Is the IPL the last straw?
Increasingly Indian cricket, instead of acting as a rallying point, has become a polariser.
To grow up in India is to love a cricketer. For my father, as a teenager in the late 60s, it was Mansur Ali Khan “Tiger” Patuadi. For me, as a teenager in Bangalore in the noughties, it was Rahul Dravid and for my husband, growing up at the same time in Mumbai, it was, naturally, Sachin. While we all pretend to have serious cricketing reasons for our love, scratch the surface, and the irrationality will peep out. We arm ourselves with statistics and arguments and records, but if we’re being honest, we know that our love isn’t based on these statistics. It’s something deeper. They are, to use the slightly fanciful term, our heros. We jump to their defence online, we fight fans of rivals, and above all, we forge bonds across our diverse, complicated and often divided country with this collective love. A Sachin fan is a Sachin fan, a Rohit fan is a Rohit fan, and a Kohli fan is a Kohli fan. The aura of their superstardom cloaks us, it allows us to temporarily put aside our own differences of class, caste, language and religion and join together, in a new form of worship (or battle) — hero worship.
Increasingly however, Indian cricket, instead of acting as a rallying point, has become a polariser.
Abandoning neutrality
A large part of our love for our cricketers had to do with the image they constructed in the public sphere. With their (sometimes irritating) studied neutrality in the face of whatever was happening, they managed to remain above the fray — the absence of opinion made it possible for a diverse group of us to see ourselves in them. The leftiest liberal and the most rabid Hindu nationalist can be and are Rahul Dravid fans. Not because of what he says, but because of what he doesn’t say. Absent from platforms like Twitter the personal Dravid is known to his family and his friends. The public one, a nice looking package of humour, good manners, worthy causes and cricketing talent, is an empty canvas for fans to project themselves on. Sachin, through his playing years, was much the same. Many sports writers, observing the heroics of American sportspeople like Muhammad Ali often expressed disappointment in our cricketers and their committed (and sometimes cowardly) neutrality, but that ignores the fact that this neutrality has had its own value — long as they were blank canvasses, we could put aside our differences and unite to support them.
Earlier generations of cricketers were given fewer opportunities to air their views. We had to trawl through the papers to find interviews with cricketers, or watch the rare show that got them on TV. They always said the same thing — they spoke of “hard work” and modestly downplayed their achievements, and that was it.
But in the era of social media and rapid opinions, this neutrality has become a facade that is impossible to maintain. Today, we are no longer insulated from the political opinions of our cricketers. In 2016, Indian captain Virat Kohli spoke in fervent support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highly controversial and ill-thought out demonetisation policy, terming it the “greatest move in history of Indian politics”. Thousands of Indians were forced to line up in long queues to withdraw their own money from banks. Some died waiting in those queues. It was a nonsensical move that decimated our largely cash based economy and did little to combat black money. In 2017, former cricketer Gautam Gambhir (who is now a member of parliament) called for mass murder in Kashmir as a response to a video showing a group of Kashmiris shoving and pelting stones at a member of the armed forces. Gambhir’s statement played to a sentiment that is rampant within India, created by decades of demonisation and conflict. Former cricketer Virender Sehwag made a similar, though less threatening, statement. It was clear, that the era of the politically neutral cricketer was ending.
State versus the people
Supporting the government of a country in a functional democracy is usually not controversial or even partisan. In the past, on aspects like vaccination, or public safety, cricketers have often collaborated with government bodies. In the last few years however, the Indian government has increasingly trained its ire inwards on other citizens. From the NRC exercise in Assam, which left 18 million people disenfranchised (12 million of whom were Hindu) to the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the brutal repression of the protests that followed, supporting the state has meant standing against an increasingly large section of our fellow citizens. The farmer protests against the liberalisation of the farm sector has made the pool of people who are considered “anti-national” even larger. Earlier this year, when global R&B star Rihanna tweeted in support of the farmer protests, a parade of cricketers tweeted near identical tweets with a ministry of external affairs approved hashtag. While worded as an appeal for “togetherness” and national unity, in effect, the whole exercise gave legitimacy to an “international conspiracy” theory that culminated in the arrest of a student environmental activist from Bangalore. In the green revolution states particularly, it was seen by many as an exercise in using their star power to silence the farmer protests.
IPL
As the IPL moves to Delhi this week, a city that is literally struggling to breathe, many have questioned the appropriateness of effectively bringing the circus to a city that is fighting for its life.
In 1936, Adolf Hitler pulled out all stops for Berlin to host perhaps the most grandiose Olympic Games the world had ever seen — a veritable propaganda blitz for the Nazi Party. The games were magnificent and if the spectacle did not silence the rising global criticism against Adolf Hitler’s government, it certainly took some of the edge of it. And while Germany wasn’t in the grips of a pandemic, one can bet that the Nazi Party wouldn’t have let a pandemic stop the games from going ahead. With India’s cricket centric sports focus, we’re unlikely to host the Olympic games but the IPL, launched in 2008, has often served just as well. We may have poorly funded public healthcare, education and nutrition initiatives, but we do have the richest cricket board in the world— the IPL showcases that. From the early editions, the IPL has represented a national reversal of fortune — we were now the ones (vicariously) throwing the money around and western players were the ones dropping everything to dance to our tunes.
This week though, in the face of the devastating toll that Covid has taken on our unprepared nation, we’re forced to ask a simple question — at what point does an escapist fantasy like the IPL become gruesome in its contrast to the outside world? As cricketers from Pakistan extend their support, and nations around the world mobilise to provide both medical supplies and wishes for the well being of our people, footage of the IPL, that shining representation of Indian financial dominance in the world of cricket rings as hollow as the vessels we were told to bang on balconies last year. Every match, with its fake crowd noises and excited commentary, and no acknowledgement of the tragedy outside other than periodic reminders to wash hands, begs the question — what good is the world’s richest cricket body in a nation reduced to begging for emergency medical aid just to breathe?
For a government which argues that the world is overstating our difficulties to make Mr. Modi’s government look bad, it is understandable that the instructions are “the show must go on to keep people’s spirits up”. The BCCI, under the effective control of Jay Shah, the son of Home Minister Amit Shah, is therefore unlikely to cancel the IPL — it would be the equivalent of a public admission that things are not under control. But what about our cricketers?
We are unlikely to know what is going on in any of our cricketers’ heads. Given the scale of the tragedy many of them are quite likely to be personally affected. Indian cricketer Veda Krishamurthy has lost her mother to the disease while her sister continues to battle it, and Ravichandran Ashwin has left the IPL to be with his family at this time. Australian pace bowler Pat Cummins donated $50,000 to the PM Cares Fund and stressed that he hoped the IPL was providing people some sort of happiness in difficult times. And yet, very few Indian cricketers have publicly expressed sympathy. Some have even continued to put their glossy product placements on social media, where they have sat on most of our timelines in the midst of endless appeals for hospital beds and oxygen.
Conclusion
As I watch the IPL play out, I worry for our sport. It’s all very well to argue that at the end of the day, they’re just doing their jobs, but cricketers in India, perhaps unfairly, have always been expected to be more. That love, that expectation, that sense of what they mean to us, has been what has made the BCCI the richest cricket board in the world. They are supposed to act as unifiers in a nation that badly needs it. Their metamorphosis into government cheerleaders was, for some of us, bad enough, but their cowering in their bio-bubble, eyes closed to the death and devastation happening right outside, afraid to even express sympathy for fear of making the government look bad, is not something that will be forgotten soon.