Is It Safe To Play Cricket In India?
By Raja Swamy
www.countercurrents.org
23 February, 2004
Who won the match? Haven’t you heard this question hundreds of times? What was the score? Who beat who? Or, who thrashed who? Since India’s national cricket team went on to play and win and lose with Australia’s national team, the whole web is abuzz with talk about whether India should tour Pakistan. Pakistan’s national team is formidable, but that is not the main concern of our deshi netizens these days: true to the dominant air of suspicion and hysteria that grips anything from cricket to forgiven and rehabilitated nuclear weapons scientists, India’s cricket fans also dabble with questions of ‘security.’ Is it safe to play cricket in Pakistan? Is it?For many Indians the question painfully made obvious through physical beatings, abuse, and even death, is this: is it safe to play cricket in India? On December 21st, 2003, two Dalit youths in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh were murdered by Rajputs in the village. The PUCL concludes that: “The main cause seems to be the defeat in successive cricket matches that was considered an insult to Rajputs who considered themselves invincible and the least to be beaten by the `subjugated and good for nothing’ dalits.” The village pradhan is suspected of being involved in these ghastly murders, and the local police are suspected of being complicit in obscuring the investigation by failing to act against the real culprits and tampering with the FIR (initial report filed with police by the victims). For Dalits who dare to use cricket as a way to achieve empowerment, these are the responses of dominant caste elites and their institutionally entrenched cohorts. Would Vikas Singh and Vikram Singh, a brickworker and a carpenter, whose lives were cut short by these vile men, have opinions on whether India and Pakistan should play? So who won, when humanity lost so terribly? (source: Two Dalit youth killed for winning cricket matches, PUCL January 2004: http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Dalit-tribal/2004/santagarh.htm)
While Adivasis are forcibly removed from their lands, which are being swallowed up by multinational corporations intent on funneling India’s mineral wealth into their deep pockets, those who dare to organize and oppose the unified powers of the state and multinational corporations, are being treated to another form of cricket. Take for instance the case of the Kutia Kandh Adivasi communities in Lanjigarh, Orissa. When Lingaraj Azad, a prominent leader was arrested by police in April 2003, at least 250 people including a large number of women and children, peacefully walked towards the Lanjigarh police station to demand an explanation. Before they could even reach the police station, a mob of about one hundred men armed with lathis, cricket bats and stumps attacked them badly beating defenceless men, women and children. The mob is said to belong to BALCO-(now owned and operated by Sterlite, a multinational with a dubious record) sponsored organization called “Yubak Sangh,” or “youth club.” Ostensibly, these “youth” learn to beat unarmed people with cricket bats and stumps while their sponsors rob the land and its people of their resources and livelihoods. Azad confirmed the above connection in his statement to PUCL: “..Lingaraj later told the PUCL that, while in police lock-up, he overheard the officer in charge telephoning instructions to pro-Sterlite “youth club” members in Lanjigarh to “beat up men and women with cricket bats and stumps.” ” (source: A London Calling Special - January 10 2004 - http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Aboutus/londoncall32.htm)
So we have policemen instructing members of a thug squad to attack men and women with cricket bats and stumps! Howzaaaat for cricket security in 2004? Cricket in the service of jingoism and perpetual enmity/rivalry between India and Pakistan is supposedly good and normal. It works as a side show to the ‘real’ thing, translatable into such questions as whose father of the bomb is less worse? Our President or ‘their’ ‘national hero?’ Cricket as a means of self-empowerment for a long-oppressed community is punishable by death. Cricket as a way of “maintaining” the thuggish vise-grip of policemen, state officials, multinational corporate hoodlums and their lumpen henchmen, over the overwhelmingly overpowered but unflinchingly unbowed original people of India, is, standard procedure. So who won?