Bat, ball and stick

THE score is now one-all. For the perceived slur of India backing out of playing cricket in Sharjah for the next three years, Pakistan now feels justified in withdrawing from the 15th Commonwealth table tennis championship in Delhi at the last moment. While the Indian government was at pains to point out that the Sharjah ban was dictated by match-fixing allegations attached to that venue, the Pakistani administrators of table tennis say that the Sharjah move is not the ostensible reason for their choosing to duck the Delhi tourney, and that the real reason was that clearances from the Indian side came in much too late. There was also an unstated assumption that India did not want Pakistan to participate in tournaments here.
There is a certain hypocrisy about this discourse that speaks, not of sport, but of cat-and-mouse games. Certainly, it bodes ill for the normalising of not just sporting ties between the two nations, but ties at the all-important political level. Which is a pity, really, considering that it has become something of an international tradition to use sport to foster happier relations between estranged nations rather than as an instrument to queer the pitch further. The historic US-China thaw in the early seventies was, after all, preceded by unlikely ambassadors: young wizards of ping pong from China and the US pitting their skills against the other. Ping pong diplomacy, the initiative came to be celebrated as. It’s ironic, therefore, that Pakistan should choose ping pong to indicate that it’s not interested in playing ball with India. Interestingly, this intransigence seems to contradict the views of Pakistan’s CEO, General Pervez Musharraf, who in a recent interview with an Indian newspaper tried to occupy the high moral ground by underlining the need to keep sport out of politics. “Let’s start playing,” are the words he used.
There is nothing exceptional about the general’s observations. Indeed, the Indian government, when it moved for the Sharjah ban, pointedly clarified that the country was not opposed to playing Pakistan. Given that both sides agree on keeping politics separate from sport, it would be foolish in the extreme for either country to back out of future India-Pakistan encounters on the sporting field. Let not past recriminations, or the misguided demonstrations staged by extremist forces on both sides of the borders in their desperate bid for political relevance, come in the way of achieving this. But if sport has to break out, both sides will have to resist yielding to unfounded suspicions about the other’s motives. Let’s play the game in the spirit of the game — or have we completely lost the capacity to do so?

This editorial from The Indian Express has been edited for space