What Is It That They Have Given Cricket To Take Away So Much From It?

After the CBI report and Income Tax raids on players, the government thinksit has cleansed cricket in India. The BCCI, after all, had punished the ‘guilty’players on the basis of the circumstantial evidence against them furnished bythe investigative arm of the government. Though the CBI did not have very manygood things to say about the BCCI’s handling of the match-fixing scam, thegovernment never had on its agenda anything remotely close to examining theextent of involvement of the officialdom in the biggest scandal in the historyof Indian cricket.

Instead, the then minister of sport and youth affairs, S.S.Dhindsa, made a few mild noises about controlling the hitherto autonomous BCCI,ostensibly to let know cricket’s governing body that it is time to get theirhouse in order. Though a few muted murmurs emanated from the BCCI, they died anatural death. Complaints and protests, after all, are hardly the way to repaythe kindness shown by a friend. The BCCI didn’t have to wait long though forreturning the favour.

The moment came when the government did not budge in its stand that cricketcontests with Pakistan would not be permitted after what happened in Kargil.After first cancelling the Indian team’s tour to Pakistan and then firmlyputting the BCCI in its place when it tried to send the Indian team to Sharjahfor a series of matches with Pakistan and Bangladesh to raise money for theGujarat earthquake, the government also barred the participation of the Indian teamin the Sharjah triangular involving Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a regular tournamenton the cricket calendar. In response, the Pakistan Cricket Board chairman, Lt.General Tauqir Zia, declared that it’s time to forget India and get on withthe world. Ironically, from the perspective of Indian cricket, it could well bethe beginning of the end of the world.

Posterity could well remember the government for cleaning up internationalcricket from the Indian landscape once and for all! With the InternationalCricket Council launching its World Test Championships from May, and given thatthere are six Indo-Pak series scheduled in the next 10 years, the day may not befar off when the ICC decides to shed its liberalism and decides to put pressureon the Indian government to revoke its decision. And that could well be bybanning India from international cricket.

There were at least three options before the BCCI to take on the governmentat the critical juncture. The BCCI could have made individuals such as ArunJaitley, the Delhi District Cricket Association President and former cricketerKirti Azad to function as their interface with the coalition government andthereby effect a shift in policy; it could have functioned as the rallying pointof a consolidated pressure group comprising players, the public, the media, theindustrialists and the corporate houses on the government; or it could have justdisregarded the government policy and gone ahead with the Sharjah tour. The BCCIchose none of these options. Instead, it implored the government for a rethinkand when the pleas fell on deaf ears it went around town speaking of itspowerlessness in the matter. The favour had been returned.

It would be an understatement to say that cricket enthusiasts expectedJagmohan Dalmiya, the man who outgrew the BCCI long ago and almost succeeded inturning Lord’s into an Asian zone as ICC chief, and A.C. Muthiah, the BCCIPresident, to orchestrate a powerful reactive campaign and shift the governmentline at least by a fraction.

The BCCI chief did meet Uma Bharati, the minister who replaced Dhindsa, along with the ICC chief Malcolm Gray. But itseems unlikely that he forcefully pushed through an agenda that contravenes thegovernment policy of cutting off cricket ties with Pakistan. Gray, steeped inthe non-interventionist values enshrined in the practice of amateurism which hasas much been the credo of the old-world Australian elite as of their Englishpeers, declared that the ICC would keep away from policy matters of the Indianand Pakistani governments.

Reading between the lines of that statement made in India after the meetingwith the sports minister, it is evident that the importance ofnon-interventionism as an ideal that Gray was trying to enunciate was meant morefor the government’s ears than as his own policy. The inaction of Dalmiya ismuch more unpalatable than the meek efforts of Muthiah. Here was his brainchild,the Asian Cricket Council, on the verge of being rendered powerless andineffective on the world stage because of the latest developments. And Dalmiya,without doubt, is the only cricket administrator in the country who can sitacross the table with government officials equipped with ample bargainingpowers.

Why then did Muthiah and Dalmiya not do anything significant to save cricketin the region where it has the biggest market and fan following? If one were todismiss the ‘repayment of favour’ thesis developed earlier in the article,the only reason could have been that the BCCI and its affiliated stateassociations are exempt from paying income tax and paying entertainment tax ontickets. But this is a legal right the BCCI enjoys on account of itsregistration as a non-profit organisation committed to organise and promotecricket in the country and it need not be seen along obligatory lines. A morepertinent reason, glaring yet always-glossed over, is that the Indian governmenthas recognised the teams selected by BCCI as the ‘Indian’ cricket team andhas given foreign exchange clearance for its foreign tours without any hassles.For the first time, perhaps, the BCCI would have thought that it could have beeneasier to play in Sharjah as the BCCI Eleven rather than under the nationalbanner.

Is expecting a governing body of sport to talk business with the governmentasking for the skies? Far from it, for there have been occasions in history whensporting bodies have taken on successfully the might of the government. Let usgo back 21 years to the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. PresidentJimmy Carter had called for a Western boycott of the Games when Soviet troopsmoved into Afghanistan in the last week of 1979. British Prime Minister MargaretThatcher responded and directed the Central Council for Physical Recreation (CCPR),the British Sports Council and the British Olympic Association (BOA) not to planahead for the Games. 

But, in February 1980, the CCPR, an independent bodycomposed of representatives of all the governing bodies of sport in Britain andwhich draws its income from statutory grants, and the British Sports Council, aquasi-independent body run by a board appointed by the sports minister forstatutory funding of sport, opposed the boycott. The very next month, 78 Britishathletes, including stars such as middle-distance runner Sebastian Coe anddecathlon master Daley Thompson, said they would go to Moscow even if the BOApulled out. (Imagine Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly declaring that theywould go to Sharjah no matter what the government ruling was!) The BOA soonconfirmed that it would violate the government directive and send a Britishcontingent to Moscow under an Olympic flag.

Many British academics specialising in sport studies view Britishparticipation in the Moscow Games as a victory for the country’s deep-rootedamateur sporting code that permeated even bodies which were answerable to thestate. Considering that cricket in India has been by and large an amateurinstitution in matters of organisational and fiscal autonomy and lack of stateintervention, the BCCI should have had no major problems in sending its team toSharjah.  

Coming back to 2001, the BCCI could also have taken inspiration from thegoverning body of European soccer, The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA),in pushing through its agenda in a State forum, establishing a dialogue andeffecting a substantial shift in the Statist line. In collaboration with Fifa,the world governing body of football, UEFA forced the European Commission (EC),which consists of representatives from all the member nations of the EuropeanUnion, to accept a middle path in changing the present international transfersystem in European club football. While the EC wanted to bring the transfersystem in line with the competition law and the rules over the European worker’sfreedom of movement, the UEFA did not want any change in the system arguing thatfootball should be exempt from the common European labour laws so as to ensureits stability.

The governing bodies of European football and world football, after settlingtheir differences first, was finally able to get the EC to approve a newtransfer system, the salient feature of which is that both parties deviatedconsiderably from the agendas they started with and met somewhere in the middle.

The new system ensures stability of a player’s contract for a period of threeyears if he is aged below 28 and two years if he is above 28. It prescribeslevels of financial compensation if the player or the club breaches the contractand imposes a sporting sanction of a maximum of four months on the player if hemoves clubs within the period of the protected contract. But, then, not for ourcricket bosses the strain of weeks and months of bipartite and tripartite talksin boardrooms and government chambers. Not when there is the comfort of theubiquitous press conference.

II

Blinded By The Light

Ironically, one of the answers to this question — themost obvious one at that — lies in the words of Dhanraj Pillay, the captain ofthe victorious Indian hockey team at Dhaka. Pillay said in a recent interviewthat the deeds of V.V.S. Laxman, Rahul Dravid and Harbhajan Singh in Kolkota hadcast a shadow across the border and across sporting disciplines causing severevisibility problems for the media and the public. In fact he was dead right —no representative from the Indian media was in Dhaka to cover the final in whichwe scored a sweet victory against our traditional rivals!

Cricket’s hegemonic position in India, at the elite as well as mass levels,is well known. And it has given the game not just a commercial advantage overother sport, but also sociological and intellectual benefits. For instance, a‘national’ identity has always been constructed through cricket right fromthe colonial period and more so in the last 20 years, and the intelligentsia andthe media have shown a singular liking for the game much to the chagrin ofofficials and players involved in other sport. But the game has had to pay anunnoticed penalty on account of its hegemonic position. And the government’sdecision to zero in on cricket to make a political statement has been the mostvisible manifestation of that penalty.

History is full of instances of governments using sport to make politicalstatements and invariably the sufferer has been the sporting event that cancarry the government’s voice farthest on the world stage or in the immediatesphere of conflict. If the Soviet Union, East Germany, China and Cuba have usedthe Olympic medal podium as a platform for announcing the ideological triumph ofCommunism over capitalism, these countries have tended to use the Olympicsrather than other elite sport (such as professional football in East Germany orprofessional football and ice hockey in the USSR) to register their protests. The USSR withdrew from the Los Angeles Games of 1984 on the grounds that thevulgar commercialism on show contravened both Communism as well as amateurOlympic ideals. Capitalistic Western democracies have also used the Olympics asa propagandist tool though they have also used more popular elite sport to maketheir political statements. 

In the specific case of the sporting isolation ofSouth Africa during the apartheid regime, the ban on English cricketers, rugby union and rugby league players from touring Springbok land was a much moreemotive issue in Britain than cutting off all sporting links because cricket andrugby were the most popular sport in white South Africa. It is the same logicthat went into the Indian government’s choice of cricket as a ‘boycottsport’— likein India, cricket is by far the most popular sport in Pakistan too.

However, here is a point to ponder for the Indian government in matters ofmaking a political statement through the most popular sport in the country:British governments over the last two decades have not put pressure on thefootball association to stop the English team from playing against Ireland. (TheBritish government also followed a hands-off policy during the peak of the Irishconflict in the 1970s in the Five-Nations Rugby tournament involving England,Wales, Scotland, Ireland and France). 

The only time that professional footballwas in danger of being used as a boycott sport was when Mrs Thatcherdilly-dallied with the idea of not sending the England team to the 1982 WorldCup in Spain. The ‘Iron Lady’ of British politics did not like the idea ofEngland’s prospective match against Argentina a year after the Falklands War.But good sense prevailed (or was it the bitter experiences of Moscow 1980?) andMrs Thatcher wished the team luck! She was spared of her nightmares when theArgentinian and English teams couldn’t progress past the early rounds of thetournament.

Many Western (read liberal/capitalist/democracies) governments, and more sobodies of sport such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), consider theextent of negative politicisation of a country’s sporting structure as theyardstick for subjecting that nation to a sporting boycott. In other words, ifthe sporting institutions in a country have been taken over by the totalitarianpolitical institution in place there, a boycott and a ban can be justified. Itwas the politics of the 1936 Berlin Olympics or the ‘Hitler Olympics’ (orthe ‘Jesse Owens Olympics’ as most of us would like it to be known) whichgave birth to this liberal definition of sporting boycotts. 

Even as Britain,France and the US were considering whether to send their teams to Berlin, Hitlergave an assurance to the IOC that the sporting institutions in Germany would bekept free of his definition of German nationalism. On the basis of theassurance, Britain, the United States and France sent their athletes to Berlin,though they would have had second thoughts had they looked at how the powerfulworking class sport movement in Germany in the 1920s had been quashed by Hitler.

It is on the basis of this very definition that South Africa was readmittedinto global sport in 1991. Two important developments took place that year inSouth Africa, which facilitated the process of its readmission. Theestablishment and non-racial governing bodies of each sporting disciplinecombined to form a single national body for each sporting code and the LandActs, the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act, all of which wereconsidered the pillars of the Apartheid state, were repealed. 

If the Indiangovernment’s cricket boycott of Pakistan is interpreted in the light of theliberal definition of a sporting boycott, the Ministry of Sports standsjustified in the boycott. The cricket board in Pakistan has been militarisedmuch more than the country’s hockey establishment and it is no secret that themilitary dispensation in Pakistan has been funding terrorism in Kashmir.

III

The Government's Sporting Spirit

But what about cricket’s irreparable loss? The nationalist might argue thata game is not bigger than a nation. But whether they like it or not, a sporttranscends nationhood. It might have local or national origins, but when it getstransplanted to various climes and soils alien to its own it grows in its newclime as well. Will an Indian ever call cricket an English game? Similarly, aBrazilian would die rather than speak about the English origins of football.And, a person from Japan would sneer at the world’s definition of baseball asan ‘American game’.

So, when a democratic government wields a specific sportas a boycott weapon in order to bring to the fore the ‘national’ cause, itshould first think whether it has the ethical grounds to intervene in thatsport. Almost all the Western governments have viewed their boycott decisionsthrough the optics of ethics, with the most important question asked being ‘Whatis it that we have put into this sport to be taking away so much from it’?

(Governing bodies of sport in the communist countries were either completelystate-run or had very strong links with the state. Even professional footballclubs in the former Soviet State were organised along the lines of militarysporting clubs—the Dynamo and the Spartak — rather than commercial lines.Olympic sportspersons were given plush State jobs and paid handsome salaries andtheir contracts with companies were negotiated through their sport bodies.Suffice it to say the question whether the government has put back enough into asport to subject it to a boycott does not even arise.)