The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Though Urdu is the mother tongue of only 5 percent of Pakistanis, it is the official language of the state and is taught in schools nationwide. Most Pakistanis are therefore bilingual. Urdu is one of the eighteen officially recognized languages of India, where Hindi is the primus inter pares among the native tongues. It is taught in non-Hindi-speaking areas, except in Tamil Nadu. Spoken Hindi is akin to spoken Urdu, and that language is often called Hindustani. Bollywood’s screenplays are written in Hindustani.

  “The common man in Pakistan wants entertainment and Indian movies provide them with a source of getting away from the [mundane] routines of life,” said Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani film critic. “Cinema owners in Pakistan understand this aspect of the political economy of the media and therefore [most of them] want Indian movies though a few among the local movie producers, directors would always resist [Indian content].”10

  The release of Dhoom 3 (Hindi: Uproar 3), a Bollywood action thriller with a record budget of $21million, on December 19, 2013, in India, and then in Pakistan a week later, introduced a new element in the tangled tale of the Indian film industry and Pakistan. Written and directed by Krishna Acharya, the lead was played by the superstar Aamir Khan. On the first day the movie racked up box office receipts of Rs 20 million from fifty-six screens in Karachi, beating the record of Rs 11.4 million set by the Pakistani film Waar (Urdu: The Strike) in the previous month. The craze in the port city reached such heights that the multiplexes ran Dhoom 3 on all their screens with five shows a day per screen. Nadeem H. Mandviwalla, the distributor, was ecstatic. “2013 was a great year for exhibitors and distributors, and the success of Chambeli, Man Hoon Shahid Afridi [Urdu: I am Shahid Afridi, cricket’s superstar], Waar, Chennai Express and Dhoom 3 showed Pakistani and Indian films could co-exist on screen.”11

  Actually, such coexistence had officially come to pass. On December 16, Lucman, who had sought a ban on Indian films before a High Court in Lahore and had the backing of those who feared the decline of the domestic industry in the face of Bollywood imports, withdrew his petition following a compromise. He and the Pakistan Cinema Owners’ Association and film distributors signed a Memorandum of Understanding whereby movie theaters in Pakistan were to be permitted to give equal screening time to Indian and Pakistani movies.12

  This pragmatic attitude in the business community was at odds with the prevalent view in political and military circles.

  Tools of Psychological Warfare

  The hard-liners in the political-military establishment fretted about the insidious influence of Indian films and broadcasting media in shaping public opinion in Pakistan. Major General Muhammad Asif, in his essay in the latest edition of Pakistan’s biennial journal Green Book, published by the General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, for the officer corps, lamented the fact that because of the lack of credibility in the Pakistani media, many people turned to All India Radio, the BBC, and Indian satellite channels for news, particularly during Indo-Pakistan crises.13

  The 2010 Green Book, published in 2012, covered information warfare. In the opening essay, “Treatise on India-backed Psychological Warfare Against Pakistan,” Brigadier Umar Farooq Durrani stated that India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) funded many newspapers and even TV channels, such as Zee TV, which is “considered to be the India’s media headquarters to wage psychological war.” However, according to Durrani, the most subtle form of psychological warfare “is found in movies where Muslim and Hindu friendship is screened within the backdrop of melodrama. Indian soaps and movies are readily welcomed in most households in Pakistan. The effect desired to be achieved through this is to undermine the Two National Theory as being a person[al] obsession of [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah.” In his foreword to the book, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani described the essays as providing “an effective forum for the leadership to reflect on, identify and define the challenges faced by the Pakistani army and share ways of overcoming them.”14

  As for Pakistan’s movie industry—based in Lahore and called Lollywood—it had recovered from the trough it had hit during the rule of Zia ul Haq. But it was a minnow compared to Bollywood. With its revenue of $3 billion in 2011, Bollywood was expected to generate income of $4.5 billion by 2016.15

  Where Pakistanis could console themselves in their competition with Indians in popular culture was cricket. There the odds favored them.

  Cricket: Spectacular Arena for One-Upmanship

  One consequence of the partition was greater sports rivalry, which was spectacularly expressed on the cricket oval. Though Pakistan became a permanent member of the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 1948, it acquired test status four years later. In the following six decades, it played 58 tests with India. It won 11 tests and lost 9, with the rest being draws.16 On the other hand, the Indians won the ICC’s World Cup at the Lord’s in London in June 1983, nine years before the Pakistanis, captained by Imran Khan, did in Melbourne. Starting in October 1978, the two neighbors’ national squads competed against each other in One Day International (ODI) in multinational tournaments and Twenty20 contests.17 In 126 such encounters until March 2014, Pakistan won 72 and India 50, with 4 declared draws.18

  Pakistan’s first series of test matches with India started in October 1952. Its team lost the first test in Delhi. Then it fought back with verve in Lucknow, inflicting a humiliating defeat on its host by an inning. Whereas its performance buoyed the spirits of Pakistanis at home, the Indian spectators at the stadium were so furious that they booed and mocked their players. By winning the next match, the Indians saved their sports honor. But the abuse that was hurled at the Indian cricket squad in Lucknow left an indelible mark. The message was: there is a lot more at stake than just cricket. A match between the two national teams was to be treated as a battle fought on the pitch—a war without the shooting. Indeed, the term “clash” replaced the normal “match” in the case of India and Pakistan. This forced the two captains and their squads to follow defensive tactics. Hence the 1954–1955 test series hosted by Pakistan and the 1960–1961 series by India were draws.

  The sports and trade break caused by the Kashmir War in 1965 continued well past the next armed conflict in 1971. It was only in 1978, when the heads of government in Delhi and Islamabad—Morarji Desai and General Zia ul Haq respectively—had not been the direct participants in the 1971 war, that cricketing ties were restored. In November 1978 the sixteenth Indo-Pakistan test match was played in Faisalabad, Pakistan. The Indo-Pakistan cricket test series became an annual event.

  One-day matches were also played in some tournaments, such as the short-lived Austral-Asia Cup, which was staged in the United Arab Emirates. Because of their brevity, these games are very exciting. The most memorable one between India and Pakistan was played in Sharjah in 1986 for the Austral-Asia Cup Final. Pakistan needed 4 runs off the last ball to win. Javed Miandad, a legendary batsman, hit a 6 when his strike sent the ball over the boundary marker and into the crowd. Pakistan went into an ecstatic frenzy while its archrival was shattered. This was Pakistan’s first victory in a one-day tournament and the consequent depression it caused among Indians lingered a long time. Indeed, the shock of triumph or defeat was so intense that several people died of heart attacks on both sides of the border.19

  The next year Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi broke new ground by inviting Zia ul Haq to watch a match with him in February 1987 to defuse the tension caused by India’s Operation Brasstacks war games. With that, the term “cricket diplomacy” entered the diplomatic lexicon in South Asia. Later, the worsening of Delhi-Islamabad relations because of the insurgency in Kashmir ended the countrywide tours by the competing squads, the forty-fifth test match in Sialkot, Pakistan, in mid-December 1989 being the last during the twelve-year period. It was in a game played against the Pakistani team in Karachi a month earlier that the sixteen-year-old Sachin Tendulkar, who would be hailed as the greatest postwar batsman, made his debut in a test series.<
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  On the one hand test matches aroused partisan passions on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border; on the other they enabled people-to-people contact. “I remember in the 1989 Test at Lahore, people came from New Delhi and Amritsar,” recalled Rameez Raja, the chief executive of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). “Likewise when Pakistan played in India, people from Pakistan went to Chandigarh and other Indian cities.”20

  With the Kashmiri separatists’ insurgency gathering pace in the early 1990s and the Indian government using an iron fist to squash it, relations between Delhi and Islamabad became frosty. The cricket test match series was suspended.

  At the initiative of Sahara India, a business conglomerate, the PCB and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) signed a five-year contract in 1995 to play five annual ODIs in Toronto, a neutral venue. In the three seasons from September 1996 to September 1998, Pakistan won the tournaments. By then, with cable TV making inroads in India, more Indians had access to watching cricket played overseas. Betting on cricket, although illegal, became widespread in both India and Pakistan. The remaining two ODIs fell by the wayside when, in the wake of the Kargil War in the spring of 1999, Sahara India ended its sponsorship.21

  As for the Indo-Pakistan test matches, on the eve of Indian premier Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s bus journey from Delhi to Lahore in February 1999, the forty-sixth Indo-Pakistani test match was played in Chennai. Pakistan won by 12 runs. The return tour of the Indian squad failed to materialize because of the Kargil War, which resulted in yet another break in official bilateral cricket links.

  On June 8, 1999, while Indian and Pakistani soldiers were fighting in Kargil, the contest between the cricket teams of the warring nations in the World Cup tournament in Manchester, England, became the most watched segment of the tournament. Though Pakistan was beaten by India, it had done so well in earlier matches that it went on to the semifinal.

  In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001, Delhi broke off diplomatic ties with Islamabad. Mutual relations, including sports, remained frozen until August 2003. Six months later, India played the first of its three tests, despite security concerns, and as many ODIs. “Our public has been starving to see India play in Pakistan for nearly 14 years,” said Raja. “I think eight international matches would generate huge excitement and interest, while almost every [sports] centre will also get its due share [of hosting the game].”22 The Indians won the series, 2 to 1. By then airing the matches on TV had become big business. So the pressure on players to win intensified.

  Predictably, the terror attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 ruptured Indo-Pakistan cricket ties. In the wake of a terror attack on the visiting Sri Lankan team in Lahore in March 2009, the ICC cancelled Pakistan’s cohosting of the 2011 Cricket World Cup. The headquarters of the organizing committee was shifted from Lahore to Mumbai. With Pakistan no longer hosting games, eight of the games were played in India, four in Sri Lanka, and two in Bangladesh. This was a major blow to Pakistan from which it has yet to recover fully.

  A Cricket Battle on the Plains of Punjab

  When the Indian and Pakistani teams found themselves facing each other in the ICC’s 2011 semifinal in the stadium in Mohali, a satellite town of Chandigarh, passion rose in both nations—and with it the size of betting, now running into billions of rupees. An extra element of drama was added when Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh invited his Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, to watch the daylong battle on a cricket pitch on March 30.

  On the eve of this momentous event, the Mohali stadium was surrounded by contingents of policemen in khaki, antiriot paramilitaries in blue fatigues, commando units in black overalls, and regular troops in full battle uniform. They were aided by bomb disposal squads with sniffer dogs and helicopters in the air. Those entering the stadium went through a metal detector and were given vigorous pat-downs by security guards.

  With only half of the twenty-eight thousand stadium seats available to the public—the other half reserved for celebrities, diplomats, and officials from both countries—demand far exceeded supply, with tickets selling for up to ten times the official price. Those desperate to gain entrance had started lining up thirty-six hours before the event. Belying the reports that Indian visas had been given to thousands of Pakistanis, there was only a trickle crossing the Wagah border post. Most Pakistanis chose to watch the event live on TV.

  In Karachi, the home of the cricket captain Shahid Afridi, the authorities erected giant screens at venues across the city, while car owners draped their vehicles with the national flag and posters of the players. In a rare goodwill gesture, prison officials arranged a special screening of the match for their Indian inmates and provided them with the Indian tricolor to cheer their side. In Chandigarh, Punjab’s deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal urged residents to open their “hearts and homes to our brothers from across the border.” They were generous to the Pakistani visitors, up to a point. “They can come, they can play but they cannot win,” said an ardent fan of the Indian squad. “This is India’s match.”23

  And so it turned out. India won by 29 runs. Three Pakistanis died of heart attacks caused by the shock of defeat. One of them was fifty-five-year-old Liaquat Soldier, an actor-writer-director who collapsed while participating in a TV show in Karachi organized for the much-hyped match. “The whole nation . . . simply got disappointed,” read the editorial of the Lahore-based Dunya (World) newspaper. “Fans watching live screening returned to their homes during the last overs of the match.”24

  India went on to challenge Sri Lanka in the final, played in Mumbai. It triumphed, beating its rival by 6 wickets. It became the first country to win the ICC’s World Cup final on home soil. With a record 67.6 million people watching the gripping final—most of them poised on the edge of their seats—it also became one of the most viewed sporting events on television.

  India’s Status on the Rise

  By now there was a mismatch in the international standing of the Indian and Pakistan teams. This stemmed from the improving quality of India’s players and the emergence of India as the thriving commercial hub of international cricket. The realization that failure to play against India was excluding Pakistan’s squad from the most lucrative hub led the PCB to urge the BCCI to resume sports links, reiterating its long-held stance that politics should not interfere with sporting ties. The BCCI invited the Pakistani team to tour India for three ODIs and two Twenty20s in late December 2012 and early January 2013.

  During its first tour of India in five years, Pakistan came out even in the Twenty20 series but won the ODI series, 2–1, its first victory since 2005. Its cricketers and media exhibited a true spirit of sportsmanship when Tendulkar, a cricketing phenomenon, retired from the sport after nearly a quarter century. Among other things, the Pakistani media covered Tendulkar’s farewell speech live on November 16, 2013. Newspapers and cricketers showered praise on the sports icon. Calling him “the most complete batsman of his age,” the Express Tribune and Daily Times explained that he had the rare skill of repelling bowling attacks of all sorts and tailoring his natural aggression to suit the needs of his team. The glowing tributes to Tendulkar went on for so long that they annoyed the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban. In a video message its spokesman urged Pakistan’s media to stop praising the Indian batsman.25

  Such an attitude was alien to the PCB, which was keen to see the BCCI accept its invitation for a bilateral cricket tour of Pakistan by India, the last one having been in 2006. The BCCI failed to oblige. Frustration in the PCB built up. In December 2013 its acting chair, Najam Sethi, an eminent journalist-businessman, said that Pakistan was more than willing to tour India. “If they are not coming to Pakistan, we are willing to tour them.” He explained that “India owe us two home series as per the Future Tour Program, and India-Pakistan series is the most sought after, millions of people are waiting for it.” But he also pointed out that being the finan
cial hub and one of the most solicited teams, India had a busy cricket schedule—a fact that militated against its team playing a long series with an archrival such as Pakistan.26 In other words, India’s growing economic clout was becoming a factor in shaping its cricketing relations with its leading South Asian neighbor.

  India achieved an average of 8 percent growth in its economy between 2004 and 2011, whereas Pakistan’s GDP expansion declined from 7.4 percent during that period to 2.8 percent.27 The lower 5 percent increase in India’s GDP in 2013 was still twice as much as that of its feisty rival. As it was, the weakness of Pakistan’s economy compared to India’s was noted at Pakistan’s inception.

  Ups and Downs of Bilateral Trade

  Taking into account the gross imbalance in the GDPs of India and Pakistan in 1947, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) allowed the new nation to impose restrictions on its trade with India. GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), followed suit in 1995. That was why when Delhi accorded Pakistan most-favored-nation (MFN) status—meaning that it was ready to give Pakistan a trade advantage by offering low tariffs—in 1996, the WTO exempted Islamabad from reciprocating, which is the common practice.

  Partition placed the jute-growing area into East Pakistan and the cotton-growing Sindh into West Pakistan, whereas jute and textile mills were in West Bengal and Bombay respectively. Therefore 56 percent of Pakistan’s exports went to India, whereas only 32 percent of India’s finished goods exports were destined for the opposite direction. Before 1965, West Pakistan and India used eleven land routes for bilateral trade: eight in Punjab and three in Sindh.28 With the prices of commodities rising as a result of the Korean War (1950–1953), Pakistan had favorable trade with India. This continued for some years after the end of that conflict. During 1957–1963 bilateral trade balanced out. Later the situation favored Pakistan. In fiscal 1964, for instance, Pakistani goods worth $46 million were shipped to India, which earned only $27 million for its exports to Pakistan.29