A wag pointed out that Saturday, March 13 might be the first time in the history of cricket that 14 Muslims would be on the same field. He got it slightly wrong. There were only 13 Muslims among the 24 cricketers in the two teams (don’t forget the 12th man). Yousef Youhana, the Pakistan wicketkeeper-batsman, is a Christian. It could as easily have been only 12, if Pakistan had included their spinner, Danish Kaneria, who is a Hindu. The most devout Muslim in this baker’s dozen is an Indian, not a Pakistani: Irfan Pathan, son of a maulvi in a small town in Gujarat, a remarkable young man whose great joy remains helping his father sweep the local mohalla mosque. You can see the welcome side of the story, of course. Every player, on either side, is there on merit alone. Faith, family, region, bias, the traditional vices of the subcontinent, surrendered to the happy law of ability.
The reason is obvious. The financial stakes in cricket are too high for communalism. It is, to quote a famous line, a triumph of rational economics over prejudice.
The players produced a game on Saturday choreographed in dreams. But there was something much bigger in the air. The true revelation was the city of Karachi. The audience in the stadium gave a phenomenal vote for peace, for goodwill, for normalcy, for a future without hate and bitterness and war. It was not just the standing ovation at the end. It was the eloquent behavior through the match. They were partisan, of course; they had every right to cheer their country as much as I prayed and wished victory for mine. But it was the passion of competition, not the fire of hatred that one has witnessed so often in the past in both countries.
India has changed as well. Fifteen years ago, a politician pilloried Azharuddin because he dropped a catch in Pakistan. Such divisive politics pays no dividends now. I doubt if I will see another catch quite as fantastic as Mohammad Kaif’s in the crucial last phase when Pakistan was looking at victory. It was not just a feat of acrobatics; it was a definition of commitment.
A year ago, when Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee resurrected every kind of cynic with his “last” call for peace between India and Pakistan, Saturday the 13th of March was unthinkable. Hand it to him: He sensed the power of peace even when the forces of hostility were enjoying their high noon. It required vision and conviction.
He could not have done it alone. I recall a statement made by President Pervez Musharraf while talking to a group of us in Islamabad. He chided us for thinking that there were wild cheers when he returned to Pakistan after the failure of the Agra summit. Indians had no idea how disappointed Pakistanis were that an opportunity had been lost.
On the morning of the match, Delhi’s newspapers were awash with the predictable flood of cricket puns: No pitch can ever get as feverish as an editor’s vocabulary, no game can be greater than a 19th century hangover. Lost amid the cricket-hype was a story that would normally have got better play. Speaking at the India Today Conclave on Friday, Prime Minister Vajpayee suggested that the time had come for “innovative” answers to the long crisis in Indo-Pak relations. He gave one hint of what they might be when he proposed a South Asian Economic Union. But it was also a suggestion to start thinking.
The best place to begin is at the beginning. India was the first country to win freedom from European colonialism. India and Pakistan became therefore the first modern post-colonial nations.
It was entirely logical that nationalism would be the most powerful impetus of peoples who had rediscovered their freedom after generations of servility. This nationalism was identified with borders: Frontiers became inclusive precisely because they were exclusive. One of the unresolved mysteries of 1947 is why the British left in August that year when they could have easily waited for another six months to resolve the disputes that were inevitable in as difficult an exercise as partition. Their most grievous error was to rush out leaving the status of the border province of Jammu and Kashmir undefined. What would have been a terrible mistake anywhere else became a terrible tragedy because it straddled the border.
Ironically, the region that had suffered the worst calamities in human history because of national paranoia and border disputes was the same Europe that colonized most of Africa and Asia. Nothing could match the horrors of World War II, and when Europe’s leaders pondered over the future they realized that only by surrendering some elements of their “sovereign space” could they make the fullest use of resources, manpower and economies of scale that would ensure a common prosperity. And only in common prosperity lay common peace. From this perception arose the European Union. Imitation is the best form of flattery. In the last five decades, in stages, the rest of the world has made the European Union its model for the reorganization of the world into rational entities. Supranational coalitions like ASEAN, Mercusor, NAFTA and the African Union are the new continents of the modern age, held together by joint will and common purpose. Why has the urge for peace descended upon South Asia, a region synonymous with conflict?
The difference between a regenerate and degenerate phase of history is often nothing more than the arrival of common sense. Common sense enables one to see a common enemy. America and Britain forged their bonds in the heat of three wars across a hundred years — against German militarism, Nazi fascism, and Soviet totalitarianism. India and Pakistan are at last beginning to see that their worst enemies are not each other but rather the poverty and terrorism that threaten the stability and destiny of both neighbors. Their resources make some foreign industrial-military complex rich, their wars leave their people poor.
For half a century, India and Pakistan have placed passion above compromise. We are only seeing the first glimpse of what can be achieved through a spirit of understanding. At one corner of this jumble is a cricket game. At some other corner is a bus route through the deserts of Rajasthan and Sindh, or the mountains of the two Kashmirs. At a third point the armies of India and Pakistan celebrate Eid Al-Adha by encouraging Kashmiris on the two sides of the Neelum River to reach out to one another, sheltered by a cease-fire. Vajpayee’s party can hardly believe what it is doing now — turning peace with Pakistan into an election-winner. Since the time of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the Congress and the BJP have sought to measure their nationalism through a politics of suspicion against Pakistan — ably helped by those in Pakistan who thought that their only contact with India should be through a permanent ‘jihad’.
The status of Jammu and Kashmir would have reached the discussion table in 1947, for the simple reason that independence was not an option offered to any princely state by the terms of the transfer of power. War sabotaged that possibility, but five decades later it is still the discussion table that will find an answer, not the battlefield. This is where “innovation” is most in demand. The first necessity is that all parties must rise above their past positions, and there are indications that they are ready to do so. There is conflict over a line, the line of control. We need to draw a larger line beside it, one that connects the distance between regional honor and common prosperity. We think of solutions in terms of pieces of paper. A solution can also be liquid: You can melt a problem.
The generation that created the problem is dead; the generation that sustained it, is on its last legs. Virtually every fact at Karachi stadium confirmed that we are now a young subcontinent. The young have the energy, education and imagination to recreate this region into an economic powerhouse, on par or even ahead of China.
As the United States seeks to refashion the world according to its strategic and economic needs, there are challenges and opportunities that are common. This is not a call for a permanent confrontation with the United States; that is foolishness. But it is an assertion that it is possible to deal with problems, including of instability and terrorism, without interference from foreign armies. A free market in South Asia by Jan. 1, 2006 may still seem like a miracle, but if that first miracle happens then it will beget even more miraculous offspring. An economic union is best guaranteed by a common strategic vision for South Asia. After all, who is the better guarantor of peace in Afghanistan? A German contingent in NATO uniform, or a Rapid Action Indo-Pak Force? Impossible? That match in Karachi was also impossible a year ago.
Optimism is a much-derided sentiment. But when you have just watched a cricket match which neither side deserved to lose, but which — thank God! — we won, then I may be forgiven my optimism.
