Not quite cricket

The message going out to the people from all the bad news is that you can get away with anything in Pakistan.

Bad news does not stop coming. We had a senseless air crash in the Margalla Hills on 28 July killing all on board, flash floods a day later on an unprecedented scale, the Sialkot lynching incident, and now the cricketing scandal from London where our team is playing England.

But losing the series and the fourth Test was the least of their troubles.  At the end of the fourth Test, the team found itself at the centre of a major match-fixing scandal.  News of the World, a London Sunday tabloid, had published a sensational story.  In a sting operation, a reporter pretending to be a bookmaker, passed substantial amounts of cash to a Pakistani (claiming to be some players’ agent) named Mazhar Majeed for ensuring two no balls from Asif and Amir and a maiden over from Salman Butt’s batting at different stages of the game at Lord’s.  The entire transaction was on video. In Pakistan, the reaction was extreme.  The National Assembly’s standing committee on sports was livid, demanding the dismissal of the chairman and dissolution of the PCB.  Processions were taken out, including a donkey parade with names of the players hung around their neck.  A prominent politician thought the players had violated the constitution.

Had this not been Britain, the defence of the players might have been more audible.  But the credibility of Scotland Yard being beyond reproach, very few people rejected the story out of hand.

To place the incident in perspective, this is a Pakistani cricket team, a country that has a pervasive culture of corruption.  Years of bad governance has had a terrible trickledown effect on its people.  Moral decay under military regimes and corrupt, quasi-democratic governments, have blurred the line between right and wrong.  Every time there is a military takeover, for example, they expect us to believe that they have not violated the constitution.  Such gigantic lies have a degrading effect on the entire nation.  This is a country where legislators have fake degrees and the government does not submit to the Supreme Court’s orders.

Look at the tax culture in the country.  According to a senior tax official, the system seems to tax the poor to subsidise the rich: it is of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.  In a country of 160 million people only 2.5 million pay income tax whereas at least 10 million should be doing so.  Both Mian Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari do not pay income tax, or hardly any.


The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) spent millions on investigation of cases.  In particular, building on the investigation done by Saifur Rahman, Nawaz Sharif’s hatchet man for the PPP, NAB took Asif Zardari and Benazir Bhutto to court in Switzerland on money laundering and kickbacks with convincing evidence.

But what happened to the cases?  The general, having lost support at home and under pressure from the Anglo-American bloc, made a deal with the PPP resulting in the National Reconciliation Ordinance, a law that did not stand judicial scrutiny.

Soon after coming into power in 2008, the present PPP government withdrew the cases in Pakistani as well as the Swiss courts under the NRO.  The funds frozen in the banks by the Swiss authorities were released, Zardari being the principal beneficiary of the action.  NAB’s hard work and millions of dollars spent on investigations went down the drain.

The message going out to the people from all this is that you can get away with anything in Pakistan provided you can hold out long enough.  Make a lot of money, doesn’t matter how.

That being the case, the sense of national indignation against the cricketers seems exaggerated.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14th, 2010.
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