Colours

Mine's brighter than yours

Last Wednesday, my therapist began our session with, "Talk to me about your day." She usually starts with a different question, so I wasn't fully prepared for this. The first thing that popped into my head was this Instagram reel where a fluffy, white labrador, standing on the stairs of a swimming pool, is lecturing another dog in Hindi, with a thick Uttar Pradesh dialect no less, about how water is poisonous, how fish die in the water, and how Jackwa (you know Jack) also perished in it, so it is advisable to not dive for the tennis ball they see lying at the bottom of the pool. The other dog looks towards the ball, thinks for a second, nods, and says, “Haaaaan.” (Yes)

I must have watched that reel at least fifty times, and it cracked me up without fail. My therapist didn’t quite share my enthusiasm, but she is nice, so she let out a soft “haha”, followed by an, “and?” What a weird question. What do you mean “and”? What can top this?

Therapists are also hella weird, so she got into this elaborate pagan ritual, where she kept prodding me to recollect more from my otherwise lazy day. And I just kept bouncing from one internet rabbit hole to another - a reel here, a YouTube video there, an article, a meme. I think I mentioned a book at some point, because she asked me later why I didn’t remember much from it. Honestly, the only answer I had was that it was neither as funny as the two dogs talking like they were gangsters in Kanpur, nor was it as cool as Jacob Collier reharmonising Coldplay’s Fix You to use seventh, ninth, and flat-fifth chords.

On days like this, I am grateful to Faye D’Souza for adopting Instagram. Her posts are a lovely dose of reality in between all the memes and reels. It is wild that some of us (me) can follow the general elections from those nuggets.¹

As a Netflix show, the Lok Sabha Elections Season 18 doesn’t quite have the same drama as the IPL, but you’ve got to hand it to the writers - they try. Click the pause button at any point, and you will find somebody saying something bizarre. The other day, my Twitter timeline was ablaze with chatter about our Prime Minister’s speech. There were a bunch of people screaming about it, but all that was a blur. I followed the link to find out that El Patrón had invoked cricket in his latest recitation. In an utterly normal digression during a campaign rally in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh, he had raised a concern about the opposition party polluting the sanctity of our cricket team if they come to power.

“The Congress’s intention is to give priority to minorities in sports as well. This means it will now decide who will be in and out of the cricket team on the basis of religion.”

There are so many things remarkable about this.

Firstly, the idea that the Congress wielding political influence over the team would be an unprecedented violation is hilarious. Especially when you consider the current roster of BCCI office-bearers. Let’s start with the face of the BCCI, Jay Shah.

Jay is everywhere - walking into selection meetings, giving speeches at ICC events, deciding the future tours programme, deciding future captains, making ad-hoc changes to tournament schedules, inaugurating venues. You know, the entire works. He is the main man at Indian cricket right now. Rumour has it that he is aiming for the penthouse office at the ICC headquarters. Guy wants to own the entire sport.

If someone told you that he heads the BCCI, you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Except, he is the secretary. Roger Binny, ex-cricketer and key cog of the 1983 World Cup triumph, and, more importantly, a dignified human being, is the president. But Binny has as much importance at the BCCI office as a box of paneer at a shawarma stall.

I looked up Wikipedia to find out Jay Shah’s cricket credentials. Scroll up, scroll down, there’s nothing. But peek towards the right, and the grey biography panel says his father is…oh.

At key matches, be it the IPL or international, the camera often finds Jay in the VVIP box, sitting with some of his buddies. Amongst the amigos are Anurag Thakur and Arun Singh Dhumal. Thakur, of the serious cricketing intellect of a solitary (and farcical) first-class match and succeeding his father, Prem Kumar Dhumal, as a Member of Parliament from Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh. Thakur, who, while trying to curb the 2020 anti-CAA-NRC protests, addressed a BJP rally in a calm, stately fashion.

Anurag Thakur served as the president of the BCCI between 2016 and 2017. He currently heads the Sports Ministry and Information & Broadcast Ministry. Arun Singh Dhumal is Anurag’s brother and the current BCCI treasurer and IPL chairman. So, yes, I can’t wait to hear more from Mirinda Maharaj about another political party taking unwelcome steps into sports.

We’re all too familiar with the BJP’s hypocrisy. This essay isn’t going to unearth any new revelations. What really hit home was the insinuation that cricket, a sport we hold dear and is a cultural cornerstone in India, could be scarred by ethnic fault lines.

We don't have to wait for Congress to win the Lok Sabha majority to get a glimpse of what that could look like.

In 2021, the Cricket Association of Uttarakhand levelled accusations of religious bias against then-coach Wasim Jaffer, claiming he was promoting players of his faith to the team and creating a “communal” atmosphere. A hurt and angry Jaffer promptly resigned after submitting a detailed report. Given Jaffer’s reputation and stature in Indian cricket, one would’ve expected his India and Mumbai teammates, some of whom have the power to stop time in this country, to rally around him. But apart from Anil Kumble, no one stepped forward to speak publicly in his defence. The key accuser was the CAU manager, Navneet K Mishra. I looked up his Twitter, and found some curious recent activity.

This incident is a mere drop in an ocean as big as the Milky Way. Allow me to present a song from Israel.

“Witnesses are the stars in the sky,
For racism that is like a dream,
The whole world will testify,
There will be no Arabs in the team!
I don’t care how many and how they will get killed,
Eliminating Arabs makes me thrilled,
Boy, girl or old,
Will bury every Arab deep in the ground”

Yup.

This is a favourite chant amongst the fans of Israeli Premier League football team, Beitar Jerusalem. The club was formed in 1936, as part of the Beitar youth movement, a revisionist Zionist movement built on extreme right-wing principles. Beitar Jerusalem have a long, linear history of staying true to their roots with few blemishes. In 2004, Nigerian defender Ibrahim Ndala signed for the club. As his first name suggests, Ndala is a Muslim. He lasted five games, leaving with a statement lamenting his time there: “I would not suggest that any Muslim or black player play here.” In 2009, ex-captain Aviram Bruchian had to apologise to the club’s fans for suggesting a future of religious harmony.

Beitar Jerusalem are probably not mainstream or successful enough to regularly confront us with their complexities. So let’s take one step further, towards Zenit St. Petersburg, a team that has played in the UEFA Champions League and continues to be one of the more successful Russian football outfits. Until as late as 2012, Zenit hadn’t signed a single - a single! - player from a religious, ethnic, racial, or sexual minority. Their commitment to playing white, straight men was almost considered a part of their DNA. But when things finally began shifting towards cultural equality, the fans pushed back. In December 2012, they published a manifesto demanding the club to exclude all non-Caucasian and homosexual players from the team. Thankfully, the team didn’t bow to this pressure.

Differences in approach and backgrounds add colour to sporting contests. It would be boring if all teams were homogenous. For example, Barcelona like to have a lot of academy graduates in their team, staying close to their Catalan roots and way of life; Real Madrid have traditionally looked to fill their squad with the brightest football stars in the world; and Athletic Bilbao, from Basque, only sign players who have either been born or trained in the greater Basque country.

But Beitar and Zenit’s ideologies, amongst thousands of other teams across sports, aren’t quirks. Many of them were established between the late 19th and early-20th century, a time when cultural division was in vogue, and have garnered enough support over time to perpetuate this “legacy”.

There is an interesting contrast in South Africa, whose universally-popular cricket and rugby teams still have racial selection quotas. The difference between them and the Beitar situation is that quotas were introduced in white-dominated South African sports - cricket and rugby - for the inclusion and promotion of non-white athletes. The railings weren’t meant as fences, but a necessary support for those stepping into the sunlight after years of darkness.

In 1998, the French men’s football team won the FIFA World Cup. The team were fondly referred to as “Black, Blanc, Beur” - black, white, and Arab. Not everyone French bought into that idea, but a significant chunk did, and that mattered. On the night of their World Cup win, the face of Zinedine Zidane, the hero of the final and son of Algerian immigrants, illuminated the Arc de Triomphe. Their team bus at the 2006 World Cup proudly displayed their national motto: Liberté, égalité, fraternité. (Liberty, equality, fraternity)

We are a privileged generation. Those of us fortunate in the genetic lottery have led relatively comfortable lives, spared from the horrors of a major global conflict. Ours has been a road of radical course-correction from the atrocities of imperialism, partitions, the Second World War, and the Cold War. It’s a different climate now from when Beitar Jerusalem was established. Today, it’s rare to find a person of significance advocating a communally divisive ideology at a global event. Even Benjamin Netanyahu has to coat his hateful and discriminatory rhetoric with some Hamas-paint to create the illusion of a specific target.

If you’ve noticed closely enough, for all the religious peacocking that he does within India, Narendra Modi dances to a different rhythm once he leaves our shores. He becomes the harbinger of peace and friendship, El Primo Vishwaguru.

I don’t honestly think that Indian cricket is going to go down an ethnically-laid route anytime soon. Cricket is one of the great unifiers in this country, and any political party, even the BJP, will think twice before completely disrupting that. Modi probably made that statement as a hot take just to grab some attention.

Nevertheless, that insinuation should be noted. Just as a scribble for now, but in a notebook that we can pull out later, should we ever need to. This week, Adidas released the new India T20 kit. I see that the sleeve has had an interesting colour change.

Didn’t need Congress to execute that, did we?

1. If you’re looking to follow the elections closely, Prem Panicker is writing a column every day.