It would not have been quite cricket. This seems to have been the Indian security establishment’s thinking when it advised against a visa to Pakistan Railway Minister Sheikh Rasheed for the cricket match at Mohali on Thursday.

The Pakistan politician had wanted to come to India not in his official capacity, but on a private visit to watch the second Indo-Pak one-day international to be played at Mohali. But there were apprehensions that the visit, coming after the Emergency in Pakistan, would have created a spectacle of sorts, Home Ministry sources said.

This factor added to the existing wariness against issuing him a visa for private visits on earlier occasions.

Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader Yasin Malik had created a stir when he claimed militants had been trained at a camp run by Rasheed near Rawalpindi in the late eighties. Rasheed denied the charge and Malik himself later sought to play down the issue, saying the camp he had referred to was meant for the welfare of refugees from Kashmir.

The recent arrests of Pakistanis in the US, who were allegedly trained at a camp in the same area, have added to India’s wariness in granting him a visa.

India’s position has been to keep a distance from the present situation in Pakistan. “If he had come here, he would have drawn attention not for cricket but for the situation in Pakistan today,” an official said. And India was chary of letting its soil being used by a Pakistani politician to discuss and explain the Emergency in Pakistan.

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