So much for the hedgehog

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

Number one in the world. It isn’t every day that Pakistanis get to celebrate globally renowned excellence. We should thank Misbah ul Haque and his team for achieving undisputed global superiority. It feels a lot better to crow about being number one than it does to have to remind the world of all the unfair obstacles that have been placed in Pakistan’s way.

How did the Pakistan Test cricket team become world number one? Entirely, under the leadership of captain Misbah ul Haque. Who is Misbah? For millions of us, he is ‘tuk-tuk’, the man that either can’t or won’t invest any effort in titillating fans. So boring, we conjured a nickname that is supposed to define a boring, almost vegetarian approach to cricket. That isn’t who we are supposed to be. Ask Goldie Hawn, or anyone who has dealt with Shahid Afridi’s ego, or shaken Shoaib Akhtar’s hand. Ever. We like carnivorous tigers. Misbah is the anti-thesis of what we are accustomed to worshipping.

Tim Wigmore wrote ‘Misbah ul Haque, The Quiet Grafter’ for The New Statesman at the end of July after the famous push ups that the team performed after victory at Lord’s. The most authoritative voice on Pakistani cricket, Osman Samiuddin, wrote all the way back in 2014 that “Misbah-ul-Haq is the sanest man in Pakistan cricket, possibly even all of Pakistan. There is no way of proving this but he really is.”

Misbah is the proof. If proof was needed that 21st century excellence is a matter of sustained sanity, rather than outrageous and exuberant bouts of genius (sandwiched by shamefully consistent mediocrity and insanity), Misbah is the testimony. Since sustained excellence in writing about cricket belongs to others, I will stop here. But how could one pen anything this week that does not pay due homage to Misbah? Perhaps no one has captured Misbah and his team’s achievement as grandly as Dennis Freedman has, writing that Pakistan scaling the heights to number one in the world is the biggest story in sports, not just this week, but in fact, is the story of the decade.

Tactics, not talent, it seems have helped Pakistan get to number one without any identifiable world beater in its ranks. In an era where Pakistani stars are routinely unidentifiable, and routinely outshined by the larger than life personas of India’s hyper-talented megastars, getting to number one is proof that team sports often reward teams, not individual super stars.

The risks of trying to transfer lessons from cricket, to anything else, be it public policy, or international affairs, or one’s personal life, are substantial. But it isn’t every day Pakistan is the world’s best cricket team. We should indulge ourselves just a little bit.

In September, the world’s leaders will gather in New York at the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). This will be the fourth UNGA under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during this term. It will be the most challenging of affairs for the PM because his existential belief in normalising relations with India no longer faces only the domestic resistance it always has (largely driven by the military’s discomfort with what it likely sees as an acceptance of Indian economic hegemony in the region).

This year, PM Sharif also faces on the one hand, the reality of a genuine movement of resistance in Indian-Occupied Kashmir that he cannot ignore, and on the other, the reality of a crafty counterpart in PM Narendra Modi, who seems to be artfully rope-a-doping Pakistan into a dance whose moves only he can predict.

At this year’s UNGA, there is no chance of Pakistan beating anyone at anything without a series of well-thought out, and agreed tactics. This means that PM Sharif will need to be more tuk-tuk than boom-boom. He will need to invest time and effort in understanding the situation in Occupied Kashmir, assessing the quantum of Pakistan’s domestic vulnerabilities and engaging the GHQ and Aabpara in a serious conversation about the region’s future.

If PM Sharif believes he is the Shahid Afridi of Pakistani politics, and that he can produce a flash of brilliance when it is needed, then he does not need to do any of those things. He can simply board a plane to New York, depend on Maleeha Lodhi to pen an effective speech, and come back without losing too much credibility here at home. From everything we have seen so far, he will choose to be Shahid Afridi.

This is antithetical to the view of the prime minister within his cabinet and among his admirers. Within Isaiah Berlin’s fox and hedgehog classification, to his supporters, the prime minister is supposed to be the hedgehog. He is not supposed to, and therefore, should not be judged, we are told, on the basis of being an all-round star. He is supposed to know one thing and know it well. That one thing is supposed to be India.

Nawaz Sharif is the one political leader with the correct ethnic, linguistic, economic and political background to be able to crack the code of Pak-India relations, and with that, the black box of civil-military relations. For ideas people, this has been the big idea that PM Sharif brings to the table.

Of course, this isn’t the view of everybody. This is the view of the smartest people that know and support Nawaz Sharif. It is not a short list of intellectually gifted and politically experienced folks. So let’s see how that’s going.

It is well past the halfway mark of 2016. Less than two years to the next election. As a strong proponent of normalisation with India, I am left asking myself exactly what the prime minister has delivered with respect to India and civ-mil relations.

As the term of the incumbent army chief winds down, the rumour mills are a facsimile of the ones that churned out multiple extensions to previous senior military officers. During the most difficult political challenge faced by the prime minister (the 2014 dharna), the army was seen as largely being supportive of the challengers, rather than supportive of the office that holds executive authority over it.

The relationship with India has been almost entirely defined by the whims of the Indians, with every major event either initiated by, or cancelled by the Indians. Even his bravest decision, which was to attend Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony was not sold by his government effectively, leaving the Indians to accumulate all the regional and global credit for extending the invitation in the first place.

All the other things that either happen or don’t happen are supposed to be the sideshow when it comes to Nawaz Sharif: the economic growth (which is Ishaq Dar’s job, not the PM’s, and at around four percent is not anywhere near the rates achieved by Pakistan’s neighbours), the war against takfiri terror (which is prosecuted largely, and without challenge by the military), and infrastructure (which his younger brother, and not he, is responsible for delivering).

The one thing PM Sharif was supposed to know, and know well, was how to untie Pakistan from the historical death-knot we have with India. Instead, here we are, facing a United Nations General Assembly at which the Indians will have their way with Pakistan, and we are left, as we so often are in cricket: holding prayer beads and mumbling various duas. Hoping against hope (and against reason) that PM Sharif can produce an innings of sheer genius.

The worst part is not that the Indians will poke and prod Pakistan at will. The worst part is that the impact of this latest round of hostility and bitterness between India and Pakistan will produce an environment within Pakistan that will make it impossible to speak of peace and normalisation. We are at the cusp of exiting an era in which normalisation had been normalised. Indian atrocities in Kashmir happen to coincide with a period of exceptional and unprecedented laziness and sloth within Pakistani state structures.

Whilst Messrs Doval, Jaishankar and Modi have thought long and hard about how to deal with Pakistan, there is no equivalent or competing brain trust in Pakistan that has any idea as to how to deal with India. This is akin to a blatant surrender of civilian authority. PM Sharif was supposed to have done a better job than this.