It is with more than a tinge of remorse that we must admit, as avid cricket fans, to have followed the Indian Premier League — the world’s most lucrative cricket tournament — this year with even deeper a fervor than the last. This represents a perversion on two counts. First, it has meant conceding the allure of a cricket format both of us had hitherto abhorred. And second (a much more solemn charge), it has required reconciling the ersatz gaudiness of T20 cricket with the harrowing imagery of overflowing crematoria in Delhi.
While the Board of Control for Cricket in India finally yielded to mounting domestic and international pressure and opted to indefinitely postpone the tournament upon the breach of the COVID-19 quarantine cricket bubble, it remains perplexing how the tournament endured for so long amidst such dire circumstances. It took cases across the Kolkata Knight Riders, the Sunrisers Hyderabad, and the Chennai Super Kings in the supposedly “totally safe” quarantine bubbles of players and administrators to shake the BCCI from their obstinacy. Indeed, the BCCI had allowed for throngs of dubiously-distanced cricket fans at international matches until mid-March, despite nascent indications of a second wave. And the IPL was meant to be a test case for the governing body before the T20 World Cup, which India is set to host later this year.
For over a month now, the BCCI has deferred charges of blithe negligence by appealing to the importance of cricket in this time of need. Just recently, the board’s interim chief executive insisted that cricketers were playing for nothing less than “humanity” and were consolidating public health measures by keeping supporters in front of their screens. Notwithstanding the extravagance of his claims, it must be acknowledged that cricket enjoys the status of a religion in India — something political forces within the country do not shy away from exploiting, while pretending that it is apolitical.
To understand the intransigence with which the BCCI and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government protected cricket from COVID-19 regulations, we first need an account of just how intimately cricket dovetails with politics in India. While the BCCI maintains the facade of a democratically-elected governing body, historically, it has always been under the political control of India’s ruling elites, epitomized by the fact that several ministers and members of parliament have served on the board.
With the exception of Sourav Ganguly, India’s former cricket captain who currently serves as BCCI’s president, the current administration, too, is stacked with political heavyweights and men of influence. Rajeev Shukla, BCCI’s vice-president, previously served as a member of the Rajya Sabha in Maharashtra. The incumbent secretary of the BCCI, Jay Shah, is the son of the Home Minister of India, Amit Shah, who has himself long been accused of exploiting the BCCI for personal and political gain and installing nepotistic marionettes at every echelon of the national cricketing infrastructure. To add to that, BCCI’s current treasurer Arun Dhumal is the son of former chief minister of Himachal Pradesh and BJP politician Prem Kumar Dhumal.
The inextricable entanglement of cricket and politics is as manifest as it is alarming; yet efforts to allay concerns about political malfeasance, like the Lodha reforms, have proved to be essentially futile. So resistant was the BCCI to implementing the anti-corruption laws proposed by the Lodha committee, a panel appointed by the Supreme Court, that their impudence prompted the court to reprimand the BCCI: “You are behaving like lords. Fall in line, otherwise we will make you fall in line.” Now, a whittled-down iteration of the initial reforms — aimed at limiting the tenure of BCCI chiefs, democratizing the election of the BCCI hierarchy, and rendering the IPL outside the purview of the BCCI — is persistently imperilled by attempts to pass extra-judicial reforms to the BCCI constitution.
However, this nepotism is itself a symptom of the weight borne by the sport of cricket in India, and the concomitant power conferred upon cricket stars and administrators alike. So salient is cricket to the national identity, that current and former prodigies of the Indian team — the likes of M.S Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar, and Virat Kohli –– occupy a deified status at the centre of the national consciousness; the cynosures of around one billion Indian cricket supporters. In the words of cricket correspondent Ajaz Ashraf, Tendulkar himself “became the symbol of national unity, his majestic wielding of the bat papering, however ephemerally, over all social schisms.” Therein lies the metaphorical weight of cricket in India: a sport whose mythos transcends ethno-religious and caste-based fissures, and in which India’s current dominance constitutes pride and resistance in the face of cricket’s British-colonial roots. It is in cricket that the chimeric ideal of a united India inheres.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose tenure has been defined by Hindutva-whipping demagoguery and institutional personalisation, is all too aware of the sway cricket commands over Indian society. In an almost farcical display of political onanism, the largest cricket stadium in the world — situated in Modi’s home state of Gujarat — was earlier this year renamed the Narendra Modi Stadium. Furthermore, the decision to allow cricket crowds until mid-March spliced neatly with the BJP’s decision to continue their teeming campaign rallies amidst state elections, and then to sanction the public celebration of the Kumbh Mela, a significant state-funded Hindu pilgrimage and festival.
The cricketing fraternity is all too enmeshed in championing Modi’s divisive politics. In an emotive and unprecedented display of jingoism, the Indian team came out in military camouflage caps against the visiting Australian team in the aftermath of the Pulwama attacks in 2019. It was later revealed that the originator of the idea was India’s world cup-winning skipper and national icon Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who is also an honorary lieutenant colonel in the Indian army.
The team’s flagrant embrace of militarism was an endorsement of the Modi government’s efforts to whip up ultra-nationalistic sentiments in the country following escalating tensions with neighboring Pakistan, which ultimately contributed to Modi getting re-elected with a landslide majority. Nationalism and cricket are intimately linked in India, and the game has proved to be a prodigious tool in providing the political elites leverage over the public mind.
India’s cricket players have themselves not shied away from their admiration for the reigning prime minister. Modi, who is a master of courting celebrities to push his political agenda, has developed a special relationship with India’s current captain, Virat Kohli, who has time and again endorsed his decisions — even calling Modi’s catastrophic decision to unilaterally demonetize 86% of circulating currency in 2016 “the greatest move in the history of Indian politics.” Named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Kohli is arguably India’s most celebrated personality and enjoys a following unrivalled anywhere else in the world. As such, it is no surprise that Modi has made every effort to win Kohli’s favor.
But Modi’s appeal within the cricketing world extends far beyond this. Sachin Tendulkar, a retired cricketer who is perhaps the only Indian athlete who can rival Kohli’s stardom, rushed to congratulate Modi after his sweeping victory in 2019. Another celebrated cricketer, Ravindra Jadeja, hailed the victory, proclaiming “a victory of Believers over non believers.” Virtually all prominent cricketers have persistently engaged in this kind of sycophantic adulation of Modi, conveniently disregarding the worsening plight of religious and ethnic minorities in the country under his rule. Gautam Gambhir, who played a crucial role in India’s victorious run in the 2011 World Cup, even won an election for the BJP from East Delhi and is currently a member of the Lok Sabha.
It is also worth noting how outsized the influence of the BCCI is in the international arena. Earlier in the decade, the BCCI single-handedly delayed the implementation of the electronic decision review system, despite near unanimity across every other cricketing board. The IPL has itself become the pivot around which the international cricketing calendar is drawn up, and initial tensions between the IPL and domestic schedules almost inevitably ended up falling in favor of the IPL. No other domestic league — be it Pakistan’s PSL or Australia’s Big Bash — enjoys such privilege in the International Cricket Council’s scheduling. In 2019, the BCCI was able to use its soft power to coax the heavily indebted West Indies cricket board into moving the bilateral T20 series to Florida — a move that pleased millions of diasporic Indians living in the United States who back Modi’s regime. The BCCI is thus as much an international instrument of political braggadocio as it is a domestic one.
For the Modi regime, then, cricket is propaganda. And it is precisely for that reason that watching the IPL during the pandemic should have struck differently than watching, for example, English Premier League football at the height of England’s COVID-19 crisis (though there was, of course, a sound ethical case against that). International cricketing boards ought to have been more circumspect about shipping their players off to a country beset by wilfully irresponsible COVID-19 governance. Such prudence should have held especially true for Cricket Australia, which must have been aware that any emergency effort to repatriate their nationals would prove near-impossible in the context of Australia’s draconian repatriation policies. Nevertheless, the BCCI flexed its muscle, and each board obliged in tow.
Bar Ravichandran Ashwin, who was the first prominent Indian cricketer to withdraw from the tournament (though without any remonstration of the government), Indian cricketers have spurned the social responsibility which accompanies their stature. They have betrayed their adoring fans under the convenient auspices of keeping politics out of sport; because, apparently, sport only becomes political when it is anti-regime. And BCCI President Sourav Ganguly, in emphasizing the expected deficit to accrue from the IPL hiatus just days after pausing the tournament, has shown disdain for the contrition and patience demanded by this political moment.
Likewise, international cricketers and boards have failed their test of social responsibility by kowtowing to a board which has, for two decades now, extorted their acquiescence by brandishing their wealth and fanbase. The safety of an entire nation in desperate need of every resource it can array for its ill and underprivileged should have proven an inviolable brightline.
And for us, the couch potatoes seeking solace and diversion in the IPL: We should be uncomfortable, and our consciences piqued. In pandemic India, cricket is not a game.
Image by williacw is licensed under the Creative Commons License.
