End this charade

It is a comedy of errors that no sane individual could have fathomed. The Tom and Jerry drama that is being played out by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) is deviously churlish.

The antagonism is getting sustained by an undeclared Board-room war that is being triggered by the administrators, whose obsession seems to be in hoodwinking each other even as millions of fans still yearn to see the two teams battle it out for sub-continent supremacy.

They are not bothered whether matches will be held in India, Pakistan or the Middle East as long as the series takes off and signals the end of the decades-old animosity that is remote controlled by political bosses for whom any anti-neighbour rhetoric will help in consolidating power.

There is no denying that in his over-enthusiastic exuberance to outwit his counterparts from the BCCI, the PCB chief, Shaharyar Khan, is ending up as the object of ridicule back home and the butt of jokes in India because his browbeating tactics have found no takers in India or the ICC, despite the unbridled optimism.

It is time the BCCI maintained a tough stance and stuck to it. By playing ball and issuing counter-statements like ‘Pakistan ought to play on Indian soil,’ the BCCI Secretary Anurag Thakur is unwittingly falling into the trap. With politics running in his genes, an anti-Pakistan stand may enhance his credentials in the NDA but the fans may not take this dilly-dallying at its face-value. Rather they detest such pretentious bravado.

The developments over the weekend will hopefully put an end to this ‘love thy neighbour’ dictum because neither Khan nor Thakur can achieve any breakthroughs on his own, particularly in the given atmosphere of mistrust and the veiled ‘care-a-damn’ attitude that comes naturally to leaders from either side of the border.

By insisting that Pakistan would not visit India and would prefer a neutral venue, Khan is actually holding on to the last straw as its trump card. It exposes the BCCI doublespeak, which has inked a six-series deal with PCB. The incumbent panel should shed the escapist “we were not a party to the deal” tendency and move forward.

One fails to understand why UAE cannot be an option when the first leg of the 2014 edition of IPL, an out-and-out India-inspired caravan, was hosted there. Thakur is influencing the Centre time and again, maintaining that the Union government would never clear a series in UAE. Unlike the BJP Member of Parliament, who can pull off such stunts, one feels sorry for Khan, whose stock has nosedived in Islamabad. In order to end this Shakespearean ‘to play or not to’ dilemma, the Centre should make its intentions of either giving the nod or otherwise clear and stick to it, come what may. The bogey should end, here and now.