Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
India-Pakistan – cricket, spooks and peace
“Cricket diplomacy” has always been one of the great staples of the relationship between India and Pakistan. The two countries have tried and failed before to use their shared enthusiasm for cricket to build bridges, right back to the days of Pakistan President Zia ul-Haq, if not earlier.
So when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced last week that he was inviting Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari to watch the semi-finals of the Cricket World Cup in Mohali, India, the temptation was to dismiss it as an old idea.
Yes, it would be the first visit by a leader of either country to the other since the November 2008 attack on Mumbai. Yes, the invitation came at a time when relations between the two countries were already thawing. And yes, the Middle East is changing so fast that you would expect – in the way that warring siblings do — that India and Pakistan would bury their differences at a time when the outside world has become so unpredictable.
But the instinct for cynicism is unerring. India and Pakistan have tried and failed to make peace for so long that it is easy, lazily easy, to predict that this latest initiative will also come to nothing. Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, himself a participant in cricket diplomacy in 2005, wrote it off in 2000:
from India Insight:
Kashmir marks 20 years of conflict, peace still distant
One of the world's longest-running separatist insurgencies, one that has killed tens of thousands of people in Kashmir, completed two decades last month.
The strife-torn region witnessed a period of relative calm, but a recent spate of rebel attacks is a grim reminder of the tensions in Kashmir at the heart of enmity between nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan.
