In a “cricket for peace” program this week, 31 teenage cricket players from India are touring five cities in Pakistan, playing a series of games with a 15-member team from Pakistan. “Selections for the Indian team were made on the basis of essay and story competitions arranged by Rupert Murdoch’s Channel V, Viacom’s MTV and the daily, Indian Express. Former Pakistani Test player Ashfaq Ahmad helped pick 15 young men from middle- and working-class families for the Pakistan team.”
“Civil society organisations Action Aid (India and Pakistan chapters), the Insaan Foundation Lahore, Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, and Leapfrog India have organised the programme to promote people-to-people contacts.”
For the first time in 14 years, India’s national team held a full cricket series in Pakistan, with citizens of the rival nations sharing a stadium and a televised broadcast. Plans call for meetings of foreign secretaries in May or June, and foreign ministers in July or August. Meanwhile, the top politicians seem to be dragging their feet on a comprehensive peace plan for Kashmir. A “Western diplomat in Islamabad” is quoted as saying, “There are substantive measures they can look at….There is the ceasefire [since November], the free movement of people across the Line of Control, economic development. They are all concrete things, and in a sense the process becomes the solution.”
But rediff columnist Lalit Koul complains that Pakistan is getting off lite. “The Indian team’s wins in Pakistan do not bring peace of mind to thousands of Indian parents who continue to lose their loved ones to Pakistani-sponsored terrorism. [Indian Prime Minister] Vajpayee’s message of peace does not bring peace to more than 400,000 Kashmiri Hindus who were uprooted from their homes in Kashmir and have been living without a HOME since 1990.”
“What happened to Vajpayee’s stand that India will not talk unless Pakistan stops supporting cross-border terrorism? Were there any external forces that forced Vajpayee’s hand? Were there any back-room dealings and promises that convinced Vajpayee to relax his conditions? Is Musharraf setting a July-August deadline because he has been told by Bush and Powell to deliver Mullah Omar, Ayman Zawahari and Osama bin Laden by August, just in time for the US presidential election?”
As one hawkish columnist to another, Koul says, “Tom Friedman of The New York Times recently wrote that it was not General Powell who convinced Vajpayee to retreat its armed forces back to peace-time positions. It was rather General Electric whose call-centre operations are run by Indian companies in Bangalore.” Koul slams Friedman’s double standard that pleads with Americans to “give war a chance” but glorifies pacification to corporate interests abroad. So long as US aid money is funnelled to Kashmir terrorists, General Electric will face terror with the rest of India, argues Koul.
But along the borderlands of Kashmir, silent Pakistani guns were a welcome relief to voters who cast ballots via electronic voting machines in India’s parliamentary elections.
Reports the BBC: “For the residents of border villages like Suchetgarh, the current ceasefire between India and Pakistan is the best thing to have happened in their lives.” The election is predicted to go well for ruling Hindu nationalists, despite calls for boycott by Islamic insurgents in Kashmir, who have been waging a 15-year war of independence against Indian rule.
MoPress 