India vs Pakistan, matchless

It is that time once again when you are asked to make sense of an India-Pakistan cricket encounter. It is a question that challenges your understanding of history, politics, nationalism, commerce and yes, of the sport itself. No matter how much you try to look at the Champions Trophy clash between the two nations — torn apart by a bloody partition more than seven decades ago — as just another cricket match, you can’t.

Just like life itself, a sporting contest between any two countries cannot be seen in a vacuum. In this case, the two nations have fought three violent wars, politically fought at every international forum and after 2007, never played a bilateral cricket series against each other, with India refusing to visit Pakistan for almost two decades now.

Yet, cricket they must play, even if it means playing at a neutral venue, as the refusal to do so could invite sanctions when it comes to an International Cricket Council (ICC) event. In the changing times when India holds unchallenged control over international cricket politics because of the money it generates from the game, it can get away with any breach of rules. It is so powerful that it forced the ICC to take an unprecedented decision to let India play all its Champions Trophy matches at Dubai, though Pakistan are the hosts of the tournament. The cricketing world order today has no space for Pakistan’s protest and all the time to address India’s concerns. When money, sorry India, speaks, the world listens.

In similar situations in the past, nations had to forfeit their matches and concede points when they refused to play another country in ICC tournaments. In the 1996 World Cup, which India and Pakistan co-hosted with Sri Lanka, teams from the West Indies and Australia had to concede their matches against Sri Lanka as they refused to play in that country due to political reasons. Ironically, India and Pakistan made a joint team to play Sri Lanka in solidarity with their island nation neighbours. That was a bygone era of cricket politics when the world had just begun to realise the money-making potential of the game in India because of live television and India’s opening up of its economy. Pakistan may have still been an enemy nation but in international cricket politics, it was India’s friend and a strong ally. Unlike today, India’s cricket board was not an extension of the government and had the courage to take many decisions that the Indian state may not have liked.

From a purely cricketing perspective as well, times have changed. India are the powerhouse of skill as well, especially in the shorter format, and Pakistan are struggling to stay afloat. To put it simply, Pakistan are no match for India and if one were to predict an Indian defeat on Sunday, even Pakistanis would express disbelief and a section of Indians will dub you anti-national.

In this world of hyper-nationalism and social media troll army, nostalgia for those rich and rewarding past encounters between the now nations would be a dangerous territory to touch. When politics prevented the two nations from playing in each other’s country, a neutral venue in Sharjah was found in the 1980s to milk the money-making opportunity the cricketing rivalry offered. Sharjah, a tiny dot on the map of the United Arab Emirates, became a breeding ground for the jingoistic crowd of expats from the two countries to express visceral hatred for each other, but cricket rivalry created many new icons and thrilling finishes.

In my own memory, some of the best moments of my reporting days are the three visits I made to Pakistan —- 1997, 2004 and 2005. The vast army of cricket fans that visited Pakistan will bear testimony to the love and affection which people showered on us. Lahore was more Punjabi than the Amritsar I had lived in during my school and college days. Its generosity was touching and the desire for peace with India heartwarming. The positive impact of people-to-people contact, which the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee encouraged in 2004, when telling the Indian team to “sirf match hi nahin dil bhi jeet ke aana” (not just matches, win people’s hearts as well), was evident anywhere one went in Pakistan. At the Lahore stadium where India lost the Test match, many Pakistani spectators were holding Indian flags and cheering the Indian team.

One had been witness to similar scenes in Chennai in 1999 when Wasim Akram’s Pakistan beat India and then took a victory lap while the packed stadium gave them a standing ovation.

In the past many years now, India and Pakistan have only played each other in ICC tournaments, encounters which are few and far between. Pakistan is no longer the team it once was and India look near invincible in their dominance of the cricketing field. Many fans believe that India-Pakistan matches are now nothing but overhyped contests, though there is little doubt they still generate television revenues, media frenzy and a lot of ammunition to social media warriors and the flag-waving, chest-thumping nationalists. And yet, given the hyper-charged politics of the region and what cricket means to the two countries, it would be wrong to assume it is just another cricket match.

— The writer is the author of ‘Not Quite Cricket’ and ‘Not Just Cricket’