Joyful in victory, hateful in defeat

Cricket in India is often sold as some sort of unifier — and it can be —but sport cannot unify by itself when the broader political discourse is one of division and violence

March 30, 2011. I was returning from a client’s office to our own office in Mumbai and the roads had gone unnaturally quiet for a Wednesday afternoon. The taxi driver, a chatty migrant from UP spent the entire ride pitying me and other people with “jobs” (by which he meant an office job with an unsympathetic boss who wouldn’t let us drop everything and tune in to watch the match). He was a Dhoni fan and was (quite rightly as it turned out) sure that the thing was in the bag. Back at the office the partners were kind enough to look the other way, as one by one, people found their way to the conference room with the television - our librarian (a part time MNS worker), our driver (a Maharashtrian Muslim), our tech support professional ( a Gujarati Hindu), our pantry boy (who was at that time raising funds for a temple to be built in his village), a bunch of fancy law school type lawyers from all around the country, and eventually, the partners themselves.

I don’t remember every ball of that cricket World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan or even the final score but I do remember a lot of the jokes, the armchair cricketing strategy, the cursing of umpires, our timid pantry boy explaining to one of the partners how he, the partner, was entirely wrong about something and a sense of togetherness, excitement and joy that temporarily cut across every barrier of region, religion, caste and class that otherwise divided us. As a cricket fan, I have very few memories that can match that day - perhaps not even our lifting the World Cup later that week.

And yet, last Sunday, watching another India Pakistan match, I felt the absolute opposite. Within hours of the loss in our opening game in the ongoing T-20 World Cup, the cricketers were heaped with abuse, bowler Mohd Shami was specifically targeted for his faith, Kashmiri students were beaten and arrested for celebrating Pakistan’s victory, and social media filled with dogwhistles targeting the Muslim minority in India. In short it wasn’t a glorious escape from reality — it was a harsh reminder of who we are and what we have become.

Can just victory and defeat explain the stark difference in the two days? Can result really change a joyful, positive, inclusive experience into a hateful, bigoted and exclusionary experience. To answer this question, we need to examine the psychology behind sports fan behaviour and understand how cricket fan behaviour intersects with broader social and political themes in India.

“We won, they lost”

At the heart of almost all sporting fandoms is a concept psychologists call BIRG — basking in reflected glory. In the 1970s, a group of psychologists conducted a series of experiments on a set of 300 college students. In the first experiment, they found that students were significantly more likely to wear their university apparel after a sporting victory by a university team even if they themselves had nothing to do with the team in question. In the second and third experiments they found that students were much more likely to use the pronoun “we” when describing the victory to others - “we won”, “our team won”. They concluded that the BIRG response was essentially an attempt to enhance one’s public image. Interestingly, they found that this tendency was strongest when one’s public image was threatened.

The corollary to BIRG is what psychologists have termed CORF- cutting off reflected failure, and it describes the tendency of people to disassociate themselves from losing sides. In the sporting context this usually means statements to describe a loss like “those overpaid idiots lost” or “they lost” and rarely “we lost”.

This becomes particularly interesting when seen in the context of existing identity conflict. Sports are often credited with bringing about a sense of inclusion and promoting social harmony. Liverpool footballer Mo Salah who is Egyptian was credited in a recent Stanford study with increasing tolerance amongst Liverpool’s mostly white local fans — the effects attributable to Salah joining the club, according to the study, included a reduced hate crime rate and a lower proportion of anti-Muslim tweets. Exposure to Salah’s faith also meant that an increased number of Liverpudlians believed that Islam was compatible with British values.

While this all seems lovely, it still needs to be seen in the context of BIRG. In that sense, all that it may mean is that Liverpudlians do not mind overcoming existing prejudice to bask in Salah’s reflected glory. And given his record, there is an incredible amount of glory to bask in. But what happens if he fails?

German footballer Mesut Ozil was unfortunate enough to see the other side of this. Ozil, who is of Turkish origin, made his debut in 2009 and was immediately claimed as a poster-boy for immigrant integration in Germany, and even received a Bambi award for integration. In 2014, as a part of the team that lifted the football World Cup, it seemed like Ozil could do no wrong. And yet, a scant four years later, he retired from international football after a humiliating first round exit in the 2018 World Cup, citing racism from fans and the administration. In his resignation note he famously remarked:

“I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.”

In the rush to disassociate from his failure, a section of fans brought back every stereotype that Ozil was supposed to have shattered (fans in a stadium even called him a “Turkish pig” ).

Similarly, in the aftermath of England’s Euro football final loss earlier this year, the first targets of fan ire were the three Black players —Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka— who had missed their penalty shots. The trio were subjected to horrific racist abuse online which though swiftly condemned still highlighted how fragile the inclusion supposedly propagated by sports can be. Even Rashford, whose work on preventing childhood hunger had been widely praised in the UK media during the pandemic was not spared.

This is a phenomenon that many Muslim and Dalit sportspeople in India are familiar with. Victory leads to widespread social celebration across communities (together with a thousand op-eds on the power of sport to unite us) but in defeat or failure, they are left standing very much alone — and always have been. Varun Grover writes of watching cricketer Vinod Kambi retire hurt and being subjected to a volley of casteist abuse as he walked back to the pitch. The vicious online abuse left on cricketer Mohd Shami’s Instagram account following his poor performance in the match against Pakistan on Sunday was certainly not the first time a Muslim sportsperson has been made the scapegoat of a team defeat. Crowds used to often target Mohd Azharuddin after cricketing failures. In the words of Indian cricket fan Abdullah Khan writing the Scroll:

When Azhar played well I heard people wax eloquent. But when he failed he was abused (however not every time) as “Sa*** Miyan”. It was not that other players were spared when they failed to perform, but their religion was never used to slander them.

Sporting failure in the minds of fans can be a shock - from trying to portray yourself as closely associated with the team to BIRG, there is a rush to distance yourself from them. Instead of highlighting similarities between themselves and the sportspeople (“We are all Indian at heart”), there is a rush to do the opposite - to dissociate, and to argue that this person never represented you in any way and that you bear no part in their failure. For many fans this takes the form of relatively harmless acts like terming the team “overrated”, “arrogant” (a term that was trending on Indian Twitter on Sunday night) or “overpaid”. A smaller section though tends to revert to their pre-existing biases to dissociate from their team. This then takes the form of particularly vile abuse - this can be racist, homophobic or (as is the case in India) casteist or Islamophobic.

And what is particularly worrying is that the targets of this dissociation and violence aren’t limited to the sportspeople. When sporting glory can lead to a seeming inclusion and acceptance of the minority community (as evidenced in the Mo Salah study), defeat can just as easily result in a targeting of that same community as a whole. After England’s Euro 2020 loss for example, a schoolgirl of mixed race was forced to hide in a toilet to escape racist bullying from her schoolfellows.

In India, this tendency to make Indian Muslims a proxy for Pakistan (and therefore targets of abuse when we lose) has always been more worrying than the abuse of sportspeople. In Khan’s moving essay in Scroll he writes about the never-ending questions about identity that watching cricket as a Muslim in India entailed:

An India-Pakistan match used to be very difficult to watch. Throughout the match, many viewers would attempt to discern whether I was supporting India or Pakistan. The tyranny of peering eyes made me behave in odd ways. If I clapped on the fall of a Pakistani wicket many of them suspected that I was simply pretending.

Indian cricket fans and broader politics

Indian cricket fandoms have always been closely entwined with identity assertion. The nature of the identity to be asserted though has evolved. From the rapturous welcome provided to a transiting Donald Bradman in Kolkata in 1953, whose demolition of the English had been a thing of wonder for newly independent India, Indian cricketing heros have always been very much a product of the social conflict closest to Indian hearts at the time. In the Nehruvian decades following independence, many Indians believed that to truly move past colonisation, we had to out-English the English. Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi was the hero for that time. Educated in England, westernised, posh, “royal”, he was the ultimate aspiration. He was in sports fans minds like the perfect English aristocrat, but Indian. His Muslim identity barely registered. By the 1970s, at the peak of Indira Gandhi’s gareebi hatao and rampant nationalisation, the more middle class looking Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Vishwanath were the chosen heros. Reams have been written about the link between Sachin Tendulkar fandoms and the aspirations of a newly liberalised Indian middle class in the 1990s, and reams I’m sure will be written about Dhoni and Kohli in turn.

The larger point is that the politics of the time has always influenced how we love our cricketers and what we expect from them. With India entering a period of unprecedented economic growth in the early 2000s, Pakistan was not really the focus either of domestic political discourse or of our cricket watching hearts. Despite a full scale military conflict in 1999, by 2003, the Indian team was touring Pakistan and wins and losses were taken, if not with equanimity, then without large scale anger.

Increasingly Indian cricket fans some of whom were now competing themselves in western, white dominated, job markets, were looking elsewhere — the new dream was of a team that would beat white people on their turf. Steve Waugh’s Australians had been beaten in India in 2001 and the idea that we could beat them in Australia became the dominant obsession. This idea was to drive cricket related controversies for the next decade or so. Our most acrimonious tours in the period were not tours to Pakistan but tours to South Africa and Australia. The anger surrounding the 2007 tour of Australia or the 2006 tour of South Africa were rooted in a new evil - we (rightly or wrongly) saw ourselves and our team as victims of racism and foreigners (like match referee Mike Dennis) became the predominant targets for cricketing hatred.

Since the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, which effectively ended bilateral cricketing ties between India and Pakistan (a series in 2013 being the only exception), India and Pakistan have only met in the occasional tournament, but the extent of hype has always been a reflection of the prevailing Indian political discourse.

Since 2017 or so, much has changed in Indian politics. Indian foreign policy and domestic political discourse have veered sharply back towards being Pakistan centric. In the aftermath of the Pulwama terrorist attack in 2019, Kashmiri students were violently targeted around India, which led to an exodus of students back to Kashmir, and a banning of all Pakistani artists from working in Bollywood. The abrogation of Article 370 and the dismantling of the state of Jammu and Kashmir were all accompanied with violently nationalist rhetoric. Later in the same year, the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act made religion a criteria for consideration in certain citizenship applications, and while the proposed National Register of Citizens has not yet been implemented, in the majoritarian and often violent public discourse the idea that Indian Muslims must prove their citizenship has taken very deep root. This was evident after the loss on Sunday in the language used to target Shami, as well as in the thinly veiled social media dogwhistles targeting minorities in India, including by prominent former cricketers.

Cricket and cricketers have also been expressly drawn closer into the majoritarian “might is right” political agenda (both domestically and internationally) of the Indian government. In 2019, Home Minister Amit Shah tweeted comparing the win of the cricket team over Pakistan to military action that the Indian government had undertaken earlier in the year.

Amit Shah @AmitShah

Another strike on Pakistan by #TeamIndia and the result is same. Congratulations to the entire team for this superb performance. Every Indian is feeling proud and celebrating this impressive win. #INDvPAK

Later in 2019, former cricketers Suresh Raina and Gautam Gambhir tweeted in support of the unilateral (and arguably illegal) abrogation of Article 370 in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. And earlier this year cricketers were used en masse by the Indian Ministry of External affairs to challenge foreign celebrities that had tweeted in support of India’s protesting farmers.

In this atmosphere of virulent nationalism that has come to dominate the political discourse of the last decade, losses in India Pakistan matches have not gone down well, and as highlighted earlier, the target of the ire has not just been limited to sportspeople. In 2014, 60 Kashmiri students were accused cheering for Pakistan and charged with sedition, a colonial era offence that can still carry a life sentence. (The charges were lessened after an outcry.) In 2017, 15 villagers in Madhya Pradesh were arrested after India’s loss in the Champions Trophy final and charged with sedition for allegedly celebrating Pakistan’s victory. In the aftermath of Sunday’s defeat, arrests have been made in J&K, in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, with calls for more arrests on social media. For many Indian cricket fans on social media, to support Pakistan or to have cheered for them is akin to treason deserving of legal punishment.

And while Shami also received widespread support in the aftermath of the trolling, the people arrested for allegedly cheering for Pakistan and the Muslim community in general have not been as fortunate.

Conclusion

In understanding the mess that has followed Sunday night’s loss to Pakistan, it’s important to highlight a few aspects — to dissociate from, to abuse or insult a losing sports team is fairly standard sports fan behaviour but the language used to dissociate and the chosen targets of this abuse are deeply influenced by the political discourse of the time. When the broader political discourse is not focussed on religious polarisation, sporting losses to Pakistan are comparatively better handled (as they were briefly in the 2000s) but when the dominant political discourse revolves around internal polarisation and othering, then losses in sport only exacerbate this polarisation.

Sports is often sold as some sort of unifier — and it can be — but people waxing eloquent about its power to unify and advocating for greater sporting ties would do well to remember two things: First, much of this good is limited to situations of victory, and second, sport cannot unify by itself when the broader political discourse is one of division and violence.