What began as a tool of political manoeuvring during the Zia-ul-Haq era has now morphed into an all-encompassing force, blurring the lines between faith and performance
Muhammad Ali Jinnah may have wished, “Religion should not be allowed to come into Politics....Religion is merely a matter between man and God”, but reality proves that religion is not just allowed, but insisted, in everything that Pakistan does. It is an unleashed genie that is eating the sovereign from within. Hindsight suggests that it was perhaps inevitable given the dalliance with inherent supremacism in the sovereign idea that is predicated on the “land of the pure” ie, Pakistan, the only country in the world to be created in the name of religion.
Pakistan watchers would confirm that religion got truly valorised, accelerated, and institutionalised in the national bloodstream during the Shariaisation years of the Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship (1978-88). Geopolitics of the times (read, Afghanistan’s Mujaheddin war) aided Zia’s regressive project. The byproduct of creating the mujaheddin ecosystem in the ‘80s subsequently bred the phenomenon of the Taliban (and its various offshoots that were either India-facing or sectarian) and an accompanying air of religious extremism that was amplified by all subsequent governments. No so-called educated, moderate or well-travelled politicians could extricate themselves from the curse of invoking religion, and so even an Oxford-educated, married to a Westerner (Jewish to be precise), and self-proclaimed reformist, ultimately morphed to Taliban Khan ie, Imran Khan.
The surrender to religious fundamentalism was similarly mirrored in the realm of Pakistani cricket. Once the playing ground of flamboyant playboys who played hard and partied even harder with the likes of Imran Khan, Zaheer Abbas, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal et al, took a U-turn to displayed piety and persona that reflected the nation’s obsession with Puritanism. Beyond optics of sporting long beards, praying on pitches, and prefixing all public utterances with religious invocations like “bismillah rahman raheem” (In the name of Allah, the most gracious and the most merciful) and contextualising all situations with “inshaallah” (God willing) etc, — the postured fervour became highly religiously charged.
By itself, faith is perfectly healthy and can give the impetus for living life to the fullest, but when it spills out from a personal or private matter to a public insistence, the danger of enforced religiosity or even proselytisation is usually consequential. It could then distract from the task, in this case, cricket, to be secondary to religious pandering.
Like many of Jinnah’s suggestions towards secularism (even if often contradictory), the invisibility of the same is mirrored in the Pakistani dressing room. The ‘90s saw the sudden advent of Tableeghi Jamaat (Party of Preachers) stressing the ‘authentic Islamic lifestyle’ that went beyond a private/individual matter and became a matter of team routines. Pakistani cricket also got mired in embarrassing cricketing scandals (e.g., match-fixing), which led to the appropriation and demonstration of religiosity as a means of suggesting otherwise.
Soon accusations of only those who were visibly adherent getting selected saw the ‘coincidental’ conversion of Christian-born Yuusuf Youhana to a bearded and pious Mohammad Yousuf, diminishment of the career of Danish Kaneria (only Hindu in the squad) etc. But all this turn towards religiousity wasn’t helping cricketing results (as was the case in the national narrative on all other fronts). In the moments of rare success against India, it took the Interior Minister to incredulously attribute the same as “Victory of Islam” and say that “Muslims all over the world are rejoicing”!
In another instance a fast bowler, Waqar Yunis said that the sight of watching Rizwan kneeling in namaz “in front of Hindus was very special to him” —basically, the entire country was caught in a vortex and normalisation of bigotry.
Not satisfied with their transformation, Pakistani players took to proselytising foreign players. Ahmed Shezad was infamously caught on camera during a Pak-Sri Lanka telling Tillakaratne Dilshan, “If you are a non-Muslim and you turn Muslim, no matter whatever you do in your life, straight to heaven” and after Dilshan’s inaudible retort, Shezad responded, “Then be ready for hell fire” (incidentally, Pakistan lost the match).
Soon the depressing performances on the field led a slew of people like the then President Parvez Musharaf, PCB Chairman Shahryar Khan, coach Bob Woolmer to media manager PJ Mir all call out to curb overt religiosity as it was distracting and leading to poor performance.
Recently, Danish Kaneria who was also one of the many Pakistani players accused of spot-fixing reiterated the discrimination that he faced when he accused, “Shahid Afridi was the main person telling me to convert, and he did a lot of times”.
While guilty of corruption, he perhaps was singled out for a harsher treatment vis-à-vis other players, even though he took 261 wickets in Test cricket to just 48 for Shahid Afridi. Danish’s career was cut prematurely with no hope for a return. The fourth-highest wicket-taker was on a roll and as he said, “PCB didn’t support me because I was Hindu, and I would break all the records. They could not drop me based on my performance. They knew I could break all the records, and Pakistan has never had a Hindu rising through the ranks”.
The accusation does not seem unreasonable. To think that there is no excess space, consideration and toxic naturalness for religiosity in the Pakistani dressing room is to live under a rock, and the resultant performance is only collateral.
(The writer, a military veteran, is a former Lt Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. Views expressed are personal)
