Former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar speaks as Unicef Regional Director for South Asia Dr Karin Hulshof looks on during a function announcing Tendulkar as a Unicef Regional Ambassador in Mumbai yesterday. Tendulkar, who recently retired from international cricket, joined the Total Sanitation Campaign as the Unicef Regional Ambassador for programmes in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan.
Peshawar: They already hate schoolgirl education activists and regularly issue statements against a government they are trying to topple. But now the Pakistani Taliban have found a new target for their anger: unpatriotic media admiration for the Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar.
Lavish praise for the recently retired cricketer in the Pakistani press has so irritated the militant group that it has released a video ordering newspapers and TV stations to stop promoting him.
“There is an Indian player called Tendulkar. He is being showered with praises by Pakistani media and people,” said Shahidullah Shahid, the main spokesman of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), during a video appearance flanked by two gun-wielding, balaclava-wearing jihadis.
“Somebody should tell the media that Tendulkar may be a good cricketer but his qualities should not be highlighted because it is against the Pakistani nation and our motherland.”
Adding to TTP irritation is the terrible press the national team is currently enduring.
Although Shahid conceded there were problems with the team captain, Misbah-ul-Haq, he demanded the media get behind the national team.
“No matter how bad a player Misbah-ul-Haq is, he must be praised,” Shahid said.
The captain has been much criticised for being a plodder at the crease, earning him the nickname “Tuk-tuk”.
The video is a highly unusual public intervention for a movement that usually restricts its statements to jeremiads against the government.
One of the last times it publicly objected to the work of journalists was in the aftermath of the botched assassination of the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, which sparked an almost unprecedented, but relatively brief, surge of media criticism. In recent weeks the Pakistani press has been full of articles about Tendulkar, who announced the end of his 24-year cricket career this month.
The Guardian
