Has Pakistani cricket failed to address the elephant in the room – or was it not there to begin with?
Pakistani cricket has always been enigmatic and gripping to watch, but the scriptwriting for the team has sometimes fallen into the wrong hands. It has been carried out by people who do not like the country, are suspicious of its people, and have their own presuppositions about Pakistani cricketers.
I had the pleasure of reading Shadows Across the Playing Fields by Shashi Tharoor. Shashi is an Indian novelist, intellectual, and has worked with the United Nations for 30 years. Unfortunately, Tharoor’s long essay on Pakistan’s cricket sphere is filled with errors of fact and interpretation. Tharoor lazily claims that Pakistan lost the 1954 tour of England; gets Hanif Mohammed’s score wrong (it was 128* and not 90); asserts that AH Kardar was an aristocrat – and while these errors may be just carelessness or just intellectual hubris, much more serious is the way he skews facts in order to prove his hypothesis.
Not just cricket: @shashitharoor on whether India-Pakistan cricket can ever promote peace https://t.co/HvswgmuFiq pic.twitter.com/2Vpvk0TUNz
— BBC News India (@BBCIndia) March 16, 2016
He states that “whereas a non-Muslim playing for Pakistan remains a rarity in a country where passports are stamped ‘non-Muslim’ to denote their bearer’s inferior status, 30 of secular India’s 258 Test caps have been awarded to Muslim cricketers.” The implication here is very damning: Pakistan’s cricketing system discriminates against non-Muslims.
As Tharoor must have known, he was making a misleading comparison. A more careful look at the numbers negates his whole argument. India is inhabited by approximately 172 million Muslims, which adds up to 15% of the total population. Therefore, it should have come as no surprise that 12% of Indian test players have been Muslims.
I am being mistreated because I am Hindu: Danish Kaneria https://t.co/gl2SJ1AybM
— The Express Tribune (@etribune) January 21, 2016
It is true that non-Muslims are a rarity in the Pakistan team, but that may be because non-Muslims are a rarity in Pakistan itself. According to the figures, the non-Muslims make up no more than 2% of the country’s population, and have provided 6 out of the 230 Pakistani test players — just under 3%. Unfortunately for Tharoor, the statistics suggests that a non-Muslim in Pakistan has roughly the same chance as that of a Muslim representing India. Tharoor also states that Pakistan never had a non-Muslim cricket captain. In fact, Yousuf Youhana (both before and after his conversion to Islam) did captain his country.
Pakistani cricket is a relatively unexplored subject. The nation’s newspapers and media reporting is a rich source of material but often highly partisan, reflecting personal or regional agendas. However, when the same bias and intellectual dishonesty is shown by highly-respected contemporary scholars, it leaves the reader either misinformed or very bitter – and perhaps most importantly with a growing distrust in whatever they read.