The rise and the fall of a "New India" poster boy
Two press conferences by Virat Kohli, five years apart, show us that while Kohli hasn't changed much, the right wing in India has moved so far right that he is now perceived as a threat
“the greatest move that I have seen in Indian politics”
On November 16, 2016, Virat Kohli was kind enough to favour the media with his opinion on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new demonetisation policy, a move that was to kill India’s cash dependent economy and devastate working class and middle class lives like few other economic policies had done until date. Never one for hiding his emotions, he made it clear that he was thrilled with his new Prime Minister. To use the popular culture term, he was clearly a Modi fanboy and unashamed to own it.
And while his commentary on monetary policy, an area in which he has absolutely no expertise, might have shocked some, for a large section of Modi’s supporters, it was clear that their poster boy had arrived. A cricketer had broken the famed neutrality of the Indian cricket team to take a political stance. And it was to rousingly cheer for Modi.
Kohli’s affinity for Modi seemed to stem in part from a genuine ideological fit. In December 2018, the Niti Ayog under Modi’s guidance released a document called Strategy for New India @75 , an ambitious mishmash of ideas supposedly targeted at creating a “New India” by 2022. And while the specifics of this New India have been a bit amorphous, the rhetoric was absorbed beautifully by Kohli. In a press conference in Adelaide in 2020, he said:
“The way my personality and character is, I am the representation of new India. For me, that's how I look at it… The new India takes up challenges and is filled with optimism and positivity. We make sure that we are ready for any challenges that come our way.
The bonhomie hasn’t been limited to policy. When Kohli married Bollywood star Anushka Sharma, Modi was the guest of honour at their Delhi reception. In September 2020, when Kohli and Sharma announced that they were expecting their first child, Modi led the congratulations to the pair on social media.
Kohli has also been happy to play along with the government line on social media with his immense following: Some of this has been inane, like the #HumFitTohIndiaFit challenge launched by the Union Sports Ministry - Kohli nominated Modi to complete the challenge, which he did (a classic two minute video showing Modi in various yoga poses that has since sparked a thousand memes) but others have been less innocuous. In February this year, when global R&B star Rihanna tweeted drawing attention to the ongoing farmer protests, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs swept in with a ham-handed effort to counter what they called “propaganda”. A parade of stars, including Kohli, then released near identical tweets using the government approved hashtag railing against this foreign interference in what they said was a purely Indian matter, completely ignoring the human rights violations that had been committed against the protesting farmers.
Barely a week later, when former India opener and Mumbai legend Wasim Jaffer was forced out of his job as a coach for the Uttarakhand side, and accused of bringing “religious bias” into selection — this was a charge that was preposterous, and yet, the BJP Chief Minister of Uttarakhand, Trivendra Singh Rawat, saw fit to order a probe into the affair — Kohli maintained a strict silence.
Despite all of this toeing the line, Kohli’s relationship with Hindu nationalist India has not been entirely smooth. At the heart of this conflict has been misogyny, and a growing ideological divide. His wife, Sharma, a blunt speaking actress who made her Bollywood film debut opposite Shah Rukh Khan in 2008, is very much a part of an industry that Hindu nationalists have gone all out to target in the last few years, and is, to say the least, not popular with Kohli’s traditional fan base. Kohli who is an enthusiastic supporter of his wife’s work has repeatedly landed in hot water while promoting it. In 2020, Kohli posted in support of Pataal Lok, a web series produced by Sharma calling it an “amazing show” - this did not go down well with right wing outfits who accused the series of promoting “Hinduphobia” and called for it to be banned. In November 2020 Kohli took to social media to wish his followers a Happy Diwali and urged them not to burst crackers. This enraged some of his followers, with right wing followers accusing him, rather bizarrely, of “Hinduphobia” and once again pointing fingers at Sharma, an ardent dog-lover, who has since 2015 been campaigning for firework free Diwalis to reduce the stress on animals. A section even began using the hashtag #AnushkaApnaKuttaSambhal (Anushka, take care of your dog)— the reference presumably being to Kohli and not her pets — to tweet anti-Kohli content. Later that year, Kohli’s decision to leave the Australia tour midway so that he could be present for the birth of his daughter also did not find much support among the right. Their idea of the ideal “New India” man (macho, never putting the family above the country) typified (supposedly) by Mr. Modi didn’t fit with the sensitive, hands-on father that Kohli was keen to be.
Kohli is also very popular in Pakistan. Perhaps in part because of his Punjabi heritage, he resonates with a large fanbase in the country — in 2016, a Pakistani fan was arrested for hoisting the Indian flag to celebrate Kohli. Kohli himself has never subscribed to the overly intense hype surrounding India Pakistan matches preferred by players like BJP MP Gautam Gambhir. He has sought to downplay most encounters and has usually made it a point to be friendly to his Pakistani opponents and kind to their fans. None of this has gone down well.
Further, while Kohli has never spoken against Hindu nationalism, he has offered very little direct support to the ideology. This has increasingly grated on his right wing fans. The last straw for many Hindu nationalists was when Pakistani Hindu cricketer Danish Kaneria offered his congratulations on the groundbreaking ceremony for the building of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya while Kohli didn’t. The Ram Mandir had been the BJP’s flagship promise for decades. In August 2020, the Prime Minister of a avowedly secular nation had chosen to break all protocol and preside over the ceremony, many saw it as the first step to the establishment of a “Hindu rashtra” and yet, their cricketing hero had said nothing. On social media, Hindu nationalists were now questioning whether their erstwhile hero was “Hindu” enough to be celebrated. Clearly, Kohli’s “Om” tattoo was no longer enough. By Diwali 2021, Kohli’s stock with Hindu nationalist fans was so low that an innocuous collaboration with Pinterest where Kohli said he would discuss his Diwali celebrations had to be pulled after a storm of protest from Hindu nationalists on Twitter. (He hadn’t said a word about crackers.)
In the last couple of years Virat Kohli has discovered what many have before him — there is no opt in/opt out option with the Hindu nationalist “New India”. You cannot cherry pick your causes and you cannot critique their behaviour. You are either with them for the entirety of their agenda, or you will be treated as being against them.
This is a journey that many of Mr. Modi’s more “liberal” supporters have been through since 2014. Much like Aatish Taseer, Tavleen Singh and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Kohli too seems to have realised that the ship has slid too far right for him to remain on it. And yet, unlike Taseer, Singh and Mehta, to his credit, Kohli chose to go out in style.
On October 30, on the eve of India’s do or die match against New Zealand at the ongoing World Cup, Kohli chose to address the controversy around pace bowler Mohd Shami, who was the target of Islamophobic abuse online after the sides loss to Pakistan . This wasn’t some little-read opinion piece. This was the most famous cricketer in the world choosing to tell the world’s media his thoughts at one of the highest profile global events in the sport. And it’s worth watching in full.
Source: Cricmate.com via Youtube
The BCCI had made it clear beforehand that Kohli would only answer cricket related questions. Responding to a question on fan pressure early on Kohli addressed the comments obliquely with a fairly generic rant against social media and a culture that encouraged cowardly anonymous trolling of people and perhaps at one time this might have been all that he would have said. But he wasn’t done. In response to a second question a few minutes later, he brushed off a BCCI overseer with his typical impulsiveness and took the bull by the horns in a manner in which almost none of the messages of support that had been sent to Shami had done so far. He said:
Attacking someone over religion is the most pathetic thing human beings can do. Everyone has the right to voice their opinion and what they feel about a certain situation but I personally have never ever even thought of discriminating [against] anyone over their religion and that is a very sacred and a personal thing to every human being and that should be left there.
On the face of it, it’s a fairly uncontroversial statement — he didn’t name a religion, he didn’t name the people doing the targeting. He merely said that religious discrimination is wrong and yet, from the storm of online abuse that has since been targeted at Kohli from predominantly right wing accounts in India, it is clear that the message landed exactly where it was supposed to. By standing against religious discrimination and (in my opinion more importantly) by reaffirming that religion was a “sacred, personal thing” Kohli had hit at the heart of Hindu nationalism that has for several years sought to connect religion with citizenship, patriotism and every aspect of public life. It was a firm parting of the ways and by the storm of abuse that followed, it was clear that the right wing saw it as such. From praying for his defeat at the World Cup, to hoping he would “lose everything” to grotesque online threats against his infant daughter, the Hindu nationalist romance with Kohli seems to be well and truly over.
Conclusion
A review of his public statements show that Kohli hasn’t changed much — he always was one of the legions of upper class upper caste Hindu men enamoured by the idea that their natural aggression was really patriotism and who believed Modi’s promises of a New India taking its rightful place in the world. And he was certainly willing to exercise wilful blindness in this endeavour - towards the Gujarat riots, towards the rights and welfare of minorities in India over the last seven years and generally towards the welfare of anyone not as privileged as him. But Hindu nationalists no longer demand just blindness and deafness to the evils of Hindutva, they demand active support for their cause including active support for every zany position they take, which is something Kohli has been unable to provide.
To conclude, while Kohli is far from perfect and his support for minorities very far from ideal, on Saturday he used his profile to deliver a hard blow to the ideology that most threatens their safety in India today, and for that, he deserves some little credit.
Last 5 years, a lot of Hindutva has been spread..so if you want to be safe every time, you have to support them on media or keep silent. otherwise you are not safe from these terrorists!
Great article 👍👍👍