India-Pakistan series unlikely under prevailing tension: BCCI

Published July 27, 2015
if you do not have good relations, you can't have good cricket.” — AFP/file
if you do not have good relations, you can't have good cricket.” — AFP/file

Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) secretary, Anurag Thakur, has said a series between Pakistan and India was unlikely until relations between the two countries normalised.

Thakur's statement came after Indian forces fought an extended gunbattle Monday with heavily-armed men who attacked a moving bus and stormed into a police station in a northern town bordering Pakistan, with 10 people killed in the violence, officials said.

The attackers killed four policemen and three civilians in the pre-dawn attack in Punjab's Gurdaspur district, said Harcharan Singh Bains, a state government spokesman.

The state's director-general of police, Sumedh Singh Saini, said it was difficult to say where the attackers came from or whether militancy was returning to Punjab.

But Thakur, who is also a Member of Parliament from India's ruling BJP, said the incident made a cricket series between India and Pakistan, proposed to take place at the end of this year, impossible at the moment.

“Even today there is a terrorist attack, in Gurdaspur. On one hand there is a rise in terrorist activity, on the other you can't expect to play a cricket series with Pakistan,” Thakur told ESPNcricinfo.

“For me the safety and security of my countrymen is more important than a cricket series. This is not the way to go ahead. I was never against the dialogue process. At the same time, if you do not have good relations, you can't have good cricket.”

Last month the PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan, while visiting India, had said Pakistan had a "Plan B" should the series not go ahead.

India have not played a bilateral Test series against Pakistan since 2007, though they did host them for two T20Is and three ODIs between December 2012 and January 2013.

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