 Pakistan's
cricketers seem unaware of the special burden they bear: they
are the last idols left for the young in a nation bereft of
heroes. There have been only two politicians who inspired the
popular imagination, Jinnah and Zulfiqar Bhutto. A child born in
the year Bhutto was hanged is already 31 years old. Jinnah was
the epitome of financial integrity; Zulfiqar’s heirs are smeared
by a reputation for corruption. You can only be disillusioned if
you have illusions, and cricket still inspires pride among
Pakistani youth. But for how much longer?
Perhaps the most revealing fact of the latest scandal is that
the brilliant Mohammad Aamer, often described as the best bowler
of his age in history, was born in 1992, the year his country’s
current President Asif Zardari bought a chateau in France.
Zardari’s garrulous spokesperson revealed a few weeks ago that
this chateau had been in the Zardari “family” for 18 years,
almost as if the Zardari-Bhuttos were Bourbons with ancient
claims on choice retreats in Europe. Zardari is a Bourbon only
to the extent that, like them, he has learnt nothing and
forgotten nothing. There has never been any explanation as to
where Zardari found the money for the purchase of real estate at
unreal prices across the world. Zardari’s parents did not own
France; they merely possessed a few cinema halls in Karachi, and
Zardari is not famous for having set up the Pakistani version of
Infosys. His wealth came from bribery, a collateral benefit of
the fact that his wife Benazir became prime minister in the wake
of her father’s judicial assassination.
Aamer is a child of an impoverished family from a remote village
called Changa Bangyaal in Gujar Khan. He could not afford an
education, nearly died of dengue at 15 and developed a back
problem that nearly wrecked his prospects as a fast bowler. He
has watched the most exalted political family of his time thrive
on loot. He has lived in an economic milieu where landlords
enslaved the peasant, controlled the power centres of Lahore and
Islamabad and, this monsoon, diverted floodwaters towards
populated villages and towns so that they could protect their
crops. He entered a game reeking of inside deals. Ian Chappell
recalled, after this scandal broke, the Sydney Test in which
Pakistan led by 200 runs in the first innings. Australia were
only 50 runs ahead with eight wickets down in the second innings
when wicketkeeper Kamran Akmal dropped four catches, enabling
Australia to get a decent score and then run through Pakistan’s
second innings. (It is probably easier to give away your wicket
than to drop a catch.) Akmal is still a star of this team.
Aamer’s captain Salman Butt is, quite apparently, complicit.
Mazhar Majeed, the man at the heart of the furore, told the
British tabloid that trapped him, that up to seven of the
current Pakistani team could be bought. That percentage might be
equally valid for the Pakistani political elite.
If Aamer was trying to maximize the financial benefits of his
personal tryst with destiny, why blame him? He learnt from the
culture of his ruling class. Zardari’s lottery was marriage;
Aamer’s is cricket. If Zardari is the father of the fast buck,
then Aamer is a jockey of the also-ran.
A Pakistani cricketer’s avenues for licit income are miniscule
compared to an Indian’s. Newcomers in India with a tenth of
Aamer’s talent become overnight stars and multimillionaires, not
just from the game but from sponsorships because India has a
flourishing economy. When all else is lost, Yuvraj Singh can
always make a packet by promising to improve the tensile
strength of a certain part of your anatomy. Still, no member of
any national cricket team can consider himself poor any longer;
nor does poverty justify fraud. This is the appropriate moment
to congratulate Bangladesh cricketers like Shakib al Hasan and
Tamim Iqbal, who were approached by bookmakers ahead of the
two-Test series against India in January and reported the
matter. Honour may be in a wheelchair but it is not dead.
There is a stale odour around cricket in India. We were once
shocked when captains like Hansie Cronje and Mohammed Azharuddin
were implicated. The first has gone to meet the great umpire in
the sky. The second has managed an adroit backward integration
into politics. It says something about Indian politics that a
person prevented from managing our cricket has been chosen to
manage our nation. Shock has been diluted into surprise, and we
are now surprised that someone has been luckless enough to get
caught in a sport heavily insured by silence.
Pakistani cricketers thank God at every traffic light. It is
possible that on the field they are actually bowing to their
bookie rather than to their God.
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Crown prince Rahul cannily turns left
Has Rahul
Gandhi launched a campaign against Congress? More precisely, has
the heir presumptive, affectionately dubbed a modern Lord
Krishna by his more fervent fans, begun to undermine the
Congress establishment, at the pinnacle of which sits Manmohan
Singh and his home minister P Chidambaram?
This makes some political sense. Having milked the
right-of-centre to the point of exhaustion, the Rahul Congress
is steering towards left-of-centre. Meanings, of course, have
changed. As the centre has shifted in the last two decades,
'right' and 'left' have moved along with it. 'Left' now
represents populism, rather than ideology. Marx died in the
1990s and even his ghost cannot escape from the effective burial
given by comrades Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping.
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