Imran Khan with the World Cup in Australia, 1992

I remember the time Pakistan won the World Cup in 1992. I’d begun watching the game in Calcutta but had to leave in the middle to catch a flight to Delhi. By the time I landed and got out of the airport, the grim writing was on the wall: any local I asked about the score gave me the kind of noise only Delhiwallahs can produce, a kind of uncouth, unintelligible, snarl-grunt-growl that means “Go to hell!” It was clear that the English had betrayed India yet again by playing like school-bunnies. By the time I got to where I was staying the last rites were being administered, with Imran Khan steaming in for the last significant bowling spell of his life. When I reached the house, there were only two members of the family present: TR, who’d worked there for many years, and Karamat Ali, the labour activist from Karachi. TR took my bags with the look of tragedy on his face. As he brought me water, his thin voice went higher than normal in a complaining wail, “Bhaiya! Pakistan jeet rahi hai (Bhaiya, Pakistan is winning)!” Karamatbhai was immediately consoling, as if to a small child, “Koi baat nahi, aap World Cup bahaut pehle jeet chukey ho, ab hamey bhi kabhi kabhi jeetney deejiye (Never mind, you’ve won the World Cup long before us, occasionally let us win as well).”

It was the same Karamat Ali who visited Calcutta recently and spoke at the Pakistan-India Forum meeting at the Book Fair. In a speech full of huge good sense, he made one point that startled me. In the north of the subcontinent, on both sides of the border, there is the term and concept of a dushmandar admi, meaning a man who has proper enemies, a man, therefore, of some substance, because a man who has made no enemies is obviously someone who has no wealth and no power. Now, who can afford to maintain and service the enmity between India and Pakistan? Who can puff up their chest and be proud of this enmity? Who needs to work up the masses to populate this feud? Clearly, only the people of power and wealth on both sides. “When a working-class Bangladeshi strives to get a work permit to come and work in Karachi as a labourer, he doesn’t remember what our army did to his country. Because he can’t afford to. No one earning two dollars a day or less can afford to have enemies, and that’s most of the people in our subcontinent.”

Coming as I do, from the middle of the Indian ‘middle-class’, I spent the best part of the 1980s hating the Pakistan cricket team. Even though I could not have afforded to have them as foes — especially if I’d been on the same cricket pitch as them — Miandad, Malik and Imran were The Enemy and I hated them even while admiring them. The dismantling of that hatred began at the moment Karamat said, “Occasionally, let us win as well.” The hatred was further dented when Wasim Akram’s team was ripped apart by India in Bangalore, in the next World Cup, with Malik and Miandad struggling shadows of themselves, with Akram, the greatest bowler Pakistan has ever produced, suddenly being accused at home of throwing the match. The point at which loathing turned into some relative of sympathy was after the India-Pakistan match at the Centurion Park in 2003, when Inzamam, Younus Khan, and Saeed Anwar got into a brawl while playing football during training. And the sympathy (and alarm) became full-blown when their coach, Bob Woolmer, was found dead after Pakistan lost to Ireland in the West Indies, with a very strong suspicion making the rounds that he had been killed by a team member. Over time, I came to realize that what I really wanted was a strong, well-knit Pakistani team doing amazing things against all others before being beaten by India in tight (and sometimes not-so-tight) matches. I did not, at all, want to see the Pakistani team dismembered and flung to the four corners of the world. Sitting in London, knowing that, for anyone who’d use the word as an abuse, I was as much a ‘Paki’ as the Mirpuri running my corner shop, there was really no question as to who I wanted to see win when Pakistan played England.

Without allowing the analogy more space than it deserves, for me something similar applies to the State of Pakistan itself. I don’t love Pakistanis per se, even though I have a couple of close friends who are Pakistani (the same goes for me and Indians, or, indeed, myself and Gujaratis); I don’t hold the idea of forming Pakistan as being one of the smartest in the history of mankind — it was, in fact, a criminally stupid idea which should never have left the feudal drawing rooms in which it was hatched; I’m also acutely aware that the jihadi-ISI-Pakistan army nexus is the single most poisonously lethal political formation that exists on the planet. Yet, I have no desire to see in Pakistan anything but proper democracy coupled with proper justice, a strong and fair economy, an even more vibrant intellectual network, and yes, bars where women can also go and drink whatever they want, wearing whatever they like.

The people in this country who not-so-secretly want to see Pakistan ‘destroyed’ haven’t worked things through. It’s not like burning down a hated neighbour’s house and having the enemy family scarper from the colony overnight. This neighbouring family happens to have roughly 172,800,000 members with a median age of 20. You can’t practically kill so many people; even after a full and thorough and let’s say (in your evil fantasy) a totally one-sided nuking, during which let’s also say not a single baby-breeze blows from west to east, several million youngish people will survive in reasonable physical health. You won’t be able to shove these millions and millions down Iran and Afghanistan’s gullets; several million of your favourite neighbours will settle and do their daily ablutions in your front garden of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab and, of course, Kashmir. Something similar will happen even without nukes; if you help goad Pakistan into a civil war, it will be one that will make Sri Lanka look like a small scuffle at a picnic, and there is one chief direction in which the fall-out will spread, into this country you claim to love so much.

It is in this light that people should perhaps look at the actions or non-actions of what they call the ‘do-nothing UPA government’. Shortly after the Mumbai attack, I heard something quite alarming from a high-ranking government bureaucrat in Delhi: “The Congress still hasn’t forgiven the BJP for exploding their nuke in ’98, and if there is to be an air-strike, they will make damn sure this time they don’t let the BJP conduct their air-strike.” Fortunately, through some leakage of wisdom somewhere in the government, it doesn’t look like there will be an air-strike, at least not until the jihadi-cockroaches get brave enough to crawl out of their drainpipes and set up substantial camps. (And even then, there might be some clever Bong or Mallu flying a ‘do-nothing’ desk at the MOD, who says to the ministers: “Saar, we know where these camps are, so why don’t we pinpoint them for the Americans and let them do the daarty works?”) In any case, the only target an Indian air-strike will hit is the limping civilian government in Islamabad, which, in turn, will please no end India’s real enemies from Karachi to Kandahar.

Around the time Pakistan won the World Cup, I used to joke that I’d better see Kashmir before I needed a passport to do so. Now the un-funny joke is perhaps that those of us who want to visit Pakistan better do so before all passports become irrelevant over there. It’s either that scenario or we make sure that the vast majority of Pakistanis, meaning those earning under two dollars a day, are allowed to win more often.