The Return of Match-Fixing and Pakistan

Over the past week or so, I've been following, with much dismay, the slings and arrows directed at three young Pakistani cricketers, and by implication, the entire Pakistani cricket team and indeed, the entire Pakistani nation. The past few weeks have featured former cricketers, cricket officials, and fans making insinuations of the worst kind not just at the accused trio but at Pakistan as a whole. Michael Atherton opened proceedings by recommending an end to Pakistan's tour of England, and immediate punishment for the accused cricketers. He then went on to prescribe leniency for the 18-year old rookie paceman Mohammed Aamer on the condition that he was put on a rehab program. In other words, he prejudged, like many around the world, the guilt of the accused. Indian cricketers such as Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar sounded more diplomatic when they said that the guilty should be punished, but they seemed to imply that at least some cricketers were guilty of spot-fixing in the Lord's Test. The ICC President Haroon Lorgat made similar remarks when he banned Salman Butt, Mohammad Aamer, and Mohammed Asif from further cricket until they were proven innocent of the charges against them. Apparently, there was adequate evidence to justify such a ban, despite the repeated official statements to the contrary.

What is, after all, the evidence? A sting operation that caught a sports agent caught taking money on camera, and some no-balls balled during a Test match. We, therefore, need to ascertain that (1) the News of the World journalist has not doctored tapes, and (2) there is a watertight argument linking the transaction caught on camera and events on the field. As experts and fans alike will recognize, even if (1) can be somehow proven, (2) is rather difficult to prove with the available evidence. To put it rather bluntly, the evidence is flimsy and the case is weak. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd put my money on the trio playing cricket again pretty soon.

Now back to the allegations. I found them actually more revealing than the video evidence of spot-fixing. When Ian Healy, for instance, talked about the 1994 Rawalpindi Test and how Salim Malik might have been fixing it, he conveniently ignored the fact that his former Aussie teammates Shane Warne, Tim May, and Mark Waugh were co-implicated in that scandal. Moreover, amusingly, it is Healy's missed stumping of Inzamam that attracted the most suspicion on the final day of that Test match. So before one gets sanctimonious about Pakistan's cricketers and its incompetent board, why not take a closer look at the Australian cricket fraternity and its role in protecting Warne, May, and Waugh from scandal? Closer home in India, expectedly, morons are having a field day. Fan comments on cricket websites are a good indicator of the bigotry that blends brilliantly with sanctimonious sentiments. We are told that Indian cricketers are not like that. Yet almost every bookie accused until date has been an Indian; a former captain and many star players ended their careers after Justice Chandrachud found them guilty after extensive investigations; the most expensive tamasha in cricket, the IPL, may well be the most corrupt in the history of the sport. The subcontinent, with its massive market for cricket coverage, is thus, unsurprisingly, the hub of corruption in cricket. In a global age, of course, the corrupt spread their tentacles worldwide, but the creature itself lives and thrives in South Asia. In sum, those pointing a finger of suspicion at Pakistan alone should realize that there are three pointing back towards them.

A final comment must be reserved for the serial Pakistan baiters in public life. Former ICC President Malcolm Speed, whose chief claim to fame is the horribly organized 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean, urged the authorities to oust Pakistan from the cricketing fraternity. Now, Speed has a long history of run-ins with Asian cricketers and officials. But his opinion here resonates nicely with that of many elsewhere. Australian and Indian newspapers are full of similar remarks. The English, though more restrained, are pondering the deeper structural problems in Pakistani society that have caused the current debacle. Some editorial writers have even taken the liberty to connect the latest episode in the match-fixing saga with support for the Taliban, military dictatorship, Punjabi dominance within Pakistan, and Third World poverty in general. Presumably, the argument here is that poor Pakistanis, oppressed by Punjabi elites and military dictators in power, are turning to terrorism and corruption for succor. This is a patently absurd line of reasoning. If true, one would need to explain why the current recession in the North Atlantic world is not causing the poor and unemployed, oppressed by Washington and Wall Street, to turn to terrorism and corruption. But the analogy would be immediately deemed invalid, because Pakistan, in the eyes of the West and its lackeys in India and elsewhere, is in a category of its own. It is a pathology, an anathema to the civilized, and an ode to evil itself. Hence, every accusation and every allegation can be justified without evidence, and individuals are seen invariably as symptoms of a national malaise. Almost everyone and their grandmothers are now self-proclaimed experts on Pakistan, including some ignoramuses in my department. And woe betide the rest of us...