LAHORE, 23 March 2004 — “We love peace”, was the message from the large number of Indian fans who arrived in Lahore on Saturday to follow the fortunes of their cricket team. Watching from the Kardar enclosure (named after late Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Pakistan’s first cricket captain who led the team to the first ever official tour of India in 1952-53) where most of them were accommodated, the fans held a huge banner proclaiming message of peace from across the border.
Waving the Indian tricolor at every good stroke, fielding or bowling they added quite some color across the Gaddafi Stadium with supporters of the home team who sat with them in the same enclosure, they seemed to prove their love for peace. Who said Pakistan and India were bitter rivals?
A recent thaw in relations has slowly but surely changed the way things stood only a year ago when their troops faced each other eyeball-to-eyeball across the long stretching India-Pakistan border.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s visit to Islamabad this January for the SAARC Summit was a leap forward in normalizing relations. But his decision to give the go-ahead to the cricket team for this series has indeed brought the nations even closer.
This tour of the Indian team, their first in more than 14 years, was in serious jeopardy just a month ago, first because the Indian government seemed reluctant to give clearance and when they did, there were concerns over security.
But watching the rival fans mixing with each other in the stands on Sunday when India, trailing 1-2 in the five match one-day series and in a fight to keep the series alive for the last match, went to show that they love the game as much as they love each other.
It is not in the stands alone that this harmony is on display. A large corps of journalists from India seem perfectly at ease working alongside their Pakistani counterparts, as they talk about what it means to them to be covering cricket here.
“I am being a part of history, part of a process that means a lot to people on both sides of the border,” said Sidharth Datta, a senior correspondent of Star News.
For Meenakshi Rao, senior editor of The Pioneer newspaper, being in Pakistan is quite an experience. “Pakistani hospitality is just unbelievable. Many misconceptions about the people on our side of the border have gone for good,” she said.
