Snubbing Pakistani cricketers to make a point in Islamabad is not a clever deployment of Indian soft power
Kapil Komireddi
Cricket used to be a charmingly lazy sport which gave its players the illusion of activity. But since the advent of the Indian Premier League, cricket has been transmogrified into a vulgar event in which the centerpiece itself is often pushed to the periphery. The IPL's fixtures are sustained by fireworks, film stars, and blonde cheerleaders imported from America; there is even a beauty pageant, "Miss IPL", whose winner is promised a role in a movie opposite one of the owners of the franchises. At best, the IPL is glamorous circus, a kitschified form of cricket, not serious sport.
Last week, the ringmasters of the circus put on a nauseating display of discrimination. At an auction to pick the players for the eight franchises that compete in the IPL, not a single Pakistani player was recruited. Pakistan reacted furiously. Mobs mobilised quickly to burn effigies of Lalit Modi, the head of the IPL; charges were levelled against the Indian government for conspiring to keep Pakistan out; and a parliamentary delegation due to visit India abruptly cancelled its trip.
If Pakistanis are calling the exclusion of their cricketers a conspiracy, it is because it looks very much like one. The IPL initially claimed that a potential problem with visas was the reason why franchise owners did not bid for Pakistani players: as a profit-making business venture, the IPL could not afford to take risks by paying for players whose participation could not be underwritten by the state authorities. If that is the case, why were Pakistani players included in the auction pool in the first place? Besides, losses from the possible denial of visas could easily have been restricted with a clause subjecting the contract's activation to a successful visa application. Instead, 11 Pakistani players were cleared for auction on 6 January - only to be utterly humiliated at the on 19 January. Unknown abecedarians were acquired for hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the reigning world champions of 20-20 cricket were uniformly snubbed. The Indian government's role in this affair is rather murky. First came the official denial: New Delhi had nothing to do with the IPL's decision. This was promptly followed up with a gratuitous piece of advice - telling Pakistan to "introspect on the reasons" for its players' rejection - which seemed to suggest that New Delhi had something to do with it.
To conservative commentators, this development represents a dual triumph: not only was Pakistan tamed - it was tamed by the private sector. Rising to the IPL's defence, the journalist Ashok Malik argued that, given the focus on individual stars, the franchises' reluctance to recruit Pakistani players was reasonable. "If one of these [promotional campaigns] focused on a Pakistani cricketer," he wrote, "and happened to coincide with, say, a terror incident linked to Islamist groups across the border, it may become inconvenient." Malik here is grafting his own bigotry on to his compatriots: surely, Indian audiences can make a distinction between an "Islamist" terrorist and a Pakistani cricketer? And if they cannot, then they deserve to be condemned, not pandered to.
The belief that this boycott is somehow a clever deployment of Indian soft power is similarly misplaced. Far from forcing the Pakistani state into rethinking its policy toward India, it will serve merely to demoralise Pakistan's beleaguered civil society - a constituency whose support and goodwill India desperately needs. Consider the humiliation from ordinary Pakistanis' point of view. There will be over 70 foreign cricketers participating in the IPL - including, oddly, 26 from Australia, where Indian students have been subjected to endless attacks - but not even one from their cricket-mad country. Some of the world's best cricketers are being subjected to a cricketing apartheid for the failures of their state. To its neighbours in South Asia, India, with its newfound prosperity, looks increasingly like an arrogant giant that is keen to starve its opponents to extinction. The IPL has contributed to that image.
Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/26/india-pakistan-cricket-auction
--
No comments:
Post a Comment