Of the 48 matches among 10 countries across 10 venues during the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 that began on October 5, the India-Pakistan clash is the most high-profile. Scheduled for October 14, at the Narendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad with 1,30,000 seats, the contest between the two neighbouring countries spills from sport into politics, putting security on high alert.
The city will see over 1,000 police personnel deployed around the venue and places where players, top officials of the ICC and BCCI, and other VIPs will stay. They will also manage crowds and traffic. Battalions from the Central forces, like the Rapid Action Force, Border Security Force, and State Reserve Police Force, will also be deployed.
On Monday, Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel held a meeting in Gandhinagar to review the preparations and security measures. Last month Ahmedabad’s cybercrime branch had lodged an FIR against Canada-based Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Khalistan separatist leader designated as a terrorist in India, who threatened attacks on the city during the match.
‘Political match’
The match between India and Pakistan in Gujarat, the Some state of Prime Minister Modi in a stadium named after him, has significance because the neighbouring country has been a subject of the State’s political discourse particularly in the run-up to elections.
“It is a brilliant political move to have a cricket match between India and Pakistan in Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium in the midst of the important State elections, and a few months before the crucial national polls,” said a writer-academician. “It’s more a political match, than a normal cricket match,” he said.
“Of course, there is the factor of money: an India-Pakistan cricket match leads to a great crowd and has economic value. But it also feeds into the anti-Pakistan [feeling] that includes an anti-minority discourse in the laboratory of Hindu nationalism as elections are approaching,” said Sharik Laliwala, a political scientist and PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work includes a study of caste and religious minorities in India.
Campaign theme
The first time that Pakistan was a subject of a Gujarat election campaign was during the 2002 Assembly election held in the wake of the worst communal riots in the history of the State. As the chief campaigner of the BJP, the then Chief Minister and now PM, Mr. Modi in his election speeches proclaimed that he was the only leader who could protect Gujarat from neighbouring Islamic Pakistan, its President Pervez Musharraf, and extremist Islamic terrorism.
“If Miya Musharraf does not stop pointing his dirty fingers at Gujarat, five crore Gujaratis will not hesitate to answer him back,” was how he would bring Pakistan into his election speeches that year.
In the 2017 Assembly election, which the BJP won with a slender margin, PM Modi had brought Pakistan into the election campaign by claiming that a meeting was held between top Congress leaders including former PM Manmohan Singh and Pakistan officials, including the then Pakistan High Commissioner in India.
“What was the need for holding such a secret meeting, especially when an election is going on in Gujarat,” PM Modi had said at a rally in Palanpur, north Gujarat. The BJP has been in power in Gujarat since 1998.
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