With profound apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that the Shiv Sena would disrupt talks between BCCI president Shashank Manohar and PCB chairman Shahryar Khan in Mumbai on Monday was a chronicle foretold.
The right wing party, which keeps it cadres in a state of readiness through prickly parochialism interspersed with dollops of xenophobia, has hardly ever sought strong reason to erupt into protest, often violently so. In an atmosphere that appears surcharged by intolerance nationally, the Sena needed barely a nudge to go on the rampage.
Of course, nothing the Sena has done has been as dire as the Dadri lynching or the murder of rationalists and writers. But it has certainly increased the frequency and stridency of its protests, with Mumbai as the playing ground for its grisly antics and visiting Pakistanis as the target.
Only a few days ago, it forced a ghazal concert by maestro Ghulam Ali, who has performed several times in the city in the past, to be cancelled. Ironically, the concert was in honour of the late Jagjit Singh.
This was followed almost immediately by the grotesque protest preceding the launch of a book by former Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri. Sudheendra Kulkarni, head of the Observer Research Foundation which had organised the event, was doused in ink by activists.
To believe the Sena would allow the heads of the cricket Boards of India and Pakistan to hold talks, among other things for the resumption of bilateral ties in the near future, in the present circumstances was, therefore, hopelessly misplaced.
The Sena uses the patriot-versus-Pakistan card whenever it wants to score brownie points, and consensus opinion among political analysts is that its target at the moment seems to be its ally in the Maharashtra government, the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP’s massive win in the Lok Sabha and assembly elections has caused a shrinking of the political space for the Shiv Sena, inducing perhaps a sense of paranoia and leading to its increased stridency.
In the prevailing circumstances, whether the Indo-Pak cricket talks could not have been scheduled in some other city by the BCCI is a moot point. It is also begs the question why the BJP, given its inability to prevent the Sena from creating a law and order issue, did not advise the BCCI against making Mumbai the venue.
But these questions are necessarily imbued with a sense of poignant sadness for cricket lovers. Mumbai has long been the nursery and bastion for Indian cricket. To see it become the epicentre of dissent rather than progress in cricket is dismaying.
Ironically, the family (and senior functionaries) who have controlled the Shiv Sena since its inception have been avowed cricket lovers, none more so than the late supremo Balasaheb Thackeray. In fact, the senior Thackeray was open in his appreciation of Pakistani cricket stalwarts (though not the country) and once even hosted Javed Miandad at his residence.
Exploiting cricket’s appeal But the Shiv Sena has also exploited massive cricket’s appeal as a medium for rabble-rousing and protest, particularly against Pakistan. In this aspect the party has been solidly consistent. It was in 1991 that Sena activists dug up the Wankhede Stadium pitch to disallow Pakistan from playing in Mumbai, and their stand hasn’t changed for a quarter of a century. If anything, it has hardened and become almost a calling card for the party’s politics.
While the Sena’s position is obviously extreme, in some way it reflects the roller-coaster ride of Indo-Pak cricket over the past 68 years. It is unlike sporting relations between two countries anywhere in history: complex and captivating, frustrating and fascinating.
The burden of Partition, with its derivatives of national identity and religion, has played out to the orchestra of jingoism, with sentiment and tension running high on either side every time the two countries have met on a cricket field.
The fragility of the political relations between the two countries has seen cricket being played in fits and bursts. But ever so often, it is cricket that has salvaged these relations from nose-diving to a point of no return.
In the 1950s, Indo-Pak cricket was dull and attritional. Neither country wanted to lose, so few risks were taken. These matches became vehicles for chauvinism, one-upmanship and mutual suspicion. Allegations of cheating abounded, so much so that in 1955 when India were touring Pakistan, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, who was captaining the home side and Lala Amarnath, manager of the Indian team, almost came to blows in the foyer of their hotel in Karachi because the Indian suspected that the umpires had been fixed. Amarnath, who had been born in Lahore, and Kardar, who had played for India before Partition, were chums-turned-adversaries. Some years later, they were on back-slapping terms again.
On this side of the divide too, passions ran equally high and when Pakistan toured in 1961-62, opening batsman Hanif Mohammed had his hand slashed by a fan who saw him as the biggest threat to India.
In the half century since, relations between players from either side have improved enormously without any of the intensity of beating the ‘arch rival’ being lost, leading to some memorable performances by players and teams from both countries.
But the frequency of cricket engagement has been volatile, depending on the prevailing political mood. For instance, it took 16 years after the 1961-62 tour for cricket between the two countries to be resumed. In the interim, India and Pakistan went to war twice.
When play was restarted, the fervour and passion of fans on either side showed what the cricket world had missed: it also defined Indo-Pak cricket as the biggest blockbuster in the sport.
Off-shore cricket, notably in Sharjah between 1982 and 1999, and subsequently Canada, not only kept the turnstiles ringing for promoters and offered livelihood to the players, but also ensured the survival of Indo-Pak cricket against the vagaries of the political relations between the two countries.
In between, India and Pakistan also collaborated twice to host the World Cup, in 1987 (when England’s hegemony over the tournament was broken) and 1996 (along with Sri Lanka). At least where cricket politics is concerned, the two Boards have been more or less in sync for a long while.
Interestingly, ‘hardline’ politicians have been at the forefront in promoting Indo-Pak cricket. In 1978, the ice was broken by dictator Zia-ul-Haq and Jan Sangh’s Atal Behari Vajpayee, foreign minister in Morarji Desai’s government. In 2004, it was L.K. Advani of the NDA who signalled the resumption of bilateral cricket ties that had been suspended since the Kargil War in 1999.
There has been no bilateral Test series between the two countries since 2007 though the teams have met in a one-day series in 2013 and play each other in ICC tournaments everywhere. The 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai was obviously a major setback to cricket relations and administrators in the BCCI and PCB have been striving since to set the ball rolling again.
Given the extraordinary history of the two countries, this is always an obstacle course to run, and dependent entirely on the mood and compulsions of the political dispensation in power.
On current evidence, it appears that Pakistan — both the government and cricket board — is eager to resume cricket. The Indian political establishment has waxed and waned. While back channel diplomacy continues, it is unclear whether there are enough signals for the BCCI to take a major step.
This confusion comes through statements made by secretary Anurag Thakur, who says there can be no progress in cricket till the governments talk and senior functionary Rajiv Shukla who says talks between the two Boards will continue irrespective of the Sena protest. To paraphrase a popular song, their stands are clear as mud.
Meanwhile, the Shiv Sena gloats in misconstrued triumphalism while a city and Indian cricket are besmirched.
(Ayaz Memon is a Mumbai-based senior journalist who writes on cricket, politics and other issues.)
