If South and North Korea can, why can?t India and Pakistan? The two Koreas have chosen to bridge the great ideological and political divide with the world of sports. They have decided to compete as a single team in the 2006 Asian Games at Doha and in the 2008 Olympic Games at Beijing. This is a decision whose reverberations will be felt way beyond the world of sports. To take sports first. In the last Olympics at Athens, North Korea had won five medals and South Korea 30. This means that if they had competed as one team, their total medal tally of 35 would have placed them seventh on the medal list, between Japan and France. Korea as a single team has a very good chance of being among the top sporting nations of the world. It would be stupid to spurn such an opportunity for ideological reasons. The collapse of communism has made irrelevant the ideological reasons that divide the two Koreas. A joint participation in a sporting event will help in removing the vestiges of the division and make for a more substantive unity. The coming together of the two Koreas is akin to the unification of Germany in the West.

The idea of fielding a joint Korean team should set Indian minds thinking. It is not far-fetched to think of India and Pakistan participating as a joint team in various tournaments. In the Olympic Games, for example, a joint Indo-Pak hockey side would be virtually unbeatable. Similarly, an Indo-Pak XI in cricket would inevitably be considered a favourite for winning the cup. The benefits of joint participation are many; and nothing save political egos stand in the way of a joint Indo-Pak participation. Track two diplomacy has become a standard instrument of negotiation, and in the contested terrain of Indo-Pak relations it has worked with more than a modicum of success. But the idea of one Indo-Pak team in sporting events has never been seriously mooted. Yet when the Indian sub-continent hosted the cricket World Cup first in 1987 and again in 1996, it was clear that cooperation in the world of sports was possible between nations that are politically hostile to each other. South and North Korea have now demonstrated that other invisible frontiers can also be crossed if reciprocal interests are allowed to prevail over ideology and political rivalry. One can only hope that New Delhi and Islamabad are listening to the east wind.