All the talk of resuming talks on India-Pakistan bilateral ties seems to be a lot of noise yet so little else
Osman Samiuddin21-Oct-2015Buried deep inside the many complications of India-Pakistan (and yes, Pakistan-India) there is a plot. The two need to talk but they do not talk and instead they talk about whether they should or should not talk.Or, how they should talk? Where should they talk? Here? Kidding right? There? No chance. What should they talk about? This? Never. That? Hmmm, maybe. Would it be better to just wave at each other? Or maybe shake hands silently? Or tweet?Ultimately, they go the long way round to doing nothing and it is not, sadly, funny along the way. The cricketing relationship between the two is only slightly less Seinfeldian, never more than over this last year: so much noise and yet, so little, well, anything.Currently we are at an especially absurd state of high-pitched nothingness. The new head of the BCCI, Shashank Manohar, invited a delegation of the PCB officials to meet him on Monday.Before they could meet, Shiv Sena protesters had reached the BCCI HQ in Mumbai and protested against any resumption of ties with Pakistan. The meeting was cancelled. Two PCB officials flew back to Dubai. The chairman, Shaharyar Khan went to Delhi and returned to Pakistan on Wednesday. Nothing happened.Or, well, one thing did happen. Shaharyar Khan was riled and is now as close to angry as it is possible for him to get. Public expressions of his anger are rare, if not entirely make-believe, because even by the levels of career diplomats, his equanimity is notable.You can see why too, both from the details of this latest episode and in the bigger picture of his efforts to revive this contest. He claims Manohar made the invitation during a phone call – Shaharyar initiated the phone call after he had convinced the ICC chairman N Srinivasan at a board meeting in Dubai of the need for re-engagement.The PCB offered to have a meeting outside Mumbai, in Delhi or Nagpur, but was told Mumbai is fine. Once the meeting was cancelled, the BCCI made no further contact or effort to reschedule, at a different time or venue. Why, asks the PCB, invite us and then make no effort to meet?Then, in a separate press conference on Monday, Anurag Thakur, the BCCI secretary, seemed to suggest that Shaharyar had invited himself, for the non-specific purpose of merely establishing contact with Manohar. For what it is worth, there is an official, physical invitation from the BCCI, though admittedly it could be meeting a pure bureaucratic need – for most Pakistani citizens to travel to India, an official invitation letter of some sort is needed.Is this too , trying to find out who invited whom? It is a sensitive point, because in Pakistan the PCB has been criticised for running after the BCCI for a series. Shaharyar made the running, though it is understandable. He was the chairman the last time the two played regularly and he saw, first-hand, the benefits of it.But it is also a useless point, hung, as ever in matters between the two, on egos and a hypersensitive sense of national pride. What matters is not who invited whom but precisely what mattered before the meeting that did not happen and what has mattered ever since the two boards signed an MoU for future series in May 2014: is the BCCI going to play in a series that is supposed to take place in just over a month’s time?That is all the PCB wants to know. If the series is dependent on the Indian government, find out (as an aside, one PCB official has asked whether legally, or technically, government permission is actually needed, given that the India team will not be travelling to Pakistan, but to neutral territory in the UAE). Whether the BCCI tells the PCB in person, with or without invite, via email, fax, Snapchat or a non-spying pigeon, does not matter. Any answer, as long as it is an answer, will do.The BCCI’s refusal to give that answer is not an indictment of relations between the two countries, as much as it is of itself. Whatever their compulsions – the political atmosphere, the shuffles within the board – how difficult should it be for them to find out whether or not the government is fine with them playing Pakistan?Instead they have been duplicitous. On Monday, Thakur said that the final call on a series would be taken after talking to the government. Minutes later, in the same press conference, he said that the boards would have to agree first and only then would the government be approached. That stage, he said, had not yet arrived.So which is it? Does the BCCI need to approach the government first before they can commit a series to Pakistan, or do they need to commit to a series first and then approach the government? And what is to be made of the reportedly positive vibes Thakur gave at the ICC board meeting in October, in which the BCCI expressed its willingness to engage more wholeheartedly in bilateral ties with all members?There is some suggestion that contact continues, that a deeper game is afoot. The BCCI could be waiting for Sunday’s ODI between India and South Africa, in Mumbai, to pass without incident before making a definitive statement about a Pakistan series (the implication being that the Shiv Sena could disrupt that match and turn this into a bigger problem for the BCCI).There is no way of knowing this but so convoluted are the ways in which these two operate, it cannot be ruled out.What we do know is that the shemozzle shows up the lies that underpinned the Big Three restructuring from last year. One of its selling points, the spin doctors said, was the prospects of a revival of ties between these two: sign up, they told the PCB, and presto, resume ties with India.That was a lie then, as it is now. There was no greater prospect of a series happening before than after. It remains as dependent on political ties as it was then, and it remains as impossible for world cricket to do anything about it. The PCB ultimately would have signed even if the lure of resumption was not specifically on the cards – realistically, what else could it have done?The only thing it can do now is wait and remind itself that it has survived eight years without substantial bilateral contests with India. And that, in the long-term, a successful Pakistan Super League is, potentially, of as much if not greater significance.This article was first published in the
