After long, the balance in the Pakistani press has tipped towards good news. Courtesy, Pakistan’s victory in the World T20 championship at the legendary Lord’s cricket ground. Mohammed Malick made an incisive analysis of Pakistan’s moment of glory in The News on June 22. “For the first time in months, the people have come out of a perpetual pall of depressive gloom. Millions poured out on the streets to celebrate as a nation. They danced on the same streets where they had been mourning their dead, lighting candles for martyrs of extremism. For one beautiful day, it felt great to be mentally free, felt proud to be a Pakistani. Nobody cared about suicide bombers, Taliban were passe, drones could go drown in the Atlantic, life was cricket being measured not in days or hours but in six-ball overs.”

The team Pakistan defeated at Lord’s became the cause of their fall from world cricket when the Sri Lankan team was attacked in Lahore earlier this year. The bus driver who braved bullet injuries and drove them to safety on that fateful day was reported by Dawn on June 22 as hailing Team Pakistan: “We desperately needed this victory because there’s so much happening around our country,” said Mohammad Khalil. “ Sri Lanka is our friend and it will remain our friend, but I wanted Pakistan to win today’s match.”

Daily Times wrote an editorial on June 23, juxtaposing the ethnicity of some players with the volatile situation in Pakistan’s north. “The Pakistani team was symbolically led by a Pashtun, Younis Khan, one of the three in the team whose mother tongue is Pashto, the same spoken by warlord Baitullah Mehsud who has proven to be the scourge of the Pashtun people before threatening the very existence of the state of Pakistan. All-rounder Shahid Afridi, whose co-tribesmen are suffering under the savage rule of a local warlord in Khyber, lifted himself from a long trough of indifferent batting. The second symbolic challenge to Baitullah Mehsud was the bowling of another Pashtun, Umar Gul, who ended up with the biggest haul of wickets in an international Twenty-20 match. The man who was expected to do the job Gul did was Suhail Tanvir, the fast bowler from Punjab. He was the bowler the teams feared most, but he failed to fire throughout the championship, as if to make possible an appropriate symbolic display of Pakistan’s struggle against terrorism.”

... contd.