If all art is propaganda, as George Orwell maintained, then all sport is politics. You cannot divorce a country’s sport from its politics. One affects the other however often we mouth platitudes about not mixing the two. Sport and politics are not like oil and water; sport dissolves in politics easily and often.
Sometimes this relationship can be a force for good, as when sporting boycotts played a role in hastening the end of South Africa’s apartheid rule. Sometimes it is a stage for hardened political rivalries to explode, an extreme case being the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games by the Palestinian Black September group.
To say that sport and politics should not mix is naive, and fails to acknowledge that often sport is politics by other means.
The brinkmanship that precedes any India-Pakistan engagement on the cricket field has begun. The publicity and platform, that it provides can is an irresistible draw for politicians and other mischief makers who like to keep the kettle boiling. Any peaceful resolution to the complex issues involved is makes the hawks on either side irrelevant. Political issues cannot be resolved on the cricket field; cricket tours have necessarily to be sorted out in Cabinet meetings. Cricket is unfairly asked to carry the burden of unresolved relations.
The sport cannot be dismissed as being too trivial in the grander scheme of things and thus left alone to exist untroubled; neither can we pretend that what happens on or around the field of play will not have repercussions elsewhere. Caught between apparent triviality and undeniable significance, it remains a plaything of governments.
India and Pakistan played the South Asian Federation Football Tournament in India recently, and it was all about football, not a proxy for war. They have met on other sports fields too — playing baseball, hockey, kabaddi and chess and bridge — without the tension and potential for violence that cricket seems to generate.
Pakistan are hosts of the Asia Cup (Aug. 31 to Sept. 17) while the 50-over World Cup is in India (Oct. 5 to Nov. 19). A ‘hybrid’ solution (proposed by Pakistan) by which India play nine matches in Sri Lanka while Pakistan play four in their country has probably saved the Asia Cup. This despite their Minister-in-charge of sports Ehsaan Mazari’s recent statement that if India do not travel to Pakistan for the Asia Cup, Pakistan will keep away from the World Cup.
It sounds impressive, even threatening, but the fact is, India hold all the cards. They can afford to ignore Pakistan’s bluster (Mazari took care to say that this was his personal opinion; the Pakistan Cricket Board can distance itself from the claim) because Pakistan cricket needs India more than the other way around. The India-Pakistan television audience might be the largest for a single cricket match. Mazari is part of the committee constituted by the Prime Minister to make recommendation on the World Cup participation.
The next two Champions Trophy tournaments are in India (2025) and Pakistan (2029) respectively; the ‘hybrid’ format will probably be well established by then. A stadium audience, is after all, only a tiny percentage of the television audience, which is what funds the game. A bilateral series is not in the Future Tours Programme till 2031. By then Virat Kohli will be 43, Babar Azam 37, and two of the finest contemporary batters might have ended their careers without playing a Test against each other.
India and Pakistan are two countries separated by a common culture, common languages, and common interest in cricket. Cricket series between the two have, in recent decades, fuelled rather than eased tensions between them. Multi-nation tournaments, however, have generally been played without incident. Yet unforgiving fans exist on either side, convinced that there is nothing worse in the game than losing to the other.
Three months — the time till the World Cup — is a long time in politics, yet with their match scheduled for India’s showcase stadium in Ahmedabad, a Pakistan withdrawal is unlikely, especially since it will mean losing a big chunk in International Cricket Council fines and television revenue. Economics, as so often happens, is likely to triumph politics.
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