cross-border talks
SHADOWS ACROSS THE PLAYING FIELD
60 YEARS OF INDIA-PAKISTAN CRICKET
SHASHI THAROOR
SHAHARYAR KHAN
SERIES EDITOR
DAVID PAGE
Lotus Collection
© Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan, 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
This edition published in June 2009
Second impression August 2009
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Scorecards: James Alter
ISBN: 978-81-7436-718-1
Typeset in AGaramond by Roli Books Pvt. Ltd.
and printed at Saurabh Printers, Okhla.
OTHER CROSS-BORDER TALKS TITLES:
Dr Humayun Khan and G. Parthasarathy
Diplomatic Divide
Meghnad Desai and Aitzaz Ahsan
Divided by Democracy
Gyanendra Pandey and Yunas Samad
Fault Lines of Nationhood
Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani
Tales of Two Cities
OTHER LOTUS TITLES:
Ajit Bhattarcharjea
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah: Tragic Hero of Kashmir
Anil Dharker
Icons: Men & Women Who Shaped Today’s India
Aitzaz Ahsan
The Indus Saga: The Making of Pakistan
Alam Srinivas & TR Vivek
IPL: The Inside Story
Amir Mir
The True Face of Jehadis: Inside Pakistan’s Terror Networks
Ashok Mitra
The Starkness of It
H.L.O. Garrett
The Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar
M.J. Akbar
India: The Siege Within
M.J. Akbar
Kashmir: Behind the Vale
M.J. Akbar
The Shade of Swords
M.J. Akbar
Byline
M.J. Akbar
Blood Brothers: A Family Saga
Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo
Param Vir: Our Heroes in Battle
Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo
The Sinking of INS Khukri: What Happened in 1971
Madhu Trehan
Tehelka as Metaphor
Mushirul Hasan
India Partitioned. 2 Vols
Mushirul Hasan
John Company to the Republic
Mushirul Hasan
Knowledge, Power and Politics
Nayantara Sahgal (ed.)
Before Freedom: Nehru’s Letters to His Sister
Nilima Lambah
A Life Across Three Continents
Sharmishta Gooptu and Boria Majumdar (eds)
Revisiting 1857: Myth, Memory, History
Shashi Joshi
The Last Durbar
Shrabani Basu
Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan
Shyam Bhatia
Goodbye Shahzadi: A Political Biography
FORTHCOMING LOTUS TITLES:
M.B. Naqvi
Pakistan on Knife’s Edge
Amir Mir
Fluttering Flag of Jehad
contents
introduction
david page
fantasies and realities
shashi tharoor
rivalry and diplomacy
shaharyar khan
acknowledgements
scorecards
index
The disagreements between Hindus and Muslims before 1947, and between India and Pakistan since, have thrown a long shadow across the playing fields of the world.
– Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field
introduction
i
n 1987, I arrived by chance at Lahore airport at more or less the same time as Imran Khan and his teammates, who had just won their first Test series against India, followed by a 5-1 victory in the one-day internationals. Proceeding from the airport to Faletti’s hotel took a very long time as the taxi got caught up in a sea of supporters in exultant mood waving flags and cheering their heroes. I particularly remember seeing a phalanx of scooters, six or seven abreast, each with three or four young men on board, each sporting welcoming banners, on one of which was written the memorable slogan: Imran Khan Faateh-i-Hind (Conqueror of India). It was more a reception for a Mughal emperor than for a cricket team captain.
The German military theorist, von Clausewitz, famously wrote that ‘war is merely the continuation of politics by other means’. For much of the last sixty years the same might also be said of the cricketing rivalry between India and Pakistan. Cricket has pride of place in the sporting calendars of both countries and no fixture is awaited with more anticipation than Tests or one-day internationals (ODIs) between them. In all cricket-playing countries, national teams carry the hopes and aspirations of millions of supporters but Indian and Pakistani teams often seem to be engaged more in a proxy war than a sporting encounter. An Indian journalist who visited both teams before their World Cup fixture in South Africa in 2003 was told by one cricketer that ‘the mood in the respective dressing rooms was akin to soldiers in a bunker, both sides desperate to emerge victorious in the end’.1
Ramachandra Guha in his classic history of cricket in India A Corner of a Foreign Field has brilliantly shown how the game has been closely entwined with politics from the very beginning.2 In nineteenth century Bombay, the Parsis and Hindus fought for their own space on the maidan in a challenge to the dominant European gymkhana which mirrored the stirrings of Indian nationalism. In the early twentieth century, the Parsi and Hindu gymkhanas were joined by a Muslim gymkhana – the Muslims taking to cricket, as they took to politics, more tardily than others – and the ground was laid for the famous Quadrangular and Pentagular tournaments between communal teams which brought life in Bombay to a standstill every year in the month of November.
From the late 1930s, the Indian National Congress tried to stop the Bombay Pentangular, arguing that such communal contests played into the hands of the British and their ‘divide and rule’ policy. But the cricketers and their public only acquiesced under pressure. In the early 1940s, the communal matches continued to pull in massive crowds and the heroes of the different teams – men such as C.K.Nayudu for the Hindus and Major Wazir Ali for the Muslims – received a kind of adulation which was all the more intense because of its political resonance. The final of the 1944 Pentangular, in which the Muslims beat the Hindus, with one wicket to spare, was described at the time as ‘by far the most exciting finish ever’. With the Muslim League demand for Pakistan gaining momentum, it was also seen as highly symbolic.
Independence and Partition killed off the Pentangular, which was superseded in India by zonal competitions like the Ranji Trophy, in which teams are selected by geography and not by caste or community. By and large these have been less intense contests, in which sport rather than politics is in the ascendant. After 1947, it has been the cricketing encounters between India and Pakistan which have carried the political intensity of the Pentangular, even if their pedigree is questioned and the criteria for tea
m selection very different.
Since 1947, cricketing relations between the two countries have been as turbulent and unpredictable as their political relations. In times of hostility and war, there have been long periods without matches. Even when the teams have met in more peaceful times, the atmosphere has often been surcharged with nationalist, if not chauvinist, feeling. Yet the passion for cricket on both sides of the border, like the passion for Bollywood, transcends these divisions. In the difficult times it has acted as a common bond, a source of hope and a means of breaking down barriers of mistrust. Cricket has not only given rise to proxy wars; it has also been an arm of diplomacy on both sides of the border.
This volume tells the story of cricketing relations between India and Pakistan through the eyes of two men who bring to the task not only a great love of the game but also a deep knowledge of their political and diplomatic relations.
Shaharyar Khan is a scion of the princely house of Bhopal, who after studying at Cambridge University served Pakistan as a diplomat for more than thirty years. He was ambassador to Amman, London and Paris before becoming foreign secretary of Pakistan in the early 1990s. After his retirement, Shaharyar Khan’s diplomatic skills were put to the service of his first love – cricket. He acted as Pakistan’s team manager on its highly successful tour of India in 1999 and as the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Control Board between 2003 and 2006. These were times when cricket was in the vanguard of diplomacy between the two countries and Shaharyar Khan’s account of those years provides a privileged insight into efforts to build bridges between governments and peoples.
Shashi Tharoor worked for the United Nations for nearly thirty years. He acted as under-secretary-general during the tenure of Kofi Annan and was the runner-up in the election to replace him in 2006. He is also an acclaimed novelist, author and newspaper columnist, who has written extensively on Indian statecraft and foreign policy and is widely read across several continents and in many languages. What is less well known is that he has a passion for cricket, which he has nourished since his schooldays, and follows the fortunes of the Indian team with a keen interest and a discriminating eye. During the Indian tour of England in 2007 I listened with rapt attention to his appearance as a guest on the BBC’s Test Match Special as he elaborated on the personalities and performances of the key players and on the role of cricket in Indian life. It was not long afterwards that he kindly agreed to contribute to this volume.
The two essays are very different in character, though they cover much of the same ground. Shashi Tharoor’s essay is that of a passionate outsider, who has spent much of his life in non-cricket playing countries like the US, ‘his enthusiasm sharpened by the keen edge of deprivation’. Shaharyar Khan, on the other hand, is very much the insider, who has not only played the game himself but also exercised an influence in the counsels of cricket both at home and internationally. Shashi Tharoor’s essay is more encyclopaedic: there is scarcely a match he neglects to cover, even those which were played in secondary venues such as Sharjah and Toronto. Shaharyar Khan concentrates mostly on the Test series and ODIs because he thinks the other matches lack ‘the cutting edge of the bilateral series’.
As the older of the two, Shaharyar Khan retains boyhood memories of the Bombay Pentangular and frames his own essay within that historical context. His account of Pentagular fever in Bhopal and the annual trip to Bombay to support Major Wazir Ali and the Muslim team is a period piece in its own right. However, he begins his essay with Douglas Jardine, who had arrived in India after the notorious Bodyline series in Australia to captain England in the first series between the two countries in the winter of 1933-34. As Shaharyar Khan points out, the Bodyline controversy was probably the first time cricket demonstrated its undoubted power to make or mar relations between nations and it was an extraordinary irony that the man who took the initiative and attracted the flak was supposedly a ‘gentleman’ and committed to the values of fair play which had made ‘It isn’t cricket’ into a household phrase.
C.L.R.James, the celebrated historian of West Indian cricket, wrote that Bodyline was ‘the blow from which “It isn’t cricket” has never recovered’. He saw the early 1930s as a pivotal period in modern history ‘in which the contemporary rejection of tradition, the contemporary disregard of means, the contemporary callousness were taking shape’. For him, Bodyline was ‘not an incident’ but ‘the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket’.3 By beginning his essay with Bodyline, therefore, Shaharyar Khan is also pointing up the challenge cricket has faced ever since: how to preserve the values of the game in a world where winning has become so much more important.
In terms of the values of the game, both authors find themselves on the same side. Shashi Tharoor is very critical of Indian spectators who carry support for their team so far that they will not applaud the fine bowling or stroke play of their Pakistani opponents. Shaharyar Khan would entirely agree. As Pakistan team manager in India in 1999, he encouraged his team to play open and positive cricket, which contributed to some of the most memorable matches in the history of their encounters. Both authors are very critical of biased umpiring, which was particularly flagrant in Pakistan before Imran Khan took the lead in appointing neutral umpires in the second half of the 1980s. Both acknowledge that the pressure to win puts a huge burden on the players and can too often distort the direction of play. Pakistan had its own Bodyline controversy, featuring the fiery Sarfraz Nawaz, which ultimately produced a new rule on the number of bouncers permitted in one over. A more frequent failing has been defensive play prompted by a determination not to lose. The extraordinary number of drawn Test encounters, particularly in the early days, tells its own story and helps to explain why the oneday international and Twenty20 contests have become so popular.
If this much is common ground, the two men approach their task from very different political points of view. Shashi Tharoor brings to his analysis a Nehruvian perspective which utterly rejects communal divisions, whether in politics or in cricket, pre-partition or post-partition. He is quite clear that India-Pakistan rivalry on the cricket field is not a continuation of Pentangular contests between Hindu and Muslim teams. Pakistanis may see themselves as inheritors of that mantle but India prides itself on the inclusiveness of its teams. Captains of India’s Test teams have been drawn from many communities and at least 30 Muslims have been capped. Shashi Tharoor notes that in recent years communal animus has affected Indian cricket, with parties like the Shiv Sena on occasion trying to disrupt tours by Pakistan teams. But he is as critical of Hindu chauvinism as he is of Muslim sectarianism and brings to his critique of Pakistan cricket the same unyielding support for secular values that Nehru once applied to the Pakistan movement.
Shaharyar Khan is less critical of the Pentangular. In fact he sees it as an important stage in the popularization of cricket in the subcontinent and takes the view that the pre-war communal contests, which were invariably played without incident and to massive audiences, had a role in easing tensions. There is also some evidence that for Pakistan Test players at least, the Pentagular contests sharpened their competitiveness for the India-Pakistan matches which were to follow. This was certainly true for Hafeez Kardar, who had played for India and the Muslims before Partition and was to captain the first Pakistan Test side to tour India in 1952.
Shaharyar Khan acknowledges that for cricketers, as for everyone else, Partition was a time for harrowing decisions. Some Muslims opted for Pakistan, some stayed behind in India. One or two, like the genial Amir Elahi, who migrated later, even played for both national teams at different times. Fewer Hindus stayed behind in Pakistan, though there were some, in Sindh particularly, and that community is still providing a few Test players for the country. However, the increasing trend for minorities in Pakistan to feel marginalized has certainly affected cricket as well, despite the founder’s clear commitment to equality for all communities in his famous speech to the Constituent Assembly. Shashi Tharoor does
not pull any punches in criticizing this trend, while Shaharyar Khan refers directly to Jinnah’s speech as an indication of where he stands. He thinks it was only to be expected that cricket would play a role in putting the new nation on the map but he maintains that ‘there was no attempt to give this impetus an Islamic colouring’.
It was a British conservative politician, Norman Tebbitt, who criticized British populations of South Asian and West Indian origin for not supporting the England cricket team during Test matches against their ‘home’ sides and in the process gave currency to the term ‘the Tebbitt test’. Shashi Tharoor accepts that, invidious though it may have been, Indian supporters have sometimes put Muslim cricketers to a similar test, voicing suspicions of stars like Abbas Ali Baig or Mohammad Azharuddin when they have not done particularly well against Pakistani opposition. Shaharyar Khan goes as far as to say that this is more a problem in India than in Pakistan, not least because of the size of the Muslim minority. Both men agree that such behaviour is unwarranted and unacceptable, as is its reverse: the patronizing of ‘good Muslim players’ by Hindu chauvinist politicians – though the practice does take place.
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