Ugly trend that can poison Indian cricket
There is a dark movement in Indian cricket and its implications should worry Australia.
Prime minister Narendra Modi enjoyed exercising his prerogative of using the cricket team as symbolic of his “new India”. That “they took the challenge head on and looked for fresh solutions instead of getting frustrated by difficult conditions” exemplified how the nation could “emerge fearless” if “we overcome the fear of failure and unnecessary pressure”.
Standard stuff, of course. But let’s look a little closer, shall we?
Modi enjoys a curiously benign reputation hereabouts. Generally, Australian politicians look on India as simply a nice juicy trade market that is (a) not China and (b) see (a). “World’s largest democracy” comes trippingly off the tongue.
Unfortunately, India is a democracy in worsening decay, thanks to seven years of the BJP’s Hindu majoritarianism, at odds with the country’s traditions of pluralism and tolerance. And that’s got implications for cricket, even Australian cricket, of which we should be aware.
The ruling BJP’s modus operandi is demonising minorities, subverting institutions, intimidating media, criminalising dissent and, not least, tyrannising the internet.
No country shuts and throttles the net so regularly; no political party operates such slickly vicious online trolling. India swims in social media; into it the BJP’s digital operatives have a habit of throwing bloody bait, viz liberal celebrities, independent journalists and academics who have stepped out of line. Especially since last September.
That was when Modi’s administration rammed through the Rajya Sabha three bills designed to “liberalise” Indian agriculture. There had been no consultative process; the bills’ passage violated all parliamentary and constitutional norms; the laws were devoid of regulatory and legal protections for farmers, and as such a prescription for monopoly abuse, in a country where a score of companies already earn 70 per cent of corporate profits.
Discontent has roiled since. Demonstrations have been largely peaceful, if on an epic scale: a one-day strike in November involving 250 million people may well be the largest single protest in history, involving ten times as many people as marched for Black Lives Matter last year.
One exception was 26 January, India’s Republic Day, when 200 farmers were “detained” by Delhi’s notoriously violent police after diverting a march to the Red Fort. The same cops then created a cause célèbre by arresting a 22-year-old activist, Disha Ravi, basically for having the temerity to communicate with Greta Thunberg, which was described as showing intent “to wage economic, social, cultural and regional war against India.”
Why? Because India’s government craves the world’s attention but recoils from its scrutiny, and busily nourishes paranoia about foreign treachery so as to turn the political into the patriotic. And what really lit the blue touch paper was a tweet on 3 February by Rihanna, linking to a CNN article about an internet shutdown following the confrontation at the Red Fort.
“Why aren’t we talking about this?”, asked the pop chanteuse of her 100 million followers, adding the hashtag #FarmersProtests and generating almost a million likes.
Modi promptly upped the ante, threatening to jail Twitter’s local executives if Jack Dorsey did not suppress 100 allegedly “pro-farmer” accounts; Dorsey hastily capitulated.
Cyber battle was also joined by an army of counter tweeters flourishing hashtag banners such as #IndiaTogether and #IndiaAgainstPropaganda, somehow oblivious to their irony. And these included the elite of the country’s cricketers.
This is hardly so surprising. The Board of Control for Cricket in India is another institution increasingly pervaded by Modi’s myrmidons.
In November 2019, the BCCI “elected” as secretary Jay Shah and as treasurer Arun Singh Dhumal – respectively the son of home minister Amit Shah and the brother of finance minister Anurag Thakur, two particularly repulsive Modi cronies. The same election also promoted a character from Rajpur, Mahim Verma, secretary of the fledgling Cricket Association of Uttakharand – more on him presently.
Leading the way was Sachin Tendulkar: “External forces can be spectators but not participants. India’s sovereignty cannot be compromised. External forces can be spectators but not participants. Indians know India and should decide for India. Let’s remain united as a nation.”
Virat Kohli, Ajinkya Rahane, Suresh Raina, Ravi Shastri, Rohit Sharma and Anil Kumble issued slightly more emollient sentiments, with further calls for “unity” – implicitly echoing another BJP talking point, for which evidence is scant, that the farmers are aligned with Sikh separatists. Probably Rihanna fans too.
How strange that all these cricketers should have decided, independently and all at once, to inveigh against “propaganda”! How strange that they should then shrink from the week’s other significant Indian cricket issue….
Having played the last of 31 Tests in 2008, Wasim Jaffer has towered above Indian domestic cricket like Everest. He retired last March after playing more than 150 Ranji Trophy matches and accumulating almost 20,000 first-class runs at an average better than 50, and was recruited as coach by Uttakharand in north India.
Except it all ended acrimoniously on 10 February when Jaffer quit, “because of so much interference and bias of selectors and secretary in the selection matters for non-deserving players” – the secretary being old mate Verma.
Jaffer, though, is a Muslim. So Verma trumped up counterclaims of “communalism”: Jaffer’s preference for coreligionists. This is a classic trope of Hindu chauvinism, obsessed with the existence of a Muslim fifth column.
Nobody of any repute believes that the new coach did other than fall victim to overmighty, sticky-nosed locals, and he did attract some Twitter support, including from Kumble, who said that Jaffer had “done the right thing” in resigning.
But from Jaffer’s former comrades in the national side, nothing was heard. Why? Because, one imagines, it was as against their interests to speak up about sectarianism as it was in their interests to obediently regurgitate BJP slogans.
Some readers will be shaking their heads by now – those readers who haven’t already drifted off out of a rooted objection to cricket articles involving anything but cover drives and outswingers – about it just going to show how sport and politics should not mix.
They will be just as wrong. Sport and politics do mix, and always have: the questions revolve around in what proportion and to what ends. In India, those proportions are increasingly ugly and those ends worseningly oppressive; they should trouble every conscience.
On Thursday night, Fox Sports broadcasted a live feed of the player auction for the Indian Premier League. This is the face the BCCI likes to show the world – that of a big, benevolent sugar daddy, showering riches on the cricket world’s best. Go Maxy! Look at those lucky young quicks!
But how should we feel if the BCCI’s cosiness with the BJP warms further, if India’s cricketers become longer-term conscripts in their governments’s creepy online claque, and if its Muslim players are further singled out for victimisation? To quote Rihanna: “Why aren’t we talking about this?”
More Coverage
‘You’re just the groundsman’: India coach caught in epic spray
India’s head coach Gautam Gambhir has been caught going to war with the Oval groundsman ahead of the fifth and final Test of a series marred by a flurry of heated exchanges.
Lyon reveals pain at Starc milestone snub
Nathan Lyon is confident he still has a role to play in pink-ball Tests despite being dumped from the Australian side for close mate Mitchell Starc’s 100th Test.
How we grew to admire them this summer, those dashing, defiant, skilful and fun Indian cricketers, led first by Virat Kohli then Ajinkya Rahane, as they taught Australia numerous cricket lessons. How we enjoyed, too, the scenes of their deservedly rapturous homecomings.