I have often defended sports boycotts - especially when India refuses to play sport with Pakistan.
But this new sports spat with Bangladesh strikes me as illogical, badly thought-out and unlikely to benefit either country.
Just follow the sequence of events. Teams were asked to choose players for the IPL from a pool selected by the BCCI. The Kolkata Knight Riders chose Mustafizur Rahman for their team. Rahman is a Bangladeshi but that did not seem particularly relevant at the time.
Then a BJP politician called Sangeet Som described the team’s owner Shahrukh Khan as a traitor and said he had no right to live in India because he had selected a Bangladeshi player.
This should have been seen for what it is: dangerous, poisonous communal rhetoric used only because Shahrukh is a Muslim and his popularity (among followers of every religion especially Hindus) agitates the Sanghi right wing.
In fact nobody in authority told Som to shut up. And so, assuming that the leadership was fine with attacks on this issue, sanghis on social media and outside kept up the assault on Shahrukh.
When people made the obvious point - if it was so bad to select a Bangladeshi then why was he placed in the pool by the BCCI to begin with - things began to get awkward. Everyone knows that cricket administration in India is a deeply political affair and cricket boards are run by politicians and their families. So the BCCI had two choices. It could maintain a high minded silence and wait for the controversy to blow over. Or it could panic because politicians were in the firing line and surrender cravenly to the lunatic fringe, by stopping Rahman from playing.
No prizes for guessing which option it chose.
So now we are in the middle of a full fledged cricket spat with Bangladesh. The Bangladesh board has said that its team will not travel to India next month to play in the T20 World Cup. India is not safe for Bangladeshis it says, a reference to the hatred on display from the Sanghi Right Wing. Bangladesh will only play India in safe neutral venues.
| "Our neighbourhood is a complicated place and the last thing we need is to engender hostility with a neighbour whom Pakistan is assiduously cultivating." |
As I said, I do not take the line that sport should be free of politics. Boycotts can be a useful tool in isolating rogue regimes. But boycotts must be well thought out. The world boycotted South Africa in the apartheid era and the boycott put psychological pressure on South Africa to dismantle apartheid. Similarly there is no point in India touring Pakistan and being all buddy-buddy when Pakistan is organising massacres of Indian civilians.
But Bangladesh is a different case. First of all, it is not sending terrorists to India. Nor does it follow a discriminatory system like apartheid.
Yes, no Indian can be happy with what is happening in Bangladesh these days. There is no doubt that Hindus are nervous about their future there given recent actions by Muslim extremists. The lynchings and violence against Hindus are deeply shocking and distressing.
The question is: how do we respond?
The government of India has opted for a calibrated response. While we have expressed our concerns we have also made overtures to Bangladesh. There was no reason for the Foreign Minister to fly to Bangladesh to attend the funeral of the noted India-hater Khaleda Zia unless we wanted to reassure the Bangladeshis that despite the anti Hindu violence we still wanted good relations. Nor was this an altruistic gesture. Our neighbourhood is a complicated place and the last thing we need is to engender hostility with a neighbour whom Pakistan is assiduously cultivating.
And besides, once this my-lynching-versus-your-lynching game begins where does it stop? Within Bangladesh they have no hesitation in pointing to violence and systematic discrimination against Muslims in many BJP ruled states in India. We never boycotted India because of those lynchings, they say. So why are you acting against us?
And quite apart from the foreign policy implications the controversy also reveals the sleazy flabby underbelly of communal politics in India. Would the Hindutva right wing have made such a fuss about a Bangladeshi player if the team that chose him was not owned by a high profile Muslim? It is significant that Som’s attack did not deal in principles or policies. He called Shahrukh a traitor and asked him to leave India. It was the old right wing trope: find an issue involving a Muslim country, find an Indian Muslim, link him with the issue and then say that he is a traitor while suggesting that his loyalties are not with India but with a foreign Muslim country.
By giving in so readily to the forces of hatred, the BCCI has let India down. It has reversed its own policy, it has sabotaged the Foreign Ministry’s well thought out approach to Bangladesh, and it has needlessly alienated even those Bangladeshis who opposed the extremist mobs.
Worse still, it has given new life to the lunatic fringe of the Hindu right and shown it that it can force policy changes in accordance with its communal campaigns.
India is a great cricketing nation. Our players will go on to win tournament after tournament.
But our sports administrators have lost this particular match and proved once again that the fewer politicians we have in sports bodies, the happier we will all be.
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