It’s not just cricket

We are told that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The allusion here is that a nation’s leadership is shaped by good education and the character-building virtues of sports. At least in the English sporting culture, cricket has a special place and the game is associated with fair play and sportsmanship.

So, what battles have we won or expect to win on the pitch of Gaddafi Stadium? We did play a great game of cricket on this playing field just over a week ago and its reverberations have continued to distract our attention. We still cannot get over the fact that the PSL final was held in Lahore, as if it was a crucial battle we had won.

Well, that is how the event has been billed by our rulers. The battle was against the terrorists who have triggered an environment of fear and insecurity. Since the game was held without any incident, with thousands of excited spectators in the stadium, the terrorist were supposed to have been clean-bowled. The umpire’s finger was raised.

But, in some ways, the game is not yet over. There is this American sporting expression of a ‘Monday          morning quarterback’. This is a person who passes a judgement on and criticises something after the event. Professional football games in the US are generally played on Sundays – though they play it with an oval-shaped ball.      The point I am making is that the PSL final brought forth a string of bouncers in the political arena.

When cricket is a point of reference, can Imran Khan be far behind? After all, he is our eternal cricketing hero. But after he entered politics, he is just not playing cricket. Or, to use another cricket idiom, he is not playing with a straight bat.    On last Monday, in a leaked video, he was heard using slang words for the foreign players who had played in the final. These obviously derogatory words were:    phateecher    and     relukattay.

A storm was raised in the media on how Imran had mocked the foreign star cricketers. The PML-N’s stalwarts had a field day. This imbroglio once again certified the quality of our political culture and it is instructive that Imran’s remarks finally led to two members of the National Assembly actually coming to blows        on Thursday.

In another sorry spectacle of how our politicians play their game, there was a scuffle outside Parliament House between Murad Saeed of Imran Khan’s PTI and Mian Javed Latif of the PML-N. They had a verbal duel earlier after Mian Javed Latif had called Imran Khan a ‘traitor’ because of his comments on the PSL final.

What I find interesting here is that Imran Khan is one of our leading politicians who had received their early education at the prestigious Aitchison College that may truly be compared to Eton of England. The emphasis in both elite institutions is on character building. Both are also a source of leadership in the two countries. Apart from the fact that they come from leading and princely families, the alumni of the Aitchison College are expected to be men of honour, with high moral qualities. In any case, Imran Khan has strongly defended Murad Saeed.

If Aitchison College is to be used as a peg, we have another former student who regularly makes headlines and sometimes raises eyebrows, as he has this week. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, according to a report published       on last Friday, “hinted that the government may block social media websites after an Islamabad High Court (IHC) judge warned that even the prime minister could be summoned, if necessary, in a case seeking the blocking of blasphemous content on the Internet”.

This is a sensitive matter and it has a bearing on the rise of intolerance and extremism in the country. There are intimations here, also, of why our war against terrorism and militant fanaticism is so problematic. The rulers may have made some tactical gains by generating nationalistic frenzy – with the media’s passionate involvement – for a cricket match. But the victory cannot be achieved without the war being fought in the minds of men.

And it is there that we are consistently losing our battles. In the first place, it is just not possible to have an open and rational debate on how our militants were nurtured and how they became so powerful. At times, there are some indications that they – the rulers – are able to identify the enemy within. The National Action Plan had raised some hopes. But the ideas that have governed us tend to be immutable – irrespective of the damage they do to our polity.       

To continue with the Aitchison reference, I feel compelled to mention a column written by a former principal of the elite school, F S Aijazuddin. It was published in an English daily        on Thursday. It is essentially a scathing indictment of the Punjab government for not caring a bit for the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF).

One is unable to understand why the high officials of the provincial administration did not comprehend the importance of a festival that is the pride of the city. The LLF was scheduled for three days just a week before the PSL final. Because of the security environment, the administration first denied the LLF its planned venue – the Alhamra Cultural Complex – just two days before the opening and then dictated that it be concluded within a day.

This entire episode, if you think about it, boggles the mind. It should be easy for a government that boasts about its prowess to accomplish gigantic tasks to protect a literature festival. But apparently no one thought about it. Those who do not value art and literature are not expected to have the capacity to think.    Aijazuddin has described how the LLF’s organisers “frantically salvaged sessions as if they were lifeboats on a Titanic hit by the iceberg of bureaucratic intransigence”.

This Titanic analogy is frightening. But it presents itself occasionally when you are able to grasp the reality of our situation and the unwillingness of our rulers to discern threats that are lurking just below the surface.

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: ghazi_salahuddin@

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