The decision to call off the cricket tour to Pakistan is a welcome step. Given the outrage across the country over the most heinous terror attack in India by Pakistani terrorists, it would have been most inappropriate to send our cricket team to a country, which is bent upon bleeding us by a thousand cuts right since the early 1980s, by sponsoring terrorism directed against us.
We have been over-benevolent by our very nature by taking various confidence building measures to better our relations with Pakistan, only to be backstabbed by them time and again. Remember the great bus diplomacy which we undertook only to be reciprocated by the Kargil war and the hijacking of IC-814 some time later; remember the Agra summit and the attack on Parliament soon after? It needs to be mentioned that Pakistan changed its nomenclature of ‘freedom fighters’ to ‘terrorists’ after the December 2001, only under pressure from the US, which wanted to avoid an Indo-Pak conflict by all means.
Why only cricket, it’s time to put an end to all official exchanges with Pakistan, till we settle the terror issue once and for all.
Navneet Dhawan, New Delhi
