We Want India to Play Pakistan, but Can We Take It?

Maybe we are not ready just yet

A couple of weeks back, I branched out my sports essays from this platform. I felt those who had subscribed for ramblings about pop culture should not get spammed by my thoughts on how Manchester United should play a stronger midfield pairing, and vice versa. As I write this essay, I am not sure where it will go.

Is communal hatred towards athletes a sports issue or a societal issue?

Last Sunday, India and Pakistan faced off for their thirteenth World Cup match across the two white-ball formats. India had won the previous twelve and were favourites to make it 13-0. This team is stacked with international superstars, most of whom were coming off a month-long IPL tournament. Pakistan, on the other hand, don’t play IPL and had two T20 tours cancelled because of security concerns. That said, they are a skilled and dynamic team. Sunday’s clash was billed as the tightest India vs Pakistan game in a long time.

Now that they only play in multi-nation tournaments, each match is preceded by disproportionate excitement to make up for the gap. Advertisers and marketers take their cues. War imagery goes hand-in-hand with patronising banter about winning and losing habits.

On the day, things happened all too quick. Like Siddharth Monga wrote so beautifully here, the game lasted about three hours but the contest was over in about twenty minutes. Shaheen Shah Afridi tore through the Indian openers, their spin bowlers were miserly, and their batters executed the chase with surgical precision. In the moments after their victory, Virat Kohli shared warm smiles and hugs with Babar Azam and Mohammed Rizwan. It was a lovely, and utterly normal, gesture from three athletes with huge respect for each others’ craft and performance. That picture is now famous. Headline event done with, we turned our gaze elsewhere on a mad Sunday of sports.

Well, not all of us. Mohammed Shami’s social media profiles became the cardboard target for a tirade of communal attacks. The formats were all too familiar: either a dig at his religion; or an insinuation that he had taken money from Pakistan to cost India the match, which also came with religious undertones; or some good ol’ <female family member><sexual activity/genitalia>. 

The anger at Shami was misplaced even if looked through a purely cricketing lens. Late-evening dew reduces a cricket ball to a bar of soap. Now, imagine having to grip and control the bar enough to aim for a shoebox kept 18 yards away. Oh, by the way, you have to throw it at 90 miles an hour. There is a reason captains choose to field first, even in high-pressure matches, if dew is a certainty. Besides, eight other Indian cricketers also had a bad evening. At a potentially crucial juncture of the match, when a couple of tight overs could have put some pressure on the Pakistan batters, Ravindra Jadeja and Varun Chakravarthy’s expensive bowling killed the game. But when has rationale ever mattered to a mob?

Identifying athletes by their names instead of performance is a truly terrible thing to do, but in this situation, one must. Jadeja and Chakravarthy, or Kumar and Bumrah, no matter what they do on the pitch, will never have to carry the burden that a name like Mohammed Shami does.

Irrespective of how many stumps he sends flying, how many matches he wins wearing the same crest as Jadeja and Chakravarthy, he will always live his career on the precipice of acceptance. His Instagram profile is a dashboard on which you can track India’s performance on any given day.

Social media, in itself, is a hateful place where nuance comes to die a brutal death. Most platforms are designed as echo chambers where you are drip-fed validation and reinforcement for your thoughts. In an article from last year about intellectual humility, Nicole Yeatman wrote this passage.

“The internet encourages epistemic arrogance—the belief that one knows much more than one does. The internet’s tailored social media feeds and algorithms have herded us into echo chambers where our own views are cheered and opposing views are mocked. Sheltered from serious challenge, celebrated by our chosen mob, we gradually lose the capacity for accurate self-assessment and begin to believe ourselves vastly more knowledgeable than we actually are.”

This arrogance leads us to believe that our actions have a greater value than they actually do. We are told that it is okay to use any kind of language because no platform has strict enough regulations in place to apprehend us.

I recently read a tweet that claimed that the volatile atmosphere within these platforms does not accurately reflect the true India, which is caring and loving. I understand the sentiment, respect it even, but could not disagree more with the premise. Social media is a microcosm of any society. At a small scale, you could say that a subset is not an accurate representation of a corpus. But when millions are using the same platform, it is a valid projection of the larger pulse.

This week has gone over and above norms to highlight that. Kashmiri students were attacked at a university in Punjab; Kashmiri residents in Srinagar were slapped with FIRs under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for apparently celebrating Pakistan’s victory. 

Ex-cricketers were waiting. On Twitter, Virender Sehwag did not miss his chance of highlighting this, and called bullshit on those advocating a cracker-free Diwali. Across the border, Waqar Younis spoke about how Rizwan offering namaz on the pitch, around the largely Hindu Indian team, was a greater achievement than the actual performance. Harbhajan Singh took banter too far and showed Mohammed Amir his aukaad.

Rivalries, especially long-standing ones, tend to get tribal. Fans have a way of attaching not just their hopes, but even communal prestige to their teams. George Orwell, always the naive romantic, called it as he saw it in 1945.

“At the international level, sport is frankly mimic warfare. As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.”

In Glasgow, Celtic Football Club and Rangers Football Club make up the Old Firm rivalry. Celtic have a long association with Scots of Irish descent, and Rangers with native Scots. The Republican vs Unionist tendencies are clear in their flags and symbols. In Belgrade, Red Star and Partizan were once owned by two opposing political parties at the height of the USSR’s communist rule. Closer home, in Calcutta, Mohun Bagan and East Bengal come with an undertone of native Bengalis against immigrants from Bangladesh.

In most such cases, there is a long history of violence. It is easy to posture and write essays about how it should stop. Of course, it should. There is no wisdom in suggesting that violence and communal hatred cannot come attached with sport. But is it even possible, in a world where shrillness is rewarded, to have a rivalry without the vitriol? 

At best, there is a sliver of hope. As we have moved into multiple post-war generations, teams have embraced multiculturalism. We don’t have wounds that the original audiences of these rivalries did. In the absence of geographical conflict, some of us are learning the tenets of equality. Sport, itself, has become more urban.

Communal conflict, however, is as robust as ever. Racism and xenophobia are just as prevalent as they were fifty years back. Social media’s broadcasting capabilities have given a medium for airing such thoughts and gathering yourself an army of supporters. The ruling governments of India, England, Hungary, Turkey, and until recently, the United States, have benefitted from such hostility. 

In India, the knob on communal hatred has been turned hard right over the last decade. The underlying feeling has always existed — such things aren’t created out of thin air — but now it is fashionable to take those thoughts to a public forum. Speakers from the ruling party often implicate Muslims as trespassers in this country, inferior and impure. Go through a week’s worth of newspapers and you will find reports of north-eastern students being mistreated in a tier-one city.

In such a climate, evaluation through identity is only par for the course. The biggest source of news in India over the last two weeks bears testament. Even the privileged 1% have no chance against the machine.

Source: DNA India

To put this thought to further test, superimpose Mohammed Shami’s face over Virat’s. How does the picture look? Just as warm and friendly? Now imagine if this was the actual picture that came out of Sunday’s match. Do you think Shami’s home and family would be safe? 

I submit to you that the moment of indecision you just had, while trying to answer that question in your head, came because of the line beyond which competition in a discriminatory culture is just a vehicle for jingoism. If ex-cricketers, who have seen both sides, can get carried away in the noise, what hope do we have from a populace who only know how to demand blood?

India and Pakistan are two wonderful cricket teams with a history of excellence. A game between them promises quality and intensity. But I genuinely don’t think fans from either country are capable of handling the politics that come with it. Watching India play Pakistan in a World Cup final has been a long-standing wish. As of now, I am not sure if it is worth the price.