What one finds most amusing about Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik’s warning to his country’s cricket team against fixing their World Cup semifinal match against India is its implicit conviction that merely saying so would actually make it so.
While Malik has apologized since issuing the extraordinary warning, the fact that he felt compelled to issue it publicly at all is indicative of how serious the problem of match is.
“I gave a warning that there should be no match-fixing. I am keeping a close watch. If any such thing happens, we are going to take action,” Malik said.
Everything that Malik said in the warning seemed to stem from a raging suspicion of wrongdoing, if not outright presumption of guilt altogether. Notwithstanding that the team had “very clean members the members were being closely monitored to see “who are meeting them and the position of their telephones,” he had reportedly said.
Last year, the Pakistani cricket team was caught in the midst of what became known as a “spot-fixing scandal.” The distinction between spot-fixing and match-fixing is mainly in the realm of semantics. Spot-fixing, as opposed to match-fixing, involves deliberately altering playing tactics at particular stages of a given match by cricketers who have been bribed to do so. The logistics of fixing an entire match are far more formidable than fixing spots because while the former requires concerted efforts of the majority of the team, the latter can be executed using a few pliable players. Of course, spot-fixing can also potentially alter the outcome of a game.
In the overall societal climate of cutting corners that Pakistani players have grown up in and seen the handsome benefits that it has paid to those who indulge in such practices in other walks of life, is it any surprise that some of them yield to the temptation of a fast buck?
The problem with Malik’s warning is that it has already prejudiced people’s minds. In the event that Pakistan loses the match today, a large number of cricket followers in the subcontinent would look for clues pointing at match-fixing even though it may not have been. During my visit to India this time just as the World Cup matches had started I came across a large number of people—anecdotally I would say more than five out of every ten—who were long convinced that everything was already rigged. In a climate of such widespread suspicion Malik’s warning can only make things worse.
It is too late for Malik to walk the beast of suspicion back now. It is already out prowling and gnawing at people’s minds. That he is Pakistan’s interior minister with access to actual intelligence reports is bound to strengthen what people already suspect, and perhaps unfairly so.
In the end though it helps to remember that it is just a cricket match that is unlikely to make the earth’s axis topsy-turvy.