Easy to say. Sports and politics don’t mix. Tell that to Umar Draz of Pakistan who faces 10 years in jail for having got so excited over Virat Kohli’s performance against Australia he went and ran the Indian tricolor up the flagpole at his home about 200 km from Lahore.
What was he thinking? Clearly not beyond cricket. The neighbors went ballistic, were offended and Umar was dragged off to prison where he is now under arrest.
One has to marvel at his ingenuity in getting himself the Indian flag. Where does one go shopping for something like that? To be fair, it was a bit stupid. If it was some Indian waving the Pakistani flag for Shahid Afridi in Jalandhar, we would have been hopping mad, too.
But get over it, slap him on the wrist, chastise him, read him the riot act and let him go. You cannot seriously lock the silly fellow up for a decade.
It is a bit of keystone cops, really. The police raided his home and found the flag on the rooftop and have now leveled a charge of treason and anti-national activity against the cricket mad fan. Now, they are looking into the possibility he might be an Indian spy. Give them some credit. Surely, they would have smarter spooks than this.
He might just be a cricket loony who doesn’t see anything anti-national in showing his love for talent. There are enough of them out there and if it was a flag from another country in support of Christiano or Djokovic, I don’t think the Pakistani authorities would have flown off the handle. It must be so damn embarrassing now that the story has leaked.
If they were not so knee jerk in their reactions they would have downplayed the incident and laughed the rage out of it. The story would have died on the vine.
But now it is Pakistan who is propelling the incident and building it into a major indictment. Poor Draz is going to be produced before a judge and might even face trial and if you get one of those uptight fellows on the bench he will throw the book at the cricket lover.
Perhaps India could get him off the hook. If Virat Kohli was to request Nawaz Sharif to okay, let the fellow go, he is just a fan who meant no harm who knows the Pakistani premier might see it as something to put a positive spin on.
Taken even further, the BCCI could agree to honor the MoU to play Pakistan in a bilateral if it lets Umar go home with a kick in the back.
As a gesture of goodwill the foreign secretaries could agree to meet (a tryst that is pretty much forgotten) if this latest link in Indo-Pak cricketlomacy is given a happy ending.
Thing is I still cannot figure out where he went and got a flag. Not as if they are selling Indian flag in the corner grocery store.
