The latest installment of Indian intransigence is playing out in front of us, this time in the field of sports. India’s cricketing body, the BCCI, has said that the national team is not going to be visiting Pakistan for the ODI Asia Cup in 2023, an event that Pakistan will be hosting.
To be fair to the BCCI, this doesn’t appear to be their decision to make; in fact, the board’s secretary has explicitly stated that deciding where to allow the national team is the government’s call. We’re not calling quits, the BCCI claims – neutral venues aren’t unprecedented; arrange one, and we’ll play.
There are many issues to unpack here. First, the decision itself would have sprung no surprises. It was but expected. Hapless Pakistani cricket fans, the younger ones of whom have been reared in the wasteland of the aftermath of attack on the Sri Lankan team in 2009, quickly take any and all improvements in the state of cricket in the country as divorced from the situation in the rest of the world. Yes, we’ve had the curse broken by having tours of foreign teams like Zimbabwe and then England visiting. Then, we set up a rather exciting cricketing league in the country in the form of the PSL, which yielded a lot of good players, powering our triumph in the Champions’ Trophy and that, coupled with an improving security situation, has significantly improved the state of cricket and sports security in the country. But all that blinds us to the fact that other countries might have some valid security concerns. Cricket New Zealand’s decision to abandon their tour is an example of that, infuriating as it might have been for us.
Another thing that the improving state of cricket might have blinded us from is the fact that the government next door isn’t quite interested in the security situation in Pakistan to begin with. They are going to do what they are going to do for purposes of political signalling. After all, the decision not to allow Pakistani actors to perform in Bollywood films (though not directly by the government but by its thuggish supporters and their appeasers) can’t be predicated on security concerns. So the decision about cricket can be seen in that light either.
Three takeaways: the government needs to dig in its heels as far as ensuring the safety of visiting cricket teams is concerned, the PCB needs to make the cricketing infrastructure in the country better, and it is doing a decent job at that. And, lastly, the Pakistani cricket fans need to make peace with the fact that some teams won’t be visiting the country anytime soon, regardless of what the government does.
