IS it going to kill the ‘gentleman’s sport’ of cricket or is it going to be its saviour? I am of course referring to the Indian Premier League (IPL), the cricket matches that are currently being played all over India and which have taken the country by storm. Correction, not just taken India by storm, but quite a bit of the world. These matches are being telecast live to almost 60 countries. That is something entirely new. Till now, interest in cricket was restricted to less than a dozen countries, mostly in what used to comprise the Commonwealth.

The IPL has made cricket more of an international sport and shifted the centre of cricket away from England. Remember, the International Cricket Council (ICC) is now headquartered in Dubai.

Also, it would be interesting to know what the TV viewership of the IPL has been in Pakistan. My guess is that it must be considerable. The Pakistan cricket authorities must surely be thinking in terms of trying out something similar in Pakistan. The British, after pooh-poohing the IPL (no prominent English cricketers made themselves available), are now reportedly having second thoughts and may replicate it.

A huge amount of money, at least by Indian standards, rides on the IPL, some two billion dollars, no less, and some of the players are being paid enormous amounts. Sony TV has paid over $250m for the TV rights.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Indian captain for the short form of the game, stands to earn $1.6m in just 44 days, with the Australian Andrew Symonds coming next with $1.2m.

The explosive Shahid Afridi is the most valuable Pakistani player but till now he has disappointed, scoring few runs. The Pakistani who has made his mark is Sohail Tanvir, with his unorthodox action. He took six wickets in an innings, the highest yet by any bowler. The next Pakistani, out of favour with his own cricket board yet surprisingly allowed to play in the IPL, to make a sensational debut was Shoaib Akhtar.

He took a wicket in his very first over, raising a roar of approval from the Kolkata crowd, eventually taking four wickets in all for his team, paving a victory for them and being named man of the match.

Sadly, six leading Pakistani players, including Inzamamul Haq, opted for the rival Indian Cricket League (ICL), promoted by Kapil Dev and financed by Subhash Chandra of Zee TV, who put in $50m. They made a big mistake. It sank like a stone and Chandra’s investment went down the drain, since few watched it in the Indian stadiums or on TV.

But returning to the IPL, India’s Rahul Dravid and South Africa’s Jacques Kallis, both considered to be among the top batsmen in the world, have not been among the runs, while players like Adam Gilchrist, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, brought out from retirement, have shone.

The novelty of Australians, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and South Africans playing in different teams has added a unique twist to the matches. Saurav Ganguly and Dravid, both former Indian captains, used to playing together, being now pitted against each other has given the IPL a piquant touch.

Then there are the glamorous Bollywood movie stars, making their presence felt in front of the TV camera, cheering and rooting for their teams: Shahrukh Khan, of course, a franchisee of one of the teams; Preity Zinta, along with her boyfriend, industrialist Ness Wadia (great grandson, incidentally, of Mohammad Ali Jinnah), another franchisee; Juhi Chawla and her businessman-husband, Jay Mehta, a third franchisee.

Prominent Indian industrialists like Mukesh Ambani — one of the 10 richest men in the world — and Vijay Mallya have also put big bucks into buying their respective teams. Whether they get a good return on their investment probably matters little to them, since they have got more than their money’s worth in sheer publicity.

In fact, Mallya’s team has performed so poorly that the CEO, Charu Sharma, was unceremoniously sacked the other day. But the canny businessman that he is, Mallya has done some clever advertising for his company. His team has been named Royal Challengers and the whisky his company manufactures is called — yes, you guessed it — Royal Challenge!

Indian regulations prohibit advertising of alcoholic beverages (Goa is the only exception). So, Mallya has resorted to what is called ‘surrogate advertising’. His airline is called Kingfisher, which happens to be the name of the beer his company brews!

Why has the IPL been such a huge hit? Star appeal and business power apart, the 20-overs game has proved to be very audience-friendly. Five-day test matches are fast becoming an anachronism in this fast-paced age and even one-day matches could soon become passé.

In the 20-overs version, three hours is all it takes to complete the entire match. And those three hours are packed with big hitting, athletic fielding, plenty of run-outs and diving catches. Many of the matches are very close, the decision often coming only in the last over. No wonder the stadiums are packed, the crowds cheering madly.

There is something else. Many more women and young children are fans, making the appeal of the 20-over version of the game family-centric. In addition, promising young Indian players who have been untested at the highest levels, find themselves thrust into the limelight, rubbing shoulders with legends of the game. It is a veritable trial of fire for them, and some could emerge as future cricketing superstars.

The purists are shaking their heads in disapproval, saying this signals the end of the hallowed sport as one has known it. Players being ‘auctioned’ to the highest bidder and money becoming the determining factor? Good grief! It’s not a googly, nor reverse swing, not even a bouncer. It’s simply not cricket.

The writer is a former editor of the Reader’s Digest and the Indian Express

singh.84@hotmail.com

THE season of hope that began on Feb 18 seems to be coming to an end. Thick clouds of despondency are blurring the common citizen’s view of the path ahead.

Frustration is fast undermining the people’s capacity to pull themselves out of the mire they are caught in. There is a danger that the masses, who had reluctantly returned to politics a few months ago, may withdraw from public affairs in disgust.

The PPP–PML-N coalition was expected to deliver a great deal in quick time — restoration of the judiciary to the Nov 2, 2007 position; an end to arbitrary rule; reassertion of parliament’s supremacy; revival of guarantees of life, liberty and security; and relief from unemployment and the hefty increase in the cost of living. The very first crack in the coalition has raised doubts about whether the people’s aspirations will ever be realised. Any haste in embracing despair will be as disastrous as has been the optimism divorced from reality.

The coalition leaders can perhaps be blamed for promising an instantaneous transition to an era of democracy, justice and mass prosperity. It is possible they did not read the objective situation correctly. While there is no need to rule out such factors as personal interest/ambition, or political immaturity or crass cupidity on the part of Zaid or Bakar, it should be useful to view the present situation, and the setback to the people’s cause, in the context of the decades-old struggle between two contenders for Pakistan’s ownership.

For want of precise definitions one of them may be described as the democratic crowd and the other as the authoritarian camp, regardless of the existence of some clever navigators who can effortlessly sail from one side to the other.

Pakistan’s present sequence of travails began in 1958. The supplanting of an underdeveloped democracy by one-man rule was an unmitigated catastrophe. The state’s disintegration 13 years later was only a part of the price the country had to pay for it. Perhaps an equally heavy price that the people of Pakistan (and, sadly enough, of Bangladesh) are paying to this day is the consolidation of the culture of authoritarianism.

Ever since 1971, when the 1958-71 despotism collapsed under the weight of its own follies, the people of Pakistan have been struggling to secure an irreversible transition to democratic rule. But what has happened? For more than half of these 36 years, the country has been ruled by two extra-democratic regimes while the remaining period has seen the rise and fall of five quasi-democratic outfits. The latter have been at the authoritarian camp’s sufferance and each time one of them was sacked, the people wondered if they would ever be able to escape the fate of Sisyphus.

The reasons for our failure to establish a democratic order strong enough to withstand praetorian challenges, apart from belief and feudalism, need to be made part of all political workers’ education if what is left of the gains of the 2008 election is to be saved.

One of the democratic crowd’s weaknesses has been its belief that there is a limit to its adversary’s defiance of the law, including its own. The events of Nov 3 and Dec 27, 2007, should be enough to disabuse anyone’s mind on this count.

The second cause of the democratic crowd’s frequent rout has been its tendency to mistake its apparent victory at the polls as a revolution, as the transfer of power into its hands; more often than not, it is only given a rope long enough to hang itself with. As soon as the masses start getting frustrated and disillusioned, the authoritarian camp begins preparing a new script for rescuing its Pakistan from a ‘self-serving, corrupt and incompetent band of politicians’. Who knows, that exercise may have already begun.

Thirdly, the democratic crowd often fails to reckon with the disabilities of the client state that Pakistan has become. This country has practically lost the strength to break the shackles of bondage to the suppliers of arms and cash resources needed to keep the elite happily in love with absolute rulers.

Finally, perhaps the most decisive cause of the democratic crowd’s misery is that, like doctors who sometimes contract the disease of their patients (now clients), it has been infected by the virus of authoritarianism, e.g. Gilani unwittingly speaking in Ziaul Haq idiom. Under the false notion of accession to power, the elected rulers find autocratic tactics an easier method of governance than the mess of democracy in which any dirty commoner can tell them to learn some manners. The enemy within the democratic crowd has become as dangerous as the enemy outside.

Thus, Pakistan’s redemption is not going to be as short a haul as was imagined. The odds are stacked against the democratic crowd: the predatory monster that is authoritarianism will not give in easily; the foreign ‘patrons’ cannot be brushed aside and will have to be coaxed into allowing Pakistan to decide for a change in its own interest; the new government must have the will to neutralise the despots within its ranks (if some juvenile logic prevents their being cast aside); and every attempt must be made to save the PPP–PML-N understanding.

Without that, neither can the judges be restored nor can the poor be prevented from choosing between crime and suicide. Nobody should be afraid of differences between the coalition partners. That is good for democracy, an insurance against the tyranny of a majority party.

It is good that both Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif appear to be reluctant to part company. The masses must help them to stay together. Any alternative will mean a return to the ancien regime.

While the situation is certainly grim, it can be saved from becoming bleak. There is reason to believe that the time to deal a decisive blow to the authoritarian tradition has arrived. The people’s struggle over three decades has forced the authoritarian camp to choose one camouflage after another. It may be as reckless as ever but its options are getting fewer. Its only hope of perpetuating itself lies in part of the democratic crowd breaking away from the pack and believing autocrats to be better allies than political opponents, a mistake as fatal as any.

Adversity, however severe, is not the worst calamity to befall a nation. Much deadlier is its lack of guides who can rise to the occasion. The future historian must not be left free to write that Pakistan was failed in 2008 by its leaders who claimed to be democrats.

IN many developing countries, the regime change that comes after military rule has been lifted does not initiate a democratic regime. Such countries enter into a unique system called the post-martial law regime. There are many factors that account for this phenomenon. Many of the variables are linked to international and local situations. One is the transnationalisation of the military-industrial complex (and conflict) and the second is the neo-liberal economic strategy.

It is claimed in different researches that developing countries which have been deeply integrated into the transnationalisation processes of the geostrategic military-industrial complex are more prone to having military coups and military-based regimes. Their financial outlays, since the Cold War days, speak volumes about their choice of priorities. The military spending of developing countries increased from $24bn in 1960 to $145bn in 1987 — an expansion that was three times faster than that of industrialised countries.

In such a situation, to use the words of Dr Ayesha Jalal, ‘institutional imbalances’ in the structure of governance in ex-colonies like Pakistan become further entrenched. This sets the stage for authoritarian and illegitimate regimes to continue even after falling from grace both locally and globally. This is a post-martial law situation which continues for a long time.

Military regimes skew the national economy by their investment patterns. They distribute economic and political resources inefficiently and inequitably. Such a regime requires the ‘right’ set of people to support it — and not the ‘wrong’ set that believes in the people’s right to govern.

The key for national integration is building a class of people around economic growth populism. This strategy effectively brings riches for the likeminded who generate stories of increase in aggregate economic growth. In Pakistan’s case, such diversions of capital show an economic growth miracle for a decade or less and then the bubble of national accounts starts to burst. The result is that despite having elections, developing countries get what observers describe as ‘small-minded leaders’ and an economic growth which Easterly calls growth without equitable human development.

In addition, there can also be a fatal combination of two international variables. One brings deep integration between the military-industrial complex (and conflicts) and the other is the enhancement of the neo-liberal economic growth strategy. A country under structural adjustment programmes of international financial institutions has to pursue privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation. A media which reports this, leading to suo motu notices issued by the judiciary, is not welcome. So, an active media and judiciary are presented as a parallel government by vested interests, though in reality this is not the case.

As a result, any person working for the free media, an independent judiciary and a powerful parliament is ‘persona non grata’ in the eyes of such post-martial law regimes.

Notwithstanding, the claim made by many that they will change the system, it must be realised that any system is a complexity of different elements. One cannot change the whole without being able or willing to restore each element to its original position.

Metanarratives, like changing the system, are good politics but the shelf-life of such commodities has recently been reduced by a legal and political awakening in the country. Consumers have graduated and now demand ‘fair and ethical trade’ for things that they can see and relate to.

In essence, the challenge of the system which requires a thoughtful response is to take this country out of the poverty trap and push it towards the path of high growth while respecting the legal and constitutional rights of the people.

This challenge entails bringing back economic and political nationalism and reversing the erosion of key civic values. One good civic value happens to be a sense of introspection to assess whether one is really needed to hold the highest office and need not show recklessness in clinging to it. Unfortunately, the top level of Pakistan’s governance structure has seen this value demolished.

We should not forget one important lesson of the Feb 18 election. It is that the majority of politicians who try to defend the bad politics of the regime lose votes, if not seats. This regime is standing on shaky legs owing to the lawyers’ movement and media activism.Though the regime is in trouble, the icons of the regime are still there. They want to stay and continue. However, it is better to be what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was to Ayub (in the late 1960s) than what Shaukat Aziz and Shujaat Husain were to the establishment more recently.

Going beyond Bhutto, we see that the real challenge for people claiming to change the system is to try to get out of the situation that is characterised by a post-martial law regime. One good way is to reverse the bad and offensive decisions taken by the martial law regime. However, one needs the people of Pakistan to bring about this change and not the people associated with the regime.

abbasi.zubair@gmail.com