Poisoning sport
How religion poisons everything — This subtitle of a book by Christopher Hitchens, the late writer famous as an atheist polemicist, seems apt for South Asia in most times. To paraphrase Hitchens, it could be said that religion is used to poison everything in the subcontinent — even sport. After Pakistan beat India in the T20 World Cup, Waqar Younis, the former fast bowler from Pakistan, said: ‘What I liked the most was what Rizwan did. Usne Hinduon ke beech mein khade ho ke namaz padhi… That was something very, very special for me.’ Younis was part of a Pakistani team that quickly embraced evangelical religiosity, and this reached absurd heights when a Pakistan player, Ahmed Shehzad, invited Sri Lanka’s Tillakaratne Dilshan to embrace Islam to escape hellfire. This invitation suggested a pre-modern bent of mind, which neatly divided souls between the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’.
Cricket matches between India and Pakistan are so rare nowadays that they acquire rabid nationalistic — and in some cases, religious — intensity. Former Pakistan fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar passionately espouses the two-nation theory, based on pre-modern separatism rooted in tribalism and religion; it is anathema to the equalitarian ideals on which modern India was founded. In the past, slogans based on religious belief had poisoned the atmosphere in grounds in Sharjah, where religiosity and nationalism would create an ugly brew in the 1980s and 1990s.
Unfortunately, the race towards medieval ideas has been taken up by some in India as well, as reflected in comments by former cricketer Virender Sehwag regarding bursting of crackers in parts of India, ‘to celebrate Pakistan’s victory’. In Punjab, some Kashmiri students were attacked for allegedly supporting Pakistan. The trend becomes more worrisome when the government gets involved — in UP, the police have filed cases against three Kashmiri students for allegedly shouting pro-Pakistan slogans. In Srinagar, after some students of medical colleges celebrated Pakistan’s win, the J&K Police registered cases under the provisions of the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against them and college managements. Such actions are disproportionate, heavy-handed and undesirable in a modern democracy. Extremist ideas must not necessarily be matched.
