Come On, Be a Sport: Decoding Sunil Gavaskar and Other Cricketers' Letter in Support of Imran Khan

Cricket pundits may deny that this is a Basil D’Oliveira moment. The letter sent by 14 test cricket captains, two Indians included, cannot move mountains, can it? The letter sent yesterday only appeals to the Pakistan government to ensure that their peer, a towering great, one of the best captains the game has produced, Imran Khan Niazi, be dealt with humanely in prison.

It cannot be a moment of the magnitude that South African ‘coloured’ player Oliveira’s selection as part of the English team, to tour South Africa, exploded into. Or can it? Oliveira’s inclusion by England led to apartheid South Africa exposing itself and finally becoming an international pariah. The sporting isolation and boycotts slowly followed, helping firmly dismantle apartheid.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

So what is the big deal about Pakistan’s government being appealed to by Imran Khan’s fellow-cricketers like this?

It is the first time in years that Indian cricket stars may have done something spontaneous, with serious political consequences. Long tamed by stencilled tweets or hefty contracts that demand silence as the price, they “got back within minutes” to sign up to ask for Imran Khan to be treated properly, as Greg Chappell disclosed in a podcast today with Peter Lalor and Gideon Haigh.

Indian cricketers do everything, including not shake hands or compare cricket matches to military operations, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on cue. That spontaneously, they would stick up and rally for a fellow cricketer – a Pakistani and a former prime minister at that – was very good news. Remember how Navjot Sidhu was pilloried and termed near-traitor for going for a swearing-in ceremony?

Of course, the days when the Indian and Pakistani cricket team members could be together even as the two neighbours were at war in 1971 are a thing of the past. Sunil Gavaskar remembers the time when his teammates shared a dressing room with their Pakistani counterparts for nearly four months even as India and Pakistan fought a war leading to the formation of Bangladesh.

In Australia, six of 17 players in the Rest of the World team were from the subcontinent. The nine-month war ended in December 1971 with Bangladesh winning independence from Pakistan. In his memoirs, Sunny Days, Gavaskar has written about how “there was no tension at all between the Indians and Pakistani players despite what was happening”. Bishen Bedi, Farokh Engineer, Pakistan’s Zaheer Abbas, Intikhab Alam and Asif Masood played in one team, as the 1971 war raged.

These present-day gestures matter a lot given the distance we have travelled from those old tales of the dressing room. “As fellow cricketers who understand the values of fair play, honour, and respect that transcend the boundary rope, we believe that a person of Imran Khan’s stature deserves to be treated with the dignity and basic human consideration befitting a former national leader and a global sporting icon,” reads the letter.

The best thing about sports is the moments it provides, usually measured in metres, seconds or medals for excellent sporting feats, done to bring laurels to nations. But beyond that, even when it is not about flags, sports can rise above human and societal limitations to produce fellowship, delight, admiration and camaraderie.

It is commonplace to support a good team which does not carry the same passport as you, or to be in deep admiration of a sportsperson, only because. That is what gives sports the currency it has had over centuries – its power to melt and transcend boundaries. This is the exact thing that boards like the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) have tried to police into hard borders or strict lines one is meant to adhere to, to make it all about a mechanical act of playing a game – not a sport.

A gesture like this, of old cricketers aka “grandees” as Reuters has called them coming together to tell an imprisoned fellow cricketer that they have his back, cuts through the power and grip that political appointees/representatives like Jay Shah and Mohsin Naqvi hold over their respective boards. Cricket boards, especially in south Asia are consumed by domestic politics. This has brought internationalism and global human values to that door.

Spontaneously coming together, invoking “human rights” to a country’s government (Pakistan, no less) and rallying cricketers across countries, including India, to do that is among the better things international cricket has done. It has happened beyond sponsorship deals, contracts, auctions, boards lines or even the limitation of not being on the cricket field.

A one-page letter has brought so many things on the same page.

Howzzat?

P.S.: This was the time when Pakistan regularly beat India and Sunny Gavaskar was big.

Sports journalist Peter Lalor said (23:25 here) that Imran Khan appealed to Sunil Gavaskar in the 1980s to stay on “for one more year as captain” when Sunny did not want to – only so that, begged Imran, “we could tell people in Pakistan back home that ‘we beat Sunny’s team’”.

Sunny agreed to Imran’s request.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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