Packed stands, divided house

A packed stadium with divided loyalty for any India-Pakistan cricket game in a third country is nothing new. But at Dhaka it is different. N...

A packed stadium with divided loyalty for any India-Pakistan cricket game in a third country is nothing new. But at Dhaka it is different. No expats or travelling fans here, it is the locals who have various reasons to chose their allegiance. The factors on which the house is divided are chiefly religion, 1971 liberation war, and funnily, Imran Khan and Saurav Ganguly.

So what if it wasn8217;t Shoaib vs Sachin here today, but the under-19 World Cup semifinal between India and Pakistan was no different. As a journalist at the Press Box was heard commenting: 8216;8216;In no other country will you find such large numbers coming to a cricket match and getting into arguments and fights over two other countries!8217;8217; True enough.

Flags of either country were being waved around, words were exchanged at will and passion seemed no different from what one would expect to see around Mumbai or Lahore or, for that matter, at Sharjah. It also appeared that the crowd was skewed about 65 per cent to 35 in favour of Pakistan. But apparently the 35-odd percentage was just about 10 per cent till a decade back.

A Bangladesh Cricket Board BCB official confirmed that when India and Pakistan played each other in 1988 in an Asia Cup encounter, you could count the Indian supporters on your fingertips, and hoping to spot an Indian flag was out of the question.

Why, you are tempted to ask, seeing that it seems logical that after the 1971 war and India8217;s role in helping Bangladesh8217;s cause, the support for the nearer neighbours would come naturally. 8216;8216;Not at all,8217;8217; says the official. 8216;8216;The main reason to support Pakistan was the religious factor. Add to that the fact that Imran Khan, right through the 1980s and early 1990s was a huge favourite with the people here.8217;8217;

Bangladesh journalist Khaled Mahmud adds, 8216;8216;Also, in cricketing terms, the Pakistan side had more charisma then. And India didn8217;t.8217;8217;

All that started changing, however, with the post-1971 generation. Says Jahangir Chowdhury, a Dhaka-based academic: 8216;8216;Basically as the value of India to our country was propagated, and that filtered through to the sections of the masses, a slight shift could be seen. If today you see a fair number of Indian supporters, that8217;s the reason. For the enlightened classes, the religious factor was overshadowed by the political factor.8217;8217;

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The last straw, according to sports journalist Abu Haider, was the following Ganguly brought with him. Especially after he became captain, 8216;8216;the Bengali factor drew quite a large number towards the Indian side.8217;8217; At least, he says, by about 20-30 per cent. And, of course, the fact India is the more charismatic team at the moment also helps.

The non-secular Bangladeshi political set-up means that the majority of the people still trust the religious factor. But the good part is that now the Indians, though they really shouldn8217;t expect universal popularity, have some people to show them the tricolour for inspiration.