I don’t think anyone congratulated the Pakistan team on losing to India. It was doubly painful because it meant that Pakistan was most likely out of the World Cup, and because it meant that Sarfraz Ahmad would not become Prime Minister. He need not bother either building a cancer hospital or eating organic food.
Of course, it seems that India get a kick out of the match, even though it seems that the team was not only making sure that there was no challenger to the Prime Minister, but was also fulfilling his diplomatic agenda. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s purpose in life is to beat Pakistan at cricket, and to stop people eating beef. A lot of Indians referred to that match while they were tweeting comments on PM’s Special Assistant on Political Affairs Naeemul Haque’s tweet, in which he put a picture of Indian batting great Sachin Tendulkar and labelled it one of Imran Khan. There were numerous remarks about drinking and the Net, as well as many pictures of donkeys labelled Naeemul Haque. But I was struck by the tweets which referred to Imran’s revision of both history and geography, by not only having Germany and Japan go to war, but also be adjacent. There were a lot of reminders of Imran’s attribution of a quote from Rabindranath Tagore to Khalil Gibran on Twitter.
Is Sachin going to become Prime Minister of India in the future? I’m sure the present Prime Minister must be happy that a fellow-Gujerati took a match-winning hat-trick against Afghanistan, with the only fly in his ointment being that he was a beef-eating Muslim. But Afghanistan also lost, just like Pakistan had already done.
But apart from watching Imran’s diplomacy in action with that loss, I also watched the Bangladesh team, and got wondering. If Bangladesh had remained in Pakistan, would any of them ever have played for Pakistan? Maybe not all, but imagine stars like Shakib, Tamim or Mashrafe Mortaza not having an international career. And it’s no use saying they would have played any way, because before 1971 only one East Pakistani played a Test, and he only played one Test. And East Pakistanis try to keep down Bengalis, as witness Imran’s trying to palm off a Bengali’s quote as that of a Lebanese.
And would they have fared better if India had remained undivided? I can only think of the left-arm spinner Dillip Doshi, and more recently the batsman Sourav Ganguly, who reached the Indian team from Bengal. Of course, in BJP’s India, I doubt if Bengali Muslims would have got much of a chance. So from the present Bangladesh team, maybe only Liton Das would make it to the Indian team.
The Afghanistan team had one achievement, and that was in the match against England, when one of their bowlers, the spinner Rashid Khan, gave away 110 runs in his nine overs against England, as they piled up 397-6, which broke the record of M.C. Snedden, the New Zealander, who gave away 108 in 12 overs against England. One had expected that record to stand, because he bowled his full 12 overs, and since 1979, bowlers have only got 10 overs a match, after the matches became 50 overs a side, down from the 60 that had prevailed in the first three Cups.
But for those not interested in the Cup a parallel event was the death of former Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi after he had a heart attack in court, during his trial for espionage. The man who overthrew him, Field Marshal Sisi, was a commando, like someone we know. Morsi’s death must have caused worries among all those arrested by NAB, including Mian Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari.
Zardari is a bit of a turn-up for the books. He was elected to the National Assembly in 1990, and he attended the House only because of production orders. Now, in 2019, after 29 years, he is still attending the House on production orders. Back in 1990, production orders were still a novelty, and policemen in plainclothes would suddenly surround him when he was leaving the National Assembly premises. Now, though, it seems that production orders are what keeps the House quorate.
If Imran can recover from the shock of the death of Morsi, it will only be so that he can go after Michel Platini, who was recently called in by the French police for questioning about the lunch he had with the President of France (then Nicholas Sarkozy) and the Emir of Qatar. Platini was then President of UEFA, but decided after the lunch to vote for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup.
Imran would obviously not approve of such corruption, especially in sport, and I’m sure he told the Emir of Qatar this when the Emir visited. The Emir found Pakistan in the throes of World Cup frenzy, though of the wrong sport. No wonder the Emir was less than impressed with being taught how to reverse-swing.
Staying in the Middle East, Imran was making preparation for a sit-in outside the Israeli PM’s residence, not because of the Palestinians, but because his wife did a plea bargain for corruption. It seems she had ordered out on government expense even though there were two chefs drawing salaries. Even a PM can’t trust what he eats. Unless he won a World Cup?