First, spare a thought for our cricketers just as it becomes clear that even cricket is not spared from violent attacks in South Asia. Sri Lankan cricketers playing on the international circuit are an awesome bunch. From the captain and vice-captain down to every player in the squad, they let the bat and ball do the talking; when they fail, they smilingly acknowledge the other side’s performance and regroup themselves to do better the next time. They bear no attitude on their shoulders and show no arrogance on or off the field. The New Zealanders may be comparable in unassuming sportsmanship but they could hardly electrify a pitch the way only Mahela and his men could do. And they have done all this despite having one of the worst cricket administrations in the world.

It was supposed to be Mahela Jayawardene’s farewell tour, but the team came back after surviving a nasty ambush in Lahore that had all the signs of an aborted kidnap attempt. The team went to Pakistan in good spirits after India had declined to go ahead with its planned tour of Pakistan. Whatever political calculations there might have been in the Sri Lankan government’s decision to allow the team to go, the Sri Lankan players went ahead with the tour willingly. Pakistan promised Presidential-level security to the Sri Lankan cricketers and officials from other countries, but what they had at the time of the ambush was no better than ceremonial security. No additional measures were taken despite intelligence warnings about an attack being planned. It was not inability or negligence on the part of Pakistani cricket authorities to look after their guests, but it is the recent political turmoil in Punjab that is being blamed as the reason for the lapse in security.

On February 25, Pakistan’s Supreme Court disqualified former Prime Minister and absentee Opposition Leader Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif, Chief Minister of the Punjab Provincial government, from holding elected positions on account of earlier criminal convictions. Following the disqualification of Shahbaz Sharif, President Asif Zardari’s national government in Islamabad dismissed Sharif’s PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League –Nawaz) provincial government in Lahore, declared emergency rule and brought Punjab under direct central rule. The President’s PPP (Pakistan People’s Party) set about forming its own government in Punjab and as a prelude dismissed en masse the provincial police and civil administration personnel to be replaced by PPP loyalists and supporters. The immediate fallout from these machinations and changes was the collapse of the security arrangement for the Sri Lankan cricketers.

The Lahore attack specifically targeted foreign visitors who were also ambassadors of cricket. It is not just Pakistani cricket that will suffer in being partially excluded from international cricket by the refusal of other national teams to visit Pakistan in the near future. Players from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and West Indies would be just as reluctant to visit the other three South Asian cricket countries – India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Not so funnily, all four South Asian countries may themselves be reluctant to visit one another in the immediate future. Hosting the 2011 World Cup in South Asia may not be possible and already the Indian government has reportedly asked the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) to postpone the Indian Premier League tournament in the money-spinning, instant-noodle, twenty-twenty form of the game. Inadvertently, the Lahore attack may have put the brakes on the ambitiously controlling plans of what BCCI has really come to stand for – the Bank of Control for Cricket International!

As a sociopolitical commentary – every South Asian country has tried to come to terms with political terrorism by instituting layers of security rather than dealing with the political roots of terrorism. Much the same way election monitoring has become a huge entrepreneurial response to election violence and malpractices rather than governments and political parties taking upon themselves to ensure elections are free, fair and nonviolent. South Asia’s political leaders and parliamentarians have more paid armed bodyguards around them than political staff or voluntary supporters. Even the game started by the Englishman and the mad dog cannot be played without Presidential-level security. Perhaps, the level may have to be raised a notch higher to the Sri Lankan Defense-Secretary-level, and even that may not be enough to lure non-South Asian cricketers to play in South Asia.

South Asians: Feeding and fighting their wars

With the exception of Bhutan, Maldives and Nepal – all smaller in size than small Sri Lanka, the other five ‘major’ SAARC countries are deep in the clutches of political violence. Bangladesh took a huge step forward in the recent elections by decisively rejecting Islamic fundamentalism and asserting a more secular South Asian Muslim identity distinct from the Arabic Islamic identity of West Asia. But it has now been tragically pushed back by last month’s mutiny in the Bangladesh army. India’s behemoth size is scaling down what are otherwise significant pockmarks of political violence, while for all the hoopla about Sri Lanka becoming a unique world success story in the military crushing of terrorism, the country has many serious problems at its core. Perhaps, Sri Lanka could do well to follow the example of Nepal that has managed to get on the track of parliamentary democracy after decades of confrontation between a decadent monarchy and erratic Maoism.

Bringing up the rear in South Asia, whichever you look at it, are Pakistan and Afghanistan and the two are burdened with overwhelming challenges and underwhelming capacities to deal with them. The two are interconnected and with India they become a threesome – a reality that seems to be more realized in Washington than in New Delhi. The Lahore attack brings Sri Lanka into the fray, not that it was already not there. For close to thirty years India has been running with the hare and hunting with the hound in Sri Lanka – and it is still not tired of the old privy-pursed Maharaja’s game. Pakistan’s connections to Sri Lanka are no less intriguing. It has been providing military assistance to Sri Lanka as much to annoy India as to help the Sri Lankan government in its fight against the LTTE. Those who are exposing or speculating about connections between the LTTE and Islamic groups in Pakistan should not overlook the incestuous connections between these groups and government establishments in Pakistan. Taken together, the real picture that the terrorism experts must not fail to see is that the South Asians are now feeding and fighting their own wars.

In an earlier time third world intellectuals were quick to criticize, and rightly so, the West for supplying weapons to non-white people who were killing one another. The West has not ceased to be the primary source of world weaponry; no, not by a long shot. There is, however, a new breed of third rate intellectuals in the third world who no longer castigate the West for its weapon supplies, but cavil at Western organizations which criticize human rights violations in local wars and call for peace instead of fighting. They are branding westerners and the locals who speak up against war and for human rights as HREs – Human Rights Extremists. Writing in 1927, the French philosopher and novelist Julien Benda accused the apologists for warmongering and vulgar nationalism of intellectual treason; our new breed of intellectuals stand accused of nothing less. By their line of reasoning the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre should be deemed hideous not because unarmed people in Punjab, women and children, were cornered and killed but because General Dyer, a White man, ordered the killing. How many massacres are now going on in South Asia but with no White man to blame?