The Sydney Morning Herald
Blood ties: Miandad and a marriage of inconvenience
December 16, 2008
The marriage of the legendary batsman's son to a notorious underworld figure's daughter is widening the cracks in international cricket. Peter Roebuck reports.
A SMALL item in a recent edition of India Today, the most influential political magazine in the country, has the potential to drive an even deeper wedge between the cricket communities of Pakistan and India and to add to the sufferings of a game facing the worst crisis in its history.
Following the Mumbai terrorist attacks last month that killed 172 people, an outrage that sent the entire country into a state of shock and put these nuclear countries at each other's throats, the magazine reported remarks by a senior Russian detective, comments that will reverberate around the cricket world.
Viktor Ivanov, director of the Russian federal drug control service (FSKN), said a don with strong cricketing connections had provided much of the support for the terrorists. Ivanov told Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper, that "infamous regional drug baron Dawood Ibrahim provided logistical networks for preparing and carrying out the Mumbai terror attacks". He added that the "profits of the narco-mafia made through Afghan heroin trafficking have been a powerful source of financing organised crime and terrorism, and destabilising political systems in the area".
Beyond argument, Dawood is a malign figure and a serious bone of contention between these powerful and periodically antagonistic nations. Indeed, he has been top of India's most wanted list since the blasts that ripped Mumbai asunder in 1993, pitting Hindu against Muslim, local-born against settler.
Dawood fled to Pakistan, where he continued his arms and drug trading while, at best, the local security forces looked the other way. India is convinced old hands from the inter-services intelligence agency helped to train the militants, one of whom survived to spill the beans. Furthermore, it believes its neighbour is not sincere in its attempts to control the various terrorist networks operating within its borders.
To make matters worse, Pakistan has ruled out handing anyone over to India. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the new army chief, has taken control of his country and especially its response to Indian accusation. Under his populist stewardship, outright denial has replaced accommodation. Tensions remain high. Thus ancient feuds are renewed. Inevitably, cricket has been caught in the backwash. Already, India's sports minister has spoken out against sending the national team to Pakistan, and Sunil Gavaskar has backed him up. Barring an unexpected outbreak of enlightenment, the forthcoming tour will not take place, increasing Pakistan's cricketing isolation.
Dawood's reputed involvement in the latest evil might seem a solely political matter. Obviously, his alleged activities and continued liberty anger the Indians beyond measure, but that does not reach across the boundary. He has also been linked to the latest match-fixing scandals surfacing in the Twenty20 leagues, which is nothing new.
But Dawood has connections, albeit tenuous, with Pakistan cricket on more than one level, and in this climate of political intrigue and distrust, even a tenuous and innocent connection can be a problem. Specifically, he has close connections with Javed Miandad, once his country's greatest batsman and now among its most senior cricket officers. Recently, Miandad was appointed as the PCB's director general and ambassador to China. His connection with Dawood goes back a long way, and was cemented by the marriage between his son and one of the don's daughters.
At the time, he told Outlook magazine that, "Muslims believe marriages are made in heaven," and explained that their wives were friends and also related.
While Miandad is no stranger to the dramas thrown up by match-fixing scandals, the Dawood link will no doubt now come in for much greater scrutiny. And the Dawood name has come up before.
Asked by Justice Malik Qayyum why he had quit as coach after his team lost a one-day match to England in Sharjah in 1999, Miandad said that during Pakistan's second match, he had received a call informing him that five of his players had taken money to throw the England game. Miandad refused to divulge the caller's identity. Instead, he had instructed a player to talk to Dawood, who confirmed that the match was fixed. There were also suspicions that Pakistan threw matches at the 1999 World Cup, and Miandad himself claimed a one-day series loss to New Zealand in 2001 had been fixed.
Dawood is described by the US State Department as a "global terrorist with links to al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Toiba", the latter group responsible for the Mumbai massacre. No one is suggesting that Miandad had any involvement in the attacks. To do so would be ridiculous. But in this volatile environment, his links with Dawood and his seniority in Pakistan cricket have caused consternation among eminent Indian cricket officials, some of whom lost friends or family members in the attacks.
It does not bode well for relations between these cricketing strongholds.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges