This just isn’t cricket

Over the years, besides the perils they face on the field, India’s cricketers have had to live with a scourge unique to their country: the mixing of cricket with diplomacy, of being used as pawns in foreign policy. This takes away the focus and concentration which our players must have while confronting the opposition in such keenly fought engagements. This also clouds our judgement. In 1978, Morarji Desai’s government decided to signal a thaw with Zia’s Pakistan by sending a team under Bishen Bedi there. You ask any member of that team and they will tell you of the pressures this additional diplomatic responsibility brought them under. They had to constantly look and behave like good guys, stay locked up in their rooms, with social outings entirely curtailed, and had to swallow the most horrendous umpiring decisions with straight faces.

The only one not to be weighed down was late Lala Amarnath but he was not on the field but in the commentators’ box while two of his sons played for India. He gave all diplomatic restraint a go the moment Mohinder was given out in his nineties, caught in the slips when his bat was hidden well behind his pads. Asked by his Pakistani co-commentator to speak about the decision, Lala said, sorry, “I will not comment on that decision because (and then he paused for a long while) because Mohinder is my son.” Many years ago, I reminded Lala of this slip-up and he said, of course, it was okay, it was such a lousy decision. Except that he was pulled up by three different officers from the Indian mission, besides by “the high-ups in Delhi”. Then he added in a manner so typically forthright of him: “They would never leave it to us cricketers to find an answer to the Kashmir issue. Then why must they tell us how to play the game so their bloody friendship business is not affected?”

My recollection of this conversation is pretty good, except that I have been careful to translate some of Lala’s Punjabi into more diplomatic English. And he had a point. A modern-day cricket series is hard ball. You cannot mix it up with the subtle, cynical needs of diplomacy. You play the game the hard way,to win, are angry when you lose, jubilant when you win. Don’t confuse all this with the niceties of diplomacy. God knows we take our cricket much too seriously in these parts but you still don’t want to carry the additional burden of knowing that your larger national interest hangs by the slender thread of your performance on, and off the field. Other Indian cricketers have felt similarly weighed down on other occasions. Ask Kapil Dev. He is too much of a nice guy to say this but had the 1992-93 series in South Africa not been billed as Friendship Series, loaded with the baggage of bringing the first opening to post-apartheid South Africa, would he have taken that infamous knock in his shin from Kepler Wessels’ bat with such equanimity? Imran Khan once said to me that to him that one single incident confirmed that Kapil was, deep down, a wimp. But if Kapil tells you the truth, he was also probably weighed under the responsibility of keeping the “friendship” spirit of that series alive.

In the 1982-83 series in Pakistan once again the team was being beaten, bored, confined to their hotel rooms and homesick as hell. The umpiring was, well, nothing unusual, crowds wanted your blood, and no social outings except stiff official receptions. One of the all-time great stories of Indian cricket folklore goes something like this. Both teams, in their blazers and ties, had been lined up to be introduced to General Zia at his official reception. He had done his homework. He knew that one of the Indians had missed the match India had just lost probably because of a pulled hamstring. As he shook hands with the player, Zia said something like, Hullo, how is your leg? The story goes that unable to take the farce any longer, the player looked the general mischievously in the eye and said, “Hairy.”

I don’t know if this Indian team has somebody with that kind of wit, or cheek. But if you asked them, they will tell you to keep politics out of their lives and let them get on with the game. It is good enough for them that the government has decided there is no ban on India playing Pakistan in Pakistan. The rest, where they play, when, the itinerary, the details should be left to the world of cricket.

The last thing you need is poor Amrit Mathur and other BCCI dadas sniffing around the Pakistani cricket grounds for hidden mines and explosives. They would rather be left to worry about the lethal stuff that may be thrown at them across the 22-yard strip in the middle. In any case they would be better equipped to prepare to counter the cricketing threats and perils their boys would face rather than anything Maulana Masood Azhar’s boys might fling at them.

Postscript: On the eve of the Test match against the West Indies in the fall of 1983 at Ferozeshah Kotla Bishan Bedi was speaking at a function in Pragati Maidan for the release of Sunil Gavaskar’s Runs and Ruins. This is when terrorism had just picked up steam in Punjab and there was a threat to the match too. Also, the West Indies had come in to avenge the World Cup loss a month earlier, with Marshall and Holding bowling like demons. Somebody asked Bishan if he feared a terror attack at Kotla. “There will be a massacre, alright,” he said. “But more likely on the field than off it.” It is a different matter that India saved that match quite honourably with Vengsarkar and Gavaskar scoring hundreds and the latter turning out, for the first time, in his skull cap and unleashing the hook shot after more than a decade of self-denial.

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