Go India

It ended days of speculation that the tour would be postponed over security concerns, which heightened on Thursday following an informal confirmation of sorts by the Home Ministry.

That provoked a strong reaction from the PCB, whose president Shahryar Khan — a former foreign secretary — warned it could set back bilateral ties. His statement, followed by a meeting between senior High Commission and MEA officials in New Delhi on Friday, and the possibility of the issue being raised at the high-level talks on Monday, apparently got the government re-thinking.

A meeting was called this morning, chaired by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and also attended by Sinha, Home Minister L K Advani and Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, at which the decision to go was taken.

The decision is heightened here by the cut and thrust of kites. Tonight is Basant, the annual spring festival, and Pakistan’s most interesting city is getting down to the serious business of enjoying itself.

‘‘I am looking forward to having Indians playing in my country,’’ ace bowler Shoaib Akhtar tells The Sunday Express over the phone. He’s hanging out with friends too tonight, in Lahore, watching them fly their kites, and will stay over the next few weeks to get back into finer fettle.

The Indian side has just lost the first, purely psychological battle of the series—by conceding over the last week that ‘‘feel good’’ was in danger from his fast bowling. ‘‘They say,’’ he said of the Indians, ‘‘that I’m a kind of a fast bowler.’’

Thank God the Indian leadership did not give in to the jingoistic nonsense that would have certainly set back the incipient peace process by leaps and bounds, says a Lahori economist and promising politician.

Shahryar Khan had left his offices at the Ghadafi Stadium for a Basant party by mid-evening. Not without being elated about moderates on both sides of the border having pulled it off, it is said. ‘‘We never doubted that the tour would go ahead,’’ he told a news agency.

His staff, used to punishing schedules and rigorous time-tables since January 22 are beginning to re-focus on the tour. They take time out to laugh over the 1999 World Cup story when a US company refused to take the stadium’s name on air since it was named after Libyan leader Muammar Ghadafi.

Subhan Ahmad, the boyish manager in charge of PCB’s Cricket Operations International, says he’s even busier than yesterday, when the tour was still up in the air. Now, hotel accommodation and other logistics have to be finalised. It’s been decided to put 15 per cent of the tickets for sale on the Net. There will be no quotas for the Indian cricket board, nor a division of the ticket spoils between India and Pakistan.

Enough tickets will be available for Indian cricket aficionados, Shaharyar Khan has announced, as many as they want. Asked about visas and if these would be valid for the month when India tours Lahore, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Peshawar, Multan and Faisalabad, Khan stressed that nobody would go away disappointed.

There’s enormous relief that the PCB will not lose the $20 million it was going to spend on the tour, instead make large sums of money.

Yesterday, Khan had told the story of how the Pak team went to India in February 1999: ‘‘Nawaz Sharif himself told me that there had been a division within the Cabinet, over whether they should go to India or not, but he’d decided that the team should go. There were threats directed at the team from the Shiv Sena. Nevertheless, we kept our word.”