Cricket as Holy Grail

There is a deep folly in believing that games are more than games, and that they
symbolise something much  deeper and more radical

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr Delhi

There are good liberals and there are bad ones. Most of the time, it is the bad ones that are heard and seen. They are both the bane and pain of society. They are the beautiful and the articulate sorts. They shout above the din to make themselves heard to themselves. They are the trouble-makers with no malice. They create fake issues, fight mock battles, become pseudo-martyrs, unworthy heroes and deserving Page Three celebrities. They flaunt ignorance as knowledge. They indulge in excesses and discredit all the good causes. It is these bad liberals who gave life to the lies that cricket is India's religion, that cricket is a bridge to peace between arch-rivals India and Pakistan.

It all began during the 1995 Cricket World Cup when edit page writers and editors, who never played a game of cricket in their lives, and who began to behave like TV-viewing housewives, began to get excited sitting in front of the idiot box. They became addicted spectators, who picked up their crumbs of information about the game from the commentators and the experts on the panel discussions. And soon they thought they had made a Newtonian discovery that cricket is all-powerful; a talisman of India's public life. It is the hollow "religious" conversion of a hollow people.

The cricket-is-religion chant was heard once again during the 2003 World Cup. But it had no magical fall-out. It was believed that if you said something a thousand times and louder than ever — the primitive notion of the power of incantation — it would come true. India did well, but they did not win the cup. The advertisers tried hard, and so did the media. But market frenzy does not drive the game on the ground. It was a good reality check, for all. But very cleverly, no one spoke about the maddening campaign in the run up to the World Cup and how it all came
to nought.

The third time that the self-induced cricket trance in the media resurfaced was in 2004 when the India-Pakistan cricket series resumed for the first time after the Kargil skirmish, wrongly called "a war" by the greenhorn media army. It was not surprising then that the pseudo-nationalist, half-baked Machiavellian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee — the supreme example of a bad liberal from the right-wing end of the political spectrum — pushed "team India" to play the matches in Pakistan in early 2004. The BJP had hoped that the Indian cricket team's victory on Pakistani soil would boost their own electoral prospects of victory. The Indian cricketers won their matches in Pakistan, but the BJP lost the election at home. That is one part of
the story.

The other part is that of bad liberals from the left wing who began to chant loudly — and what a cacophony it was — that cricket will bring India and Pakistan closer, and what politicians have not been able to do over 50 years, cricket will do through sheer goodwill. It was, to put it in plain terms, a stupid notion. But who can stop the angelic and uninformed chatterati from believing in their own delusions.

It was not surprising then that cricket did not have any ripple effect on India-Pakistan relations at the political and diplomatic levels. Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf wanted to take advantage of this hyped tripe when he pretended to attend the cricket match at New Delhi in 2005, and he tried to convert that into a political summit. The trick did not work. And our bad liberals were disappointed.

The sound and fury about what cricket can do to improve India-Pakistan relations has piped down considerably in the ongoing India-Pakistan series. There was an attempt initially, especially in some of the English language TV news channels, to drum up the empty idea once again. But it could not be sustained. So, what we have on hand is an India-Pakistan series that leaves even ardent cricket lovers on both sides rather cold.
It is possible now to write about the birth and death of cricket-as-the-Holy-Grail-of-peace-between-India-Pakistan. The idea began in the media hype created during the 1995 World Cup when the propaganda lie was created that cricket is the religion of people in India, and the idea that cricket can be the harbinger of peace has died quietly during the India-Pakistan series in 2006. It is an interesting populist idea, which sparkled like a firework and disappeared in so much of flame and fume.

But why was the game of cricket invested with the extraordinary powers of bringing peace in the first place? There is a connection between conceiving cricket as a religion to that of thinking of cricket as the magical formula to dissolve political rivalries between two countries. And it naturally arose among a class of aesthetically-inclined apolitical people — our bad liberals — who have neither religion nor morals. Lack of religion leaves a gaping hole in their souls, and they are always hungery for that "idea" and "personality" to fill it. So, the Elvis Presley cult makes its appearance at one end of the extreme, and the fad of spiritualism at the other end. The middle of the spectrum of pseudo-faiths is occupied by those who pursue vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism, anti-corruption, Gandhiism, banishment-of-war, nuclear disarmament, eradication of disease, devotion to cricket/football/baseball. On the face of it, such admirable devotion to harmless issues can appear to be moralistic. But morality implies being strict with one's own self. But the Epicurean crowd wants none of that. For them, subscribing to fancy causes is an example of taking moral action. That is why, whoever criticizes them for chasing chimeras is accused of being cynical. It was not surprising that it was these people who rode the bandwagon of cricket-for-sub-continental-peace.

There is a deep folly in believing that games are more than games, and that they symbolize something much more deeper and radical. It was an interesting idea in itself, but if it is stretched to its logical conclusion then it takes the form of sheer absurdity. The idea of the game-more-than-game seemed to have started with the West Indian cricket writer and ideologue CLR James, who saw cricket in the Caribbean as an expression of national identity, and as a way of asserting the self-respect of an oppressed group. It was a sensible idea if the inherent limitations were recognized. Also, a nation, a society, that depends on a game to assert its identity is in a vulnerable position. Nobel laureate VS  Naipual, for all his other faults, saw through the danger of raising cricket to a higher level of national and civilisational force.

In a very unselfconscious manner, the bad liberals in the India of 1990s and in the first five years of this century, have revived this old idea and dressed it up in market language and apparel, as it were. It is a dirty trick that history plays on the minds of an unthinking intelligentsia. And contemporary Indian intelligentsia is an indolent one. It wants to replace clear thinking with oozing sentimentality, a treacherous thing at the best of times.

Cricket was sought to be used as Track III diplomacy, which would aid and supplement Track II diplomacy, and completely replace diplomacy proper. The romanticism behind it was not very attractive. It was a lazy, hippy idea.
India-Pakistan relations cannot be placed on a better footing by the empty rhetoric—threatening and cajoling in turns—of Pakistan's political class led by President Pervez Musharraf. The BJP leaders responded to Pakistan's bluster with one of their own. Of course, it led to nowhere, and both sides stood where they always were— distrustful and wary of each other.

There is no doubt that dubious diplomacy of the strategists and of the foreign offices on both sides is not going to solve the problems either. If anything, they will only lead to greater suspicion on the two sides. The alternative cannot be silly sentiment. There is need for a realistic assessment on both sides. India happens to be a big and powerful country. And it is not necessary for Indians to flex their muscle because of this natural advantage. It might even prove counter-productive. But that was exactly what the BJP leaders led by Vajpayee and Advani tried to do, so unconvincingly and so unsuccessfully.

India must genuinely respect Pakistan. Similarly, Pakistan's leaders must stop demanding like a petulant neighbour that Pakistan must have everything that India has. If India clinches a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States, Pakistan wants it too. Islamabad has to firmly recognize India's natural pre-eminence. This does not imply abject surrender to Indian hegemony. Mutual respect is the name of the game. And it is all based on calculated self-interest on both sides. Cricket has no role whatsoever in these matters. We do not need flower power. We need recognition of real power that is based on hard reality.