In this special edition, Trevor Chesterfield captures some of the worst emotions when terror strikes, the aftermath of it all and some rather disturbing questions that perhaps would have left the cricket world dumbfounded for answers had some fortuitous events not happened.
Trevor Chesterfield dissects the thoughts in the aftermath of the terror strikes in Mumbai:
You can almost smell the growing anger, yet with it a sense of dystopian fear: a paranoia that has left many searching questions but as yet no answers.
In the aftermath of the Mumbai Massacre, where a section of the city has been brutalised by a wanton act of evil by terrorist thugs, the security system paralysed by an inability to react effectively after their senior anti-terrorist officer was killed in the first skirmish.
And as most world leaders condemned this cruel and senseless murder of innocents, India’s own political hierarchy has been found wanting in the nation’s hours of need. It did not reflect well on the world’s biggest democracy. What is needed is support and answers to solve the problem and improve security. It lost the respect of those who support it.
To say that it won’t happen again is foolish and typical rhetorical fumbling by politicians groping in the dark for the light switch.
From personal experiences in the 1960s, any act of terrorism creates such brutal and dysfunctional imagery you never forget it. Or its terrifying aftermath. At the time, such events are heavily travailed, and where cool judgement and thinking is required to separate what is an intense, personal emotional loss in order to help others around you more affected by callous and savage events.
Always, the innocent suffer and it is how the corollary of such senseless aggression leaves a growing list of widows, orphans and grieving husbands. It means nothing to terrorists, or those who continue to preach anarchy, how they have caused a trail of bloodied collateral damage and a large pile of bodybags.
This is the fanatical fundamentalism challenging a democratic world as such brainwashed groups confront it. They care not whether you die, or whether they too become a victim, of those with such vested interests, and who arm and pay such robotic-like mercenaries to carry out such gratuitous acts in whatever name you want to give it.
And this is the challenge facing not only the city of Mumbai, the subcontinent’s major economic hub, where last week’s massacre and its aftermath has left a gaping wound in its confidence and that of their own inept administration.
What is ominously clear is how in its range and complexity, the attack is a major change in the way such extremists operate. That they arrived in fast boats from the open sea and had the capability to attack in so many locations and known soft targets. It shows a well-orchestrated attack with a smart tactician pulling the strings.
The pattern of recent terrorist operations suggests imitation style attacks can be expected in the weeks ahead. This frightening spectre is one that needs to be tackled.
There is though another scenario that could have created further doubt about safety issues of not only the hundreds of tourists and locals, but international sportsmen.
As it happened, a series of fortuitous events saved former England captain Michael Vaughan, spinner Monty Panesar and opening batsman Andrew Strauss along with the high performance squad from being caught up in the mayhem that took place in Mumbai.
Vaughan and the England squad training for the Tests with the high performance squad were not in Mumbai last Wednesday. They had left equipment in a room at the Taj Mahal hotel at the start of the pre-Test series preparation programme. The plan was to be back in Mumbai last Tuesday or Wednesday, but for unexplained reasons, the training camp was then switched from Mumbai to Bangalore.
“All our Test kit is in one of the rooms at the Taj Mahal in Mumbai. It was deposited there after two practice games in Mumbai and waiting our return. That is how close the danger is (for us),” were his prosaic comments.
Had Vaughan and the rest of the squad been in Mumbai and in the hotel, would the terrorist group have worried who they were? Or would they have killed them the way they shot those they came across. Having Test players in the grasp of terrorists would have placed a seriously different slant on such a commando security exercise.
Whatever name you want to give such maleficent groups out to perform Tartarian acts of subjugation, the question is who funds them and why. How did this terrorist group go undetected for so long in Pakistan, wracked as she is by her own security problems, yet managed earlier this year to stage a successful Asia Cup.
There was a nasty twisted logic to the Mumbai butchers thinking. They said in one statement that the attack was to teach the Hindu fundamentalists a lesson. Is this why their modus operandi was to hunt down and murder any foreigners they could find: Jews, British, American or anyone perceived to be Western.
They didn’t discriminate. There were those who walked onto the railway platform and casually shot at passengers, leaving bloodied corpses or maimed mothers or fathers or children. Whether they would have spared the lives of Vaughan, Panesar, Strauss and others of the England high performance squad would have been an interesting situation.
Imagine another sickening Daniel Pearl episode carried out in the name of whatever evil this group profess to believe. It could have so easily happen.
While all this was taking place, two Tests and an ODI match were in progress or about to start. But there was no enthusiasm to sit and watch any of it.
Long-term questions to be asked are, apart from planning for and running the 2011 World Cup, in four culturally divergent nations, can the four coexist as a cricket force to overcome the trauma of not only the Mumbai Massacre. There is a civil war in Sri Lanka and terrorist attacks throughout region are daily occurrences.
Yet, this is an important issue as whatever many think the world game needs India.
This influence has given someone such as Lalit Modi, the vice-chairman of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, powers that are almost above those of the chief executive of the International Cricket Council. As commissioner of the franchise run Indian Premier League, he has tried his own tactical games against Sri Lanka Cricket who objected to his bullying.
But all this aside, the BCCI are heavily committed to a string of television deals and as England’s captain, Kevin Pietersen, explained in a media interview, it is the TV deals that are the driving force in why cricket needs to return to normality as soon as possible. In this, Modi, a as the mover and shaker and why India is so important to the game.
It is important that England play the two Tests of the series, it is also, in a sense, whatever are the misgivings that India play Pakistan in their Tests and slogs. Whether this is in Pakistan, India or at some off-shore venues such as Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. Australia were forced to do this in a Test series with Pakistan in 2002 after the Champions Trophy.
It was Modi who admitted in the Indian media on Friday that India cannot not afford to be sidelined by terrorists as had Pakistan this year. That long-term solutions needed to be found to the staging of the IPL games, with the Champions League, now postponed, already under threat and teams from Australia, England and South Africa likely to miss out on the financial bonanza.
Already Steve Harmison and Andy Flintoff have said they are not prepared to return to India to play the two Tests. Others may, or may not follow. Both would not have travelled to Pakistan to the now postponed Champions Trophy had this not been placed on hold for a year.
“My life means more to me than anything else,” is how Pietersen explained it as he was about to fly to London. “I can totally understand if individual players have misgivings and I am not going to force any adult who has a wife and kids to do anything he wouldn’t want to do.”
There is the side of the subcontinent that people don’t know and Steve Waugh pointed this out, confident the show will go on; that India will pick herself up and after a hiatus life and the game will return. It is too important in their lives.
This I know all too well from my own visits and the friends that I have made over the past twenty-one years of flying in and out since 1987. You feel comfortable and at home.
One of the joys of travelling in India is the daily chaos in the streets yet the warm, abiding welcome that is more apparent in India than elsewhere. In outstations in Sri Lanka they have the same cheerful expressions and innocence.
In places such as Ahmedabad, heavily polluted Kanpur with its grime and smells, Chennai and New Delhi, Agra and Mohali, you are left signing autographs because while you maybe a nobody, a story you wrote appeared in the Indian Express with your photo and they want to reach out and touch you. It is their way of saying thank you. There is the same feeling in Galle and Dambulla.
This is the South Asia that I enjoy: it is because of their underlying ability to cope with the unsuspecting terror that lurks around the corner; in Sri Lanka it was the tsunami almost four years ago.
It give you a sense of belonging yet one of outrage of seeing how ordinary folk have become targets for such Neanderthals as the terrorists, whose only act is to destroy while the puppet masters pull the strings. They have made life cheap and those who have manipulated such wanton acts are those who need to be asked questions by the serious-minded politicians to discover the answers.
Topmost pic: March in San Francisco in protest of the killings in Mumbai. Another voice raised against the heinous act of terror that drenched Mumbai in blood last week, made even more brtual by the attack on the Jewish place of worship, killing Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife amongst others.
