Leaders will piggyback on today's all-Asian cricket World Cup final, but the game confounds agendas
Sri Lanka and India, who meet in the final of the World Cup today, have both won the tournament before ? India in 1983, and Sri Lanka in 1996. These victories came at critical junctures in the post-colonial histories of these nations. In 1983 India was battling a violent insurgency in the Punjab, which aimed to establish an independent Sikh state. Similarly, Sri Lanka in 1996 was in a civil war, as a predominantly Sinhala republic fought a ruthless Tamil insurgency determined to create a breakaway Tamil state.
In 1996, when Sri Lanka co-hosted the tournament with India and Pakistan, the Australian and West Indian teams forfeited their group stage matches in Sri Lanka because of the threat of terrorist violence. This inspired a rare display of south Asian fellow-feeling: India and Pakistan sent a combined cricket team to Colombo to play the Sri Lankans in a gesture of solidarity.
Fifteen years on, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have changed places. It's Pakistan's turn to be cast as the pariah state. Since armed men attacked the Sri Lankan team in Lahore in 2009, no international cricket has been played in Pakistan. Like India and Sri Lanka before it, Pakistan came into this World Cup hoping that success would be an antidote to the poisonous news from home.
Muscular Indian nationalists saw the semi-final between India and Pakistan in Mohali as a contest between an emerging Asian superpower and a failed jihadi state. Luckily for cricket fans, the relationship between sport and politics is more complicated than that. The spectators in the stadium were enthusiastic but cheerful and the captains did nothing to feed a hungry media's need for symbolic conflict.
An early exchange between Sachin Tendulkar and Shahid Afridi set the tone for the match. This occurred just after the Indian opener had been dropped for the second time off the Pakistan captain's bowling. When the lucky batsman got to the bowler's end, Afridi, who had been bug-eyed with rage just a moment ago, grinned at Tendulkar and slapped his shoulder. Tendulkar smiled back and suddenly, the match really was just a game. A tense, nerve-wracking game, naturally, but not war by other means.
With a casual gesture, Afridi invoked the sweaty fellowship that only professional sportsmen know. Suddenly the fact that Mohali was the chosen venue of Indo-Pakistan diplomacy became unimportant. India's prime minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani, seemed utterly irrelevant as they presided over Wednesday's match with the solemn immobility of waxworks.
Now the circus moves to its climax in Mumbai where, for the first time, two south Asian sides will vie to be world champions. Like the semi-final, this contest will carry its share of nationalist freight. South Asian politicians like riding piggyback on cricket's mass appeal so the presidents of both nations, Percy Mahinda Rajapaksa and Pratibha Patil, will be present at the game.
For Sri Lanka's populist president, fresh from his triumph in the civil war, a victory will be one more laurel, another token of the resurgence of an unapologetically majoritarian Sri Lanka. Should Sri Lanka win Muttiah Muralitharan's last international match, the face of this national triumph will be a Tamil; given the dreadful press Rajapaksa has received for his brutal suppression of the Tamil insurgency, this will be a gift.
For an Indian middle class eager to bask in the still notional prestige of an "emergent" power, winning the World Cup will be a tangible achievement. International cricket is a small world, but since India owns the economy of the game, victory in Mumbai will demonstrate that its financial muscle is matched by its cricketing ability. Besides, if India wins, this will be Tendulkar's first World Cup medal in a 22-year career, which tracks almost perfectly the two decades of economic growth that underwrite modern India's self-esteem. Like Muralitharan, Tendulkar is a national mascot, so "winning it for Sachin" is, in fact, a form of collective self-congratulation.
But as we saw in Mohali, competitive cricket has a way of confounding political agendas. Both teams are led by preternaturally calm and poised men whose on-field manner is calculated to discourage lumpen nationalism. In the pressure cooker of the Wankhede Stadium, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahendra Singh Dhoni might yet prove to Pratibha and Percy and the rest of us, that cricket is its own reward.
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