Pakistan welcome despite threats

The Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said yesterday he hoped right-wing activists who are opposed to this month's tour by Pakistan's cricket team would reconsider. Press Trust of India quoted Vajpayee as saying that "better sense should prevail" and that he was unhappy over attempts to disrupt the series.

Activists of the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party damaged the pitch at New Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla stadium on Wednesday, three weeks before the first test between the archrivals on Indian soil in almost a decade.

Shiv Sena is vehemently opposed to cricket ties between the two countries.

Indian officials earlier said the tour would go ahead as planned and "fool-proof" security would be given to the Pakistani cricketers from the point they arrived in India.

Shiv Sena, which controls the western state of Maharashtra in coalition with Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party, says India and Pakistan should not play sport while Indian soldiers are suffering during the bitter territorial dispute over Kashmir.

In Madras, where Pakistan are scheduled to play next month, the state administration threatened to come down hard on Shiv Sena. Meanwhile, the Pakistan captain Wasim Akram said yesterday that he wanted the tour to go ahead, but added the decision was up to the government and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB).

"I want the tour to go on, the team wants the tour to go on," Akram said during a break in training at Karachi's National Stadium.

"It's entirely up to the government and the PCB to decide what they want us to do. If they tell us to go play, we would like to go play."

PCB officials said they would send a representative to India either today or tomorrow to discuss security arrangements.

Pakistan's local media is split on whether the tour should proceed, with the Dawn newspaper publishing an editorial yesterday which said: "If we give in to blackmail by a lunatic fringe in Indian politics, it will set a bad example."

But the Lahore-based Nation newspaper ran a column that said because of the threats "the logical thing would be to cancel the tour".

Pakistan tours to India have been called off in the past because of threats by Hindu militants. Shiv Sena activists dug up a pitch in Bombay in 1991 to sabotage one planned tour.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their independence from British colonial rule in 1947.