Before the match:
"It's a great sign for both countries that cricket brings them together. I'm a cricketer first then a diplomat and I'm happy with that."
- Shahid Afridi
After the match:
"I would like to congratulate the Indian team and the whole nation, they deserved to win."
- Shahid Afridi
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Pakistan and India met 154 miles from the Lahore border at Mohali. The meeting brought us all together.
The meeting ended. Some said, we lost in cricket. And we felt like the world had end. But others said, we had won in politics. It was as if the world had just begun.
The world of opportunities between us conflicting neighbours had just opened up. And while we celebrated the encounter between India and Pakistan on the Mohali field the entire day until the final moments, we forgot to celebrate the encounter in the stands between the elected leaders of the two countries.
Some said they even got to hold hands. In fact there were pictures to prove that they had done so.
The captain of our cricket team wished them a victory in the final.
The magic of the meeting was such that we came together in droves to watch it.
There is a strange way in which sports can unite conflicted nations. There is a strange way in which sports can resolve conflicts between nations.
These are the two potentials this game that brought.
There is no alternative to peace:
“You see, there is no alternative to peace. You must eventually sit across the table and discuss things,” Kuldip Nayar said in an interview to Pakistan Today during his recent trip across the Zero Line.
There is a reason to bring this quote in before we dwell into matters on the field of the match. What reason, you would ask. I would answer, because in the larger context the result of the match was marginal, so to say.
Of course, it would have been brilliant to win. The crisis of nationalism being suffered by Pakistan needs a boost.
But perhaps for the better, we lost. A loss allows a collectivity to put some perspective into itself. A sense of perspective that ‘shining India’ has been struggling to get to terms with. An urbanising India has been the foundation for rather sombre rural poverty, a form of rural poverty that has not crept into Pakistan’s mainstream (Sindh’s haris being an exception) yet.
In fact, the loss of perspective has been severe enough for the party that proclaimed ‘shining India’ (the BJP) in its last election campaign, got booted out by the electorate.
But then the electoral circle in India is powerful because the voter is powerful and lies get exposed.
Our (Pakistan’s) irony, however, has always been that the electorate has never had a say. A mature electorate (not that India, or, the world’s most developed democracy has achieved it), but the electoral system in Pakistan has not had stable time enough to develop a mature electorate.
There are three things to learn from the Indian post-colonial experience: a national electorate can be trusted (Indian democracy), local identities must be respected (the concept of linguistic states) – and, counterintuivively, communities disrespected will resist (the Naxalites and Kashmiris).
The State structure both began with (despite the claimed weaker state in the Pakistan area) was fundamentally the same. The State must construct the idea of the citizen while respecting the citizen for who he is. This was an early lesson of the Indian state, whom under Nehru decided to the create linguistic states.
The path that Pakistan took was counter such, with the ascribed founder of the State declaring that Bengalis had to adopt Urdu as mother tongue (and not link-language).
Enough dwelling over the post-colonial legacies of both neighbours. Let’s dwell on the match.
The magic of the match:
Frankly, those who know me, know I am not too much of a nationalist. There is a stable connection of the heart with the people of that inhabit the State-created boundary declared Pakistan. Thus to connect with this match, and the Pakistani team, was to be faithful to the people around me.
Cricket is magical. There are moments where it is able to transcend the deepest of divides by being able to reveal the artificiality of their construction. Not that I cannot list the history of conflict between India and Pakistan. Not that that conflict has ended with the end of the match.
But the ability of it to bridge the divide, at the Mohali stadium, and in our hearts, was magical.
Meeting in a Cricket World Cup Semi-final was all that was required to realse we are not so different, and, well, in a different sense, not so similar either.
Glued to the screen we cheer on the Greens, glued to the screen they cheer on the Blues. But both are cricket mad nations. And this madness is not replicated elsewhere.
What appears ages ago, India’s 1955 tour to Pakistan, the BCCI President Maharajkumar said, "Where politicians have failed, we have succeeded by coming nearer each other." The 1955 Pakistan-India series brought the biggest movements of people across the border after the partition: 10000 Indians crossed border - as fans to cheer on their team.
5,000 Pakistanis are said to have been granted a permit to go to India for the match. A move unprecedented in the security driven relationship that has marred the two neighbours for so many years, and, especially since 26/11 in Mumbai.
Of course, it would have been wonderful for the same fans to have travelled to Mumbai, to cheer the Pakistani team on. It would have been wonderful to remove the wounds of 26/11 and amicably visit the city that blames Pakistan (the truth does not matter) for the horror conducted in its midst.
In 1960, when the Pakistan cricket team paid India a visit, captain Fazal Mahmood observed, "India is not a foreign country to me." There was a second thing he said, of equal if not more value, "national prestige and other such things are being unnecessarily involved in cricket".
It was a lesson learnt by the graceful duo of Prime Minister Gilani and Captain Shahid Afridi who wished India the best for the final. But it was a lesson not learnt by the likes of Rehman Malik (telling the team not to ‘fix the match’) and Shahbaz Sharif (promising large tracts of land to the players).
The bridges of Mohali:
Politics and cricket did meet at Mohali. If two Prime Ministers were sitting together, how could they not.
But on the field cricket was left to dominate. And to its credit cricket dominated the politics.
Cricket said Pakistan and India can be one. Politics followed and said Pakistan and India can be one.
Put in context, that the cricket team lost was a minor event in the day’s festivities. Our cricket team, brilliant as it was during the World Cup, did overachive. And it is to the credit of its spirit that it was able to do so.
But the real power of the cricket team lay in the bridges it built. At Mohali, before the match began, the music for the Pakistani National Anthem sounded out. A flag of Pakistan was found fluttering to the Indian winds. And the few Pakistanis in the crowd, and PM Gilani got to sing out, in India, the words of the national anthem:
Pak sar zameen shad bad
Kishwar I haseen shad bad
The pure land remains fovever
The host to the beautiful remain fovever
It is this that is the legacy of Mohali. That India and Pakistan came together, as equals, on a playing field. Both respected each other. One won, one lost the battle on the field. But both won the war outside it.
Now it is up to us and to politics to keep Mohali's legacy alive.
- The article was printed in The Review for Pakistan Today on April 2, 2011.
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