Vishal Sharma
Pakistan cricket team skipper Shahid Afridi’s post match comment about his team being cheered and supported by Kashmiris in India during the ongoing world T-20 world cup was in bad taste. He should have known about the sensitivities involved and the ramifications of him being cavalier and flippant.
BCCI general secretary, Anurag Thakur waded into the issue by saying that Afridi should have been politically correct. Beyond this, the matter has strangely rested for opinion makers and Indo-Pak watchers to make sense of it.
In situations like these, media normally picks up the story, colours it a certain way and runs with it. Commentators on both sides trot out their own justifications and prop up the issue for it to gather steam till it becomes another one of those controversial issues. But this time, it has been thankfully ignored.
Be that as it may, Afridi’s statement still needs to be understood in the context it appears to have been made. Whether he should have said what he said? What did he want to convey by bringing K-word in his post match interaction? Was it on design? Was it a faux pas? Some of these posers should not go abegging.
Remember, other Pakistan cricket team skippers have had better opportunities to do Afridi in the past. For instance, Imran Khan, who led Pakistan successfully against India for a decade, would perhaps have been more tempted to make such a comment. Because they had had team India so much battered and bruised those days that any Pakistan skipper would have naturally felt emboldened to step out of the line and be politically incorrect.
Afridi by contrast has had been at the receiving end of the Indo-Pak contests in recent times. Nor does he have the cerebral and the sporting profile of Imran Khan, or let’s say Wasim Akram, to be so adventurous with his public posture. His career, by any measure, and also even by today’s abysmal Pakistan standards, has been fair to middling
The Afridi’s injudicious act has apparently been an attempt to compensate for his earlier comment regarding Indians loving him more than his fellow countrymen. Though this was fairly an innocuous comment (and, perhaps, not a part of the script of his presser) and rather intended to play to the indian gallery, it ended up raising the hackles of the Pakistanis.
And Afridi hadn’t bargained for this; the surge of anger amongst his countrymen against him.
It is everybody’s case that his subsequent referring to Kashmiris’ support was a ploy to create conditions that conduce to his safe return in Pakistan. He obviously knew that Pakistanis would feel assuaged by his raising K-word on indian soil; something even Pakistan’s diplomats these days use with lot of caution.
About Pakistan media, the less said the better. It had gone into an overdrive when afridi talked about Indians’ love for him; going as far as to tag him a near traitor. Some one like Javed Miandad came down hard on him saying that he should concentrate only on cricket and not try to act as an ambassador of peace. He even called for counseling the touring cricketers about what they had to say in pressers and other media interactions on foreign soil.
But this time around, there is unusual calm in the media and amongst the cricket commentators in Pakistan. There has been no urge on the part of those, who chided him for his initial comment, to reprimand him for crossing the limits of propriety. If he was not supposed to be a favourite of Indians, or worthy of their love, surely he was not required to incur their wrath by treading on their toes as well.
At a much more fundamental level, afridi’s act though has created a narrative of its own in Indo-Pak cricketing contests. It has added an important political dimension that was always kept out of bilateral cricketing ties for obvious reasons.
Could there be situation where an Indian player similarly makes a statement on Pakistani soil about a dissident constituent’s love for him?
There could very well be.
Let’s assume, Virat Kohli or M S Dhoni, when on tour in pakistan, goes ahead and says in a presser that he is thankful to a certain ethnic group of Pakistani populace (who? Well, your guess is as good as mine) for having come to Gaddafi Stadium Lahore and supporting his team.
What would be the reaction of Pakistanis? Wouldn’t there be calls for calling off the tour or seeking retraction of the statement or an apology? There would most surely be.
Pakistanis need to understand the implication of Afridi’s act. They may have a feeling that they have had the last laugh in Afridi affair. But it could quite easily boomerang on them.
What is in it for the Indians that must be done so that the silence on the issue is not taken as India’s consent or, say, weakness by Pakis much in the same way it has been done in the case of Pakistani embassy officials who have made a routine to sup and dine with the Hurriyat?
India has done well to remain quiet on the affair though. Because raving and ranting on the issue would have only allowed it more publicity and got the issue to hang in air that much longer. Longer air time and more eye balls have always been pakistan’s aim to keep the pot boiling on K- issue.
India though would be well advised to quietly put across to the Pakistanis that a repeat of the act would warrant a matching response, that would not be in the interest of Pakistan cricket, which is already struggling to survive. This response could also take the shape of further isolation of Pakistan cricket board in the international cricketing world.
Already Pakistan cricket, in Wasim Akram’s word, is five years behind of the world cricket as no cricket team has toured the country in recent history because of security issues. If india, the superpower of the world cricket, were to use its influence, it could further strengthen the pariah status of pakistan cricket. That would effectively kill the Pakistan cricket.
India has failed to raise costs for pakistan diplomatically and militarily on K-issue. It should not, however, similarly sit back and let Pakistan open another front through cricket to needle it.
Infact, Afridi’s misadventure affords New Delhi an opportunity to do what it has failed to do diplomatically and militarily against Pakistan, that is, take the fight to its camp. If India could put pakistan in its place on this front, it might just create conditions for itself to step out of the trenches it’s sitting in on other fronts as well.
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