More adventurism

Surveying the damage inflicted on India-Pakistan relations by the Indian Premier League,Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna tried to draw a thick line of separation between government and private events in this country. As diplomatic damage control,he was distancing the government from the outrageous non-auction of 11 Pakistani cricketers on Tuesday — and thereby from the anti-India sentiment in Pakistan fuelling abandonment of a visit to this country by Pakistani parliamentarians as well as calls for a blackout of IPL matches and Indian films. But will the minister and his colleagues in government take stock of the damage inflicted by the IPL on this country and on cricket as it is hosted in this country? The government may or may not use the instruments available to call the IPL — or the BCCI,it is the same difference — to account. But it certainly needs to be much more articulate in isolating them in their arrogant disregard for the consequences of their actions.

A year ago,IPL’s second season was abducted to South Africa — and a refusal to compromise on the schedule at a time when the security forces were stretched for general election duty was carried through by representing this country as unsafe for a big-ticket event. Now as not one of the 11 Pakistani players — eleven men in whom team owners had shown enough interest for them to go under the hammer — received an opening bid,IPL commissioner Lalit Modi shrugged it off with these words: “Many other players were not sold,I don’t see too much into this.” Availability is the new mantra,and in its name presumably even individual team decisions that taken together smack of prejudice are acceptable.

Not so fast,Mr Modi. IPL is a work in progress,and cricket officials are clearly using it to test the limits to which they can consolidate their turf as a state within a state. Last year they invoked the calendar as a pretext for conceit. Now they are wrecking a civility that’s survived even through the darkest days of Indo-Pak relations. Whatever be the state of play in relations between the two governments,cricket has been a sphere to assert a normative standard of people-to-people interaction. In fact,governments have drunk deep from this carefully harvested reservoir of goodwill. Modi and his cohorts,by their arrogant disregard for the consequences for their actions,have depleted that reservoir. Pakistan will likely find soon enough that the message sent out from the IPL is not representative. But cricket is the poorer for this week’s callousness.