Note the CBC: it’s cricketers, not cricket-eers. And Suhanna Meharchand should know better.
I’ve said before that people in North America don’t understand what cricket means to the Subcontinent. Today’s attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team will bring home to the Indian subcontinent the seriousness and immediacy of the turmoil in Pakistan as little else would have. Cricket isn’t just a sport – even a national sport – in a place like India. It’s a national religion, the only one that brings together followers of various other religions who otherwise see themselves as altogether different from each other. I’d say that it’s pretty similarly looked on in Pakistan and Sri Lanka too but there I admit to hypothesizing from the Indian context. Perhaps this latest attack was a reaction to the political upheavals in Punjab province or merely planned to coincide with popular feelings about the Pakistani Supreme Court’s ruling about Nawaz Sharif and his brother (former Prime Minister has been banned from holding elected office again and his brother has been removed as Governor of Punjab). Whatever the political backstory to this, the headline is the attack itself.
I was in India when the Australians and the British cricket boards cancelled their tours of Pakistan; and almost universally, they were seen as somehow being neglectful of the “spirit of cricket” because no one believed that a sport of such standing could ever be targeted. I was in London when the British team fled India in the aftermath of the terrorism in Bombay in November 2008, they were accused of being “not quite cricket” since they had clearly not been targeted. Indeed, when they returned to play out the rest of the matches in India, it was seen as something of a dramatic declaration of faith that love of cricket in the Subcontinent would overcome all other disputes. Pundit after pundit went on the TV to announce that Pakistani or Pakistani-trained “terrorists” have never attacked a match or foreign or domestic cricketers and that they never would because that would mean losing any popular support the hoped to achieve by attacking more ambiguous figures. Bombs might be flung at embassies and mosques and Parliaments but cricket stadia were sacred to all. But in the aftermath of today’s bloody attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team, if that sentiment is taken at face value, the end goal of the attackers ain’t popularity so much as spreading terror and fear.
And by targeting an international cricket team – indeed, the only team that had dared to come to Pakistan to play cricket in the last couple of years – they succeeded in further destabilizing Pakistan’s image in the eyes of its neighbours. By attacking cricket, the terrorists have signalled that nothing is off-limits; that there are no more sacred symbols left in Pakistan.
The British media understand how serious this is and what it means to the millions who live in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. On a day when their own Prime Minister Gordon Brown was meeting with President Obama for the first time – and no doubt hoping to generate some positive headlines back home – headlines about this attack trump even his visit. There’s big-name politicians talking global politics and then there’s world news being made.
