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.