Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, Pakistan, has now hosted two of Sri Lanka's best and worst moments. In March 1996, they won the cricket World Cup there as co-hosts with India and Pakistan, setting of a frenzy of unprecedented celebrations in the little island nation.
Thirteen years later, on March 3, 2009, terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan cricketers as they were entering the same stadium, giving the world chilling memories of the 1972 Munich Olympic attacks in which terrorists gunned down 11 Israeli athletes. At least five people were killed and six Sri Lankan cricketers injured as police battled with 12 well-armed gunmen. The cricketers called off their tour and immediately headed home.
Hindi movies, terrorism and the English language are among South Asia's common bonds, but none as much-loved, fervent or unifying as cricket. Rarely in world history has a single sport dominated cross-border emotions, politics and roller-coaster national relationships as much as the game of cricket has between India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Cricket is popularly called a "religion" in these four South Asian nations, and the fear of terrorists including the game in their agenda has been an ever-present Sword of Damocles.
When the terrorists' sword fell on Tuesday morning, the Sri Lankan cricket team was not scheduled to even be in Lahore. India had canceled its tour of Pakistan in January - the strongest action against Pakistan that India had so far taken following the November 26 terrorist attacks in Mumbai - and Sri Lanka decided to replace India in Pakistan. The Mumbai attacks were linked to Pakistani militants.
The 17th century English-born game again has the three former English colonies mixed in a cricket tango, this time to the tune of a grim tragedy. The fourth country, Bangladesh, is currently in uproar over a failed military uprising. Cricket has featured in sub-continental moments of disunity, as well as heart-warming togetherness.
In 1996, India and Pakistan sent joint cricket "friendship" teams to Sri Lanka during the World Cup the three nations were then jointly hosting, after Australia and the West Indies refused to tour Sri Lanka after a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) bomb attack in Colombo. Top Indian and Pakistani cricket stars played together in Sri Lanka to express solidarity with the island nation.
And it was Sri Lankan solidarity for Pakistan that brought its ill-fated team to Lahore, after India canceled its tour as apparent payback for the Mumbai attacks. "Match abandoned due to terror attacks," announced the Google News India home page of the second five-day match in Lahore between Sri Lanka and Pakistan, in the live updates of matches that Google provides for cricket-crazy Indian fans. Such a match-ending line has never been seen in the 120-year recorded history of the game.
India pulling out of its scheduled Pakistan tour cost the local Pakistan cricket board an estimated US$40 million loss. The Indian government's move was supposed to be the strongest, and as yet the only expression of Indian outrage at the attacks. But Pakistan was already a cricketing outcast, with no international team willing to play a Test match - that is, the five-day version of the game - in the violence-ridden nation in the past 14 months.
Before India, Australia had pulled out of a scheduled tour of Pakistan in April 2008, and the international Champions Trophy one-day cricket tournament that Pakistan was to have hosted was also cancelled after other governments deemed Pakistan as being too dangerous a place for their nationals.
In 2002, New Zealand - where the Indian cricket team is presently touring - promptly canceled their ongoing tour of Pakistan after a bomb exploded in Karachi, near the New Zealand team's hotel. Thirteen people, including 11 French navy personnel, were killed in the bomb attack at the Pearl Continental Hotel.
Given the recurring nature of random violence in Pakistan and fears of international teams to visit the country despite Islamabad's security assurances, Sri Lanka's decision to go to Pakistan appeared foolhardy. The move was greeted with some disapproval by millions of Indian cricket fans who felt the island nation and its cricketers had betrayed India by not following Delhi's boycott.
The Sri Lankan decision to tour Pakistan was seen as a balancing act of its "cricket diplomacy", trying to please both India and Pakistan. Both Islamabad and Delhi are crucial factors in Sri Lanka's battle against its home grown-insurgency by the Tamil Tigers. Pakistan helps arm the Sri Lankan military, and Sri Lanka dared not offend India in case its bigger neighbor resumed its support for the LTTE. India withdrew its support after the LTTE assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi on May 21, 1992.
Cricket was already a strong component in sub-continental diplomacy, both to express coldness and as an ice-breaker in relations. An Indian cricket team toured Pakistan in 1977, to mark the resumption of warmer diplomatic ties between the two countries after the 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh.
Former Pakistan president and late military dictator Zia ul-Haq was an ardent cricket fan, as have been his successor chiefs of the Pakistan army, some of whom have headed the Pakistan cricket board, most recently former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf.
In 1987, Zia ul-Haq, whose term marked the resumption of India-Pakistan tensions over disputed Kashmir, went to India almost uninvited to see a cricket match in Jaipur, in what he hoped would be an attempt to cool rising tempers in India over Pakistan's alleged involvement in terrorist violence in the restive region. In 2005, Musharraf came to see a cricket match in New Delhi, the city of his birth, to again thaw relations between the two nations.
The 1999 war between India and Pakistan, the worst military confrontation between the two countries since 1971, happened during the cricket World Cup in England in which both nations were participating. A 2003 Indian tour of Pakistan led to unprecedented warmth between the two neighboring nations, a people-to-people contact that cricket author Rahul Bhattacharya described in his book Pundits From Pakistan.
No Sri Lankan cricket writer will have such happy memories of touring Pakistan in 2009, following the Lahore attack that raises not just disturbing questions about Pakistan's future as a co-host to the 2011 World Cup, along with India and Sri Lanka, but to its future as a nation.
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