Passage to Pakistan

would have visited Pakistan in 1971 for my first tour abroad. I had been selected to represent India in the inaugural World Cup tournament in Lahore. The Olympics seemed just a step away. However, the unsporting attitude of Pakistani cricketer Abdul Hafeez Kardar came in the way of that tour.

I did visit Pakistan 5 years later, not just as a player, but as the captain of the Indian team for the Qaid-e-Azam tournament held in Lahore in 1976. By then, Aslam had become a popular name in hockey, as well known in sports as Kardar.

I learnt of my captaincy while flying to Bangalore with the Indian Airlines team. It was a delightful shock. My father had only represented the country. I was leading it. Amma would certainly be proud.

But I was shocked to learn that I was to lead a team of players, mostly young, mostly Muslims, and mostly from Bhopal. Moreover, this team was announced without any sort of preparatory camp. Let there be a team, they said, and there was a team. Just like that.

I remonstrated against the composition of the team and declined to lead it. "I would be honoured to lead my country's hockey team," I said, "but not a goodwill delegation." But there was insistence. I was told that this fresh blood would be India's team of tomorrow.

There were problems galore. To begin with, there was no coach. The manager, Mashkoor Hasan of Bhopal, spent all his time in Delhi. Soon Gurcharan Singh Bodhi arrived as a coach. We did not have a full complement of players. After a few days, when we were boarding the bus from Patiala to Jalandhar, two other players joined us - Mehboob and Zafar Iqbal.

Neither the manager or I had the money to pay the bus fare from Jalandhar to the border. Punjab, which has always made a great contribution to Indian hockey, again came to our rescue. A friendly Deputy Inspector General of Police provided us a police lorry, and rang up for the border to be kept open.

The lorry was one of those used for carrying undertrials. In a way, we too were under trial. We rattled on in the police van to Pakistan.

The entire Pakistani press corps was waiting for us at the border. We were taken to the Lahore Inter-Continental Hotel. As the media swarmed around us, the manager took me aside and said, "You handle the media. This is my first visit with a team."

Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, with a seating capacity of 50,000, is perhaps the only stadium in the world where gender apartheid is practised. There are different enclosures for men and women. It baffled me that while Islam permitted men and women to perform Haj together, the Islamic State of Pakistan frowned upon them watching a match together.

We won our first match against Poland. The newcomers in our team - Kaushik, Charanjeet, Sodhi, Syed Ali, Mehboob, Khurshid and Zafar Iqbal - lived up to my expectations.

The next match against Pakistan ended in a defeat for us. The result would have been different if we had even one seasoned player in the forward line. A Govinda or an Ashok would have been enough to tilt the scales in our favour.

In the crucial third match against Malaysia, goalkeeper Chettri refused to play since he was not started in the match. Fernandes of Mumbai had played the first half. India was leading 1-0 off a goal by centre-forward Lobo.

However, on two occasions, Baldev stopped stray shots from the centre-line inside the "D" instead of letting the ball go out harmlessly. Both times the ball touched his feet, resulting in penalty corners. Malaysia did not refuse such offers, and scored both times to win the match.

We ended up 5th in the tournament. If only the team had not been treated like a step child, we could have been placed at least two rungs higher.

After the match against Malaysia, as I was coming out of the stadium under a police escort, a voice shouted out my name in typical Bhopali Urdu. It was the great Latif-ur-Rehman, who had represented India in the 1948 Olympics, and later played for Pakistan.

Later a voice shouted out in Punjabi, "Why don't you come to Pakistan? You will be representing 6 crores of Muslims. Our team will be complete."

"Why should I?" I countered. "I am representing 60 crores of Indians. And more than 10 crores of them are Muslims. You should know that we also hold the highest office in our country. Remember Zakir Hussain. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed."

Everything went very quiet. It was a tense moment. Suddenly, somebody shouted 'Aslam Sher Khan' and the Zindabads broke the awkward silence.

With Abdul Rasheed Jr. of Pakistan