A churn is taking place in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has announced that the country’s Parliament will be dissolved Wednesday, which means that the general elections will have to take place within 90 days; Maldives goes to polls next month; Bangladesh elections are scheduled to be held by December 2023-January 2024 in the wake of several key state polls in India; and all of this will be capped by the mother of all elections in India to be held next summer.
If it’s not politics, it’s sport — never a dull day in the region. Starting with the India-Pakistan cricket match to be played on 14 October at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. While the two countries have played a few times abroad, this is the first time since the 2016 Pulwama attacks that the Modi government has relented enough to open up its borders in the name of sport.
And since the Pakistani cricket team is coming – at last – Pakistani cricket fans won’t be far behind. Remember when the 2011 World Cup semi-final was being played in Mohali and then-prime minister Manmohan Singh received his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani at the stadium? Those were the heydays of regional normalcy, of course.
Around 4,000 Pakistanis had come for the match in Mohali. That’s what “Akhand Bharat’ — or its modern-day manifestation as the World Bank likes to put it, #OneSouthAsia — should look like. People travelling back and forth across the border and lines of control. Except that the Wagah-Attari border has been mostly sealed since Pulwama, the bus services between the two Kashmirs are at a standstill, the SAARC summit hasn’t been held since 2014, and bilateral dialogue between Delhi and Islamabad has totally ceased.
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Coming together for cricket
And yet, the Modi government seems to be opening a tiny chink in its own armour by allowing the India-Pakistan cricket match to be played in India. Certainly, the government would have signed off on the match, whatever sports violations India may have otherwise incurred internationally; it helps that Union Home Minister Amit Shah, whose son Jay Shah is the secretary of Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), are both big cricket buffs. It is likely that the father-son duo and their families will watch the game from their VIP box.
Cricketer Shikhar Dhawan has already captured the intense spirit of the game when he said recently, “Whether you win or lose the World Cup, don’t lose to Pakistan.” The two countries are also planning to play some hockey next month, although those matches are going to be in faraway Hangzhou in China.
It’s a pity that Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former cricket captain and the country’s former Prime Minister, has been sentenced to three years in Attock jail – will he be allowed to watch the game on a TV screen? The jury is out on whether he would still be a free citizen had he not under-invoiced all those expensive watches given to him when he was the head of the government – it is alleged that he had the prices slashed and acquired them for himself and family from the state Toshakhana.
As for Attock itself, it is a beautiful and historic city built on the banks of the Indus River by none other than Mughal emperor Akbar, who, for some reason, called it ‘Atak-Banaras.’ Invader after invader has crossed the river at Attock seeking the treasures of Hindustan. As for the jail, its reputation precedes itself – when Pakistan’s then-Army chief Pervez Musharraf undertook a coup in 1999 and overthrew Nawaz Sharif’s government, the elected prime minister was sent to Attock jail to cool his heels. In a meeting many years later, at his home in Raiwind outside Lahore, Sharif told me how the authorities had beaten him with chains in order to break his spirit.
Certainly, the man is made of sterner stuff. He has been cooling his heels in London for the past five years, since the judges and jury ruled against him in a case in which he is alleged to have bought property in London with monies he never declared. It is now said that if the Sharifs win the election in Pakistan, he will return – that’s a big if, of course, because Imran Khan’s popularity is growing by the minute.
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Is Pakistan confronting the truth?
Even Shehbaz Sharif, the much more colourless younger brother, is trying to redeem himself. For the third time in the past year since he became prime minister, with a little help from the military establishment, Sharif said he was willing to reopen talks with India.
Far more interesting, and hugely relieved by the Saudi and UAE decision to roll over their debts to Pakistan, Sharif admitted that the country cannot survive on foreign loans forever and will have to relook at the way it runs itself.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistan’s foremost intellectual and physicist, quoted Sharif as saying, “India has progressed ahead but we have been left behind due to our own faults.” Hoodbhoy went on with the terrible self-clarity that he is widely known for.
“This understated the truth: Pakistan is seen everywhere as problematic even as major world powers cosy up to India; foreign companies are fleeing skill-empty Pakistan but high-tech semiconductor manufacturers woo India; and Pakistan’s space programme has faded away even as Chandrayaan and Mangalyaan elevated India to the world’s top four space-faring nations,” he wrote in a Dawn article.
Is Pakistan finally confronting a moment of truth after 75 years of independence? Has its terrible economic situation forced it to confront why it has failed – and India, relatively, succeeded? Or is Sharif, like most other Pakistanis, still refusing to face the fact that the military establishment, which calls the shots, is really responsible for this mess?
The big question that Prime Minister Modi, as he begins the last year of his second term, must now answer is whether he could have taken a leaf out of the Manmohan Singh book to deal with Pakistan much earlier? Whether it would have made a difference in the neighbour’s bottom line? Or has the stick that Delhi employed worked much better?
The answers will not all be apparent soon, but one by one, as the region goes to the polls over the next few months, some things will become clearer. As for the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, that will take much more time than the 100 overs that an ODI cricket match takes for a solution – although Ahmedabad could have the courage to demonstrate a beginning.
Jyoti Malhotra is a senior consulting editor at ThePrint. She tweets @jomalhotra. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)