The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  Because of Thackeray, there could be no Test in Mumbai, the spiritual home of Indian cricket. His supporters also tried to prevent the match in Delhi, by digging up the Feroz Shah Kotla pitch and threatening to release snakes into the crowd. Yet the series went ahead, and produced wonderful cricket.

  Pakistan won the first Test in Chennai by 12 runs, due largely to a century of reckless brilliance by its young Pushtun all-rounder, Shahid Afridi. And if the game was superb, what followed was better. As India’s last wicket fell, the Chennai crowd rose to applaud the victorious Pakistanis. It was a reminder that some Indian fans could still appreciate a good game, whatever the result. Barely believing what they were witnessing, the Pakistani cricketers went on a slow victory lap of the stadium. Audibly moved, the Indian television commentator Harsha Bhogle intoned, ‘If you ever wanted to see a victory for sport, here it is in your television screens, in your drawing rooms.’

  India won the second Test, in Delhi, with ease. So there was no crowd trouble there. Anil Kumble, a tall Bangalorean leg-spinner who bowled faster than some Indian seamers, made history in the second innings by taking all ten wickets, a feat achieved only once before in a Test. But during the final match in Kolkata, there was trouble. Chasing 279 in the fourth innings, India were going well at 145 for two. Then Tendulkar was run out controversially, while leaping to evade a Pakistani fieldsman. Outraged, the Bengali crowd began raining water bottles on to the outfield and lighting fires in the stands. There was an overnight pause. But early on the next day after the local Bengali hero Sourav Ganguly got out, reducing India to 219 for seven, the rioting began again. The match was stopped while the police herded the crowd out of Eden Gardens. It was resumed, in an empty stadium, to allow the Pakistanis to complete their win.

  By the end of the 1990s, a casual Islamaphobia had percolated Indian society. I caught a glimpse of this in June 1999, on a visit to Delhi from Tokyo, where I was living at the time. I had come to see the girlfriend who would become my wife. My visit was also strategically timed: the World Cup was being held in England and was unavailable on Japanese television.

  It was, despite the fiery summer heat, a pleasant week. In the early mornings, when there was just a breath of dewy cool, Mian and I escaped her flat, which had no air conditioning, to walk among Delhi’s Mughal and Lodi ruins. Then she went off to work and I went home to read the newspapers and await the first cricket match of the day. The papers were filled with reports of a new war, in Kargil, a district of Indian-controlled Kashmir that Pakistani militants had invaded earlier in the year. India had struck back, battling for the heights where the Pakistanis were dug in. As the World Cup was being played, dozens of Indian and Pakistani fighters were being killed in Kargil every day.

  On the eve of my return to Tokyo, we went to watch India play Australia at the home of some friends. Our hosts were three unmarried sisters, all of whom claimed to be cricket-mad. Yet their enthusiasm soon began to wane. The Australians scored a formidable 282. And the Indian reply was inept. Tendulkar went for a first-over duck and Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly swiftly followed, reducing India to 12 for three. By this point our hosts had almost given up on the game, and the sight of India’s captain, Mohammed Azharuddin, walking to the wicket did not encourage them. Azharuddin was one of India’s best players. Yet he often struggled on fast overseas pitches and he was currently in wretched form. He lasted only eight balls, before edging a catch to point. As he trudged off, one of the sisters screamed, ‘Bloody Azharuddin, we should have got rid of you and your family at Partition!’ I remember this very clearly. I don’t remember having been shocked by it. I thought such views were normal in India.

  Azharuddin, a Muslim from Hyderabad, had been India’s captain for almost a decade. For liberal Indians, he was a sign that India’s secular underpinnings were still in place. To millions of poor Muslims, including my friend Javed the tailor, he was inspirational. Azhar was not Oxbridge-educated or filmy. He was from a religious, lower-middle-class family, and had learned cricket in the street. ‘Azharuddin was different,’ Javed told me. ‘He was like us.’

  On form, he was wonderful to watch. Azhar was relaxed at the crease, with slumped shoulders and no wasted effort, with little but balance and timing in his shots. When he drove the ball at the top of its bounce through the covers, standing back and on tiptoe, he seemed to hover over the pitch. ‘It’s no use asking an Englishman to bat like Mohammad Azharuddin,’ commented John Woodcock of The Times. ‘It would be like expecting a greyhound to win the Epsom Derby.’

  It was the sort of encomium Cardus had once heaped on Ranji. And that was fitting, because Azhar’s early achievements recalled the genius prince. He scored centuries, against an England touring side in 1984, in each of his first three Tests – a feat no one has ever matched.

  Yet Azhar also had it tough. When India played Pakistan, the pressure on him to perform was enormous. Indian Muslims needed his runs for inspiration; Hindu nationalists needed them to be convinced of his loyalty. When Azhar once scored a match-winning century, Thackeray declared him a ‘nationalist Muslim’, a phrase that was doubly insidious. It carried a suggestion that, by contrast, many or most Indian Muslims were unpatriotic; also that, should Azhar fail, his allegiances might require further review.

  The inference was not lost on Azhar. ‘I don’t deny that people look upon me as a Muslim,’ he told his biographer, Harsha Bhogle. ‘But whenever I have gone out to bat, or to field, I have done so as an Indian and so it shouldn’t matter what religion I follow ... I guess I will have to learn to live with it. But that can never prevent me from giving 100 per cent for India every time I walk out.’

  Only that wasn’t true – for reasons that had nothing to do with his religion. In April 2000, the police in Delhi announced they had taped phone conversations between South Africa’s captain Hansie Cronje and an Indian bookmaker, Sanjeev Chawla, during a recent South African tour of India. They allegedly recorded the pair discussing arrangements to fix two forthcoming one-day games. This led to one of the biggest corruption scandals in sport, and Azhar’s disgrace.

  Further investigations by detectives, journalists and, lagging far behind, the national cricket boards revealed a rottenness in cricket that had long been rumoured. It turned out to go deeper than almost anyone had feared. For years, some of the game’s biggest stars had been taking money from bookmakers in return for privileged team and other match-day information, and sometimes for wilfully under-performing in games. Cricketers from every major country were implicated in the scandal. The Australians Mark Waugh and Shane Warne became whistleblowers after admitting taking money from a bookie two years previously. But most of the fixers, on the evidence produced, were Indians and Pakistanis, and so were the bookies, based mostly in India and the Gulf. Some worked for Mumbai’s mostly Muslim gangsters, including Dawood. By one estimate this mafia were responsible for a quarter of India’s illegal gambling industry and much of the fixing.

  Those accused included some of India’s most revered modern cricketers. Kapil Dev was among them. A former team-mate, Manoj Prabhakar, accused Kapil of offering him 2.5 million rupees to throw a game against Pakistan. Kapil was forced to resign as India’s national team coach, though he denied the charge, and was subsequently exonerated.

  That left Azhar, whom Cronje had referred to in the tapes as an accomplice, as the biggest Indian villain. He was accused of taking millions of rupees from bookies, since 1996 or earlier, in return for team information and attempting to fix one-day internationals. At first he suggested he was being victimised because he was Muslim. Then Azhar allegedly admitted ‘doing’ three one-day games and was banned for life. Three other Indian players, Manoj Prabhakar, Ajay Sharma and Ajay Jadeja, also received bans. Though Jadeja – an old boy of Rajkumar College in Rajkot who had been accused of associating with bookmakers – succeeded in having his five-year ban overturned by the high court in Delhi.

  Azhar the modest, god-fearing Hyderabadi was now a distant mem
ory. The portrait that emerged from the match-fixing investigations was of a venal cynic, greedy for expensive cars and watches. It was a transformation that had been evident for some time; many dated its onset to when, five years earlier, Azhar had ditched the mother of his two sons and shacked up with a minor Bollywood actress, Sangeeta Bijlani.

  His fall was dramatic. But for the BCCI it should be temporary. In 2006 Azhar appealed against his life-ban and the board suggested it would overturn it. One BCCI official, Ratnakar Shetty, described the ban as having been a ‘knee-jerk reaction’ which the BCCI regretted: ‘In retrospect, they feel the board had been too harsh on its players considering the way the other boards went about protecting the guilty.’

  Yet Azhar remained banned, and also shunned by his former teammates. Though still revered by many Indians, he was persona non grata in Indian cricket. In 2008 he therefore followed a path trodden by many alleged miscreants and entered Indian politics. He stood for Congress in India’s 2009 general election, in the poor and Muslim-heavy constituency of Moradabad; and won election by more than 50,000 votes. Three years later, to the surprise of many cricket fans, the Indian high court overturned his ban – the judges having found no evidence that Azhar was guilty of match-fixing.

  As the 21st century dawned, Indo-Pakistani relations were dire. In 2001 more than 4,500 people were killed in Kashmir, making it the deadliest year of the conflict. In December of that year, five jihadist terrorists attacked India’s parliament – the most potent symbol of Indian democracy. They breached its outer perimeter, killed seven people in a shootout and, but for the quick thinking of a police constable, might have made it into the main chamber. Most Indian MPs were inside at the time.

  Both countries rushed their armies to the border, amid fears of a nuclear exchange. War, thankfully, was averted. But it surely would not have been if another planned jihadist plot had come to fruition. In February 2002 three Kashmiri militants, under arrest in Delhi, confessed that they had been hatching a plan to kidnap Tendulkar and India’s then-captain, Sourav Ganguly.

  Yet in late 2003, there was a surprising lurch for peace. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and Pakistan’s latest dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, called a ceasefire in Kashmir. Two months later, they reactivated air and rail links. In January 2004 Vajpayee visited Islamabad, where I had recently set up shop, as the Pakistan correspondent of the Guardian. His visit led to two important announcements. The countries would embark on a new ‘Composite Dialogue’ to settle all their outstanding differences. And, despite a wave of terrorist violence in Pakistan, as the overspill from the war in Afghanistan between NATO and the Taliban, the first Indian Test tour of Pakistan for nearly 15 years would go ahead, as planned, in March. It would include five one-day internationals, followed by three Tests. This was the most ambitious ‘cricket diplomacy’, as the effort to improve neighbourly relations through cricket was known, ever attempted.

  Vajpayee, a Hindi poet and wit, underlined its significance at a farewell party for the Indian players in Delhi. ‘Khel hi nahi, dil bhi jeetiye!’ he instructed them. ‘Win not only matches, but also hearts!’ Even Musharraf, who was more of a tennis man, sought to capture the importance of the occasion. ‘It’s not the question of win or lose, the good performance should be appreciated,’ he declared on the eve of the first ODI, in his home town of Karachi. Then the General added: ‘We must show that we are a disciplined nation.’

  This is not a quality for which Pakistanis are well known. And the crowd in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest and most lawless city, was notoriously riotous. In 1997 it had stoned the Indian team during a one-day game. And the jihadist blowback from the 9/11 attacks – whose plotter Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was then hiding in Karachi – had introduced new dangers. New Zealand’s cricketers fled the city in 2002 after seeing a busload of French engineers blown up outside their hotel.

  I was in the press box at Karachi for the game. As the Pakistan captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, led his team out on to the turf in their Muslim-green costumes, the crowd roared. When they were joined by India’s opening batsmen, Sehwag and Tendulkar, the volume rose. I had never heard such thunderous cheering – this was the first India–Pakistan game I had seen. But the crowd was only warming up.

  The first over was to be bowled by Shoaib Akhtar, the ‘Rawalpindi Express’. This would be a significant event, because it was the series in a nutshell: great Indian batsmen against searing Pakistani pace. As he began his run-up, from almost beneath the press box, Akhtar was a fearsome sight. Most fast bowlers accelerate to the wicket, husbanding their energies for their delivery stride. Akhtar just charged in like a Celtic psychopath joining battle. He ran with his mighty torso inclined forwards and his bowling-arm half-extended, less like a limb than a weapon, a javelin to be hurled.

  As he reached the crease and unleashed his first missile, the roaring of the crowd was tremendous. The ball bulleted wide down the leg-side, but at such thrilling velocity that the crowd kept on yelling – ‘Zindabad Shoaib!’ ‘Long live Shoaib!’ – as the Express hiked back to the end of his run-up. This was proper Pakistani fast bowling, the real 90mph terror.

  But the Indian openers survived the opening salvo from Akhtar and his willowy new-ball partner, Mohammad Sami. And as they started laying about the bowling, the crowd started shouting appreciation for them too: ‘Sachin Zindabad!’ and ‘Sehwag Zindabad!’ And suddenly thousands were shouting ‘India Zindabad!’ A group of youths were tearing around the boundary line holding the Indian tricolour and green flag of Pakistan knotted together. ‘India Zindabad! Pakistan Zindabad!’ the crowd thundered. Had I not heard it, I would not have believed it was possible. In mad, murderous Karachi, the crowd was working itself into raptures over these Indians who, despite everything they knew about the city, had trusted to come to it to play cricket.

  I left the press box and wandered through the stands. ‘This cricket series is our greatest and happiest Eid, for which we have been waiting for 15 years,’ one spectator told me. ‘This game is not just about cricket. Musharraf and Vajpayee are brothers and that is what we are celebrating. And cricket will win. Whether we win or lose is nothing to us,’ he said as his friends laughed and tousled his hair.

  I went looking for some Indian spectators. There were only a couple of hundred in the stadium, sent to test the waters ahead of the much bigger Indian influx expected for the later games in Lahore. Most of this forward party worked for Samsung, the series sponsor, and were sitting together. They were easy to spot: a square of blue India team shirts in a stormy sea of white salwar kameez.

  Yet the Indian spectators could not have sounded more relaxed. They enthused about Pakistani hospitality, one of the glories of Asia. Whenever the Indians took a taxi, the driver-wallahs waived the fare, when they ate in a restaurant, strangers demanded to pay their bill. What’s more, gushed one Samsung man, ‘The women! How pretty the women are here, with wonderful grace!’ He had not expected even to see any. ‘But it’s really very like India.’

  Then the Karachi crowd upped the ante. India’s foremost political celebrities, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, son and daughter of the murdered Rajiv, were ushered into the stand to greet the Indian spectators, surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards. Their grandmother, Indira Gandhi, had ordered Karachi to be shelled during the 1971 war. Yet no sooner had the Pakistani spectators cottoned on to the Gandhis’ presence than they were cheering for them too. ‘Priyanka Zindabad!’ they shouted as Priyanka, who resembles her grandmother, beamed with delight. Rahul looked more awkward, as he usually does.

  Back in the press box I bumped into Pakistan’s greatest cricketer, Imran Khan. He was not at this time contemplating the motivations of a suicide bomber. He appeared deeply contented. ‘I’ve never seen an India–Pakistan game with an atmosphere like this,’ he said. ‘There’s such a feeling of friendship. It’s as if we’re saying: “War is no longer an option, we need something new.”’ Outside a sudden roar signalled that
an Indian wicket had fallen. The match was turning out to be worthy of the mood.

  India scored 349 for seven, including a wonderfully paced 99 by Dravid. It was India’s highest 50-over score against Pakistan. In reply, the Pakistanis started disastrously, with both openers going cheaply. But this put together their two best batsmen, Inzamam and Yousuf Youhana, and they changed the game.

  Inzamam was one of my favourite players. He was from Multan, Pakistan’s ancient ‘city of saints’, and there was something appropriately medieval about him. He was a round-shouldered giant, rather fat, enormously strong and comically idle. Besides batting, Inzy mainly liked eating and sleeping. Like most Pakistani cricketers, he was pious and uncomfortable speaking English and his batting was largely uncoached. On occasion his manners let him down. As when, fielding on the boundary in a hilariously misnamed ‘Friendship Cup’ game against India in Toronto, an Indian heckler had insulted him, calling him ‘mota aloo’, or fat potato. Inzy then called for a bat and leapt into the crowd with it to try to brain the heckler. But Inzy’s batting was not unpolished. It was a vision of unlikely elegance. And that day in Karachi, Inzamam played one of the great one-day innings.

  He and Youhana put on 135 together. Youhana then got out, attempting yet another six, but Inzy rumbled on, putting on another century partnership with Younis Khan, the best Pushtun cricketer since Imran. India’s captain, Ganguly, who looked anxious at the best of times, started switching his bowlers around frantically. The deficit was now less than 100 and he needed a breakthrough.

  Inzy had by now scored 122 off only 100 balls, half of them in seemingly effortless boundaries. But there his innings ended. He was caught behind, attempting a delicate late cut. I walked out to the boundary to watch Inzy come in: as he trudged past, vast and saturated in sweat, his pudgy face betrayed no emotion.