 Pakistani terrorist attack.
A decade that had promised such hope for Indo-Pakistani relations had ended dismally. Peace was impossible now. Whatever trust had been built up during the Composite Dialogue was gone, and neither country had leaders capable of restoring it. Pakistan had entered a new era of democratic feuding; most Indian politicians were largely indifferent to Pakistan. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, was one of the few still striving for peace. Promising a new round of cricket diplomacy, he hosted his Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, at the game in Mohali. A right-minded man, born in what is today Pakistani Punjab, Singh declared that India and Pakistan ‘share the same destiny’. But many Indians would have wondered what on earth he meant by that.
