Imagine a football match in which one team keeps committing foul upon foul without any consequences because the referee and the linesmen are completely biased in its favour.
Meanwhile, the other team is punished severely for even minor trespasses, to a point where it is unable to defend, let alone score any goals. Some players even have their legs broken to prevent them from playing at all.
The sports channels covering the game deliberately hide footage of fouls committed by the dominant team and highlight the ones by its rival. To make matters worse, the audience – made up of Bollywood or cricket stars and fly-by-night religious gurus – cheers loudly for the team that openly flouts the rules. The megaphones they wield drown out any other voice around.
There are also mobs of football hooligans roving around everywhere, lynching those who dare to support the weaker team – or even for appearing ‘different’. The security staff either turn a blind eye or join those carrying out such wanton violence.
Now, you can stop imagining. That in a nutshell was a description of the real state of the Indian polity today.
In this football analogy, the rule and leg-breaking team would obviously be Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bhartiya Janata Party regime, which has openly rigged the game of electoral democracy – ensuring it can never lose, no matter how badly it plays.
The rival team is of course the opposition INDIA Alliance, which has been severely hobbled by the arrests of top leaders, freezing of bank accounts and repeated raids by tax and criminal investigation authorities. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress party, rightly claimed a few days ago that the ‘match was fixed’ – the ‘match’ here being the upcoming general elections in the country.
Taking the football metaphor a bit further, a closer scrutiny of the patchy playground – representing India’s soil, air and water – reveals most of it to be toxic and replete with potholes, indicating years of complete neglect. The stadium – indicating the nation’s infrastructure and economy – is similarly uneven in quality – with large parts in a state of collapse.
And then there are those who clean up the ground and stadium premises after the game is over. These are India’s invisible masses, made up of Dalits, Adivasis, the poor and marginalized. Very often they are often bribed or threatened into filling up the stadium stands and cheer for the pre-decided winning team. The only the right they get is to scavenge the garbage bins, after the players and their celebrity supporters go home.
As for the much kicked around and weathered football – a metaphor for the Republic of India and its modern Constitution – the poor thing is in such a sorry state that anywhere else in the world it would have prompted immediate stoppage of play. And that precisely seems to be part of the ruling regime’s plan too – to degrade the rules to a point where it does not matter whether the game is played at all or not. In future the ‘winner’ will be routinely announced by a ‘Council of Elders’ or some such cabal.
Persisting with the footballer’s x-ray vision reveals even more interesting details. From the advertising hoardings around in the stadium it is clear the match is being sponsored by the country’s largest corporations. The same few brands monopolise sales of everything from football merchandise to popcorn and soda.
While the distribution of funds is tilted heavily towards the dominant team the oligarchs also have key players from both teams on their payroll. At critical moments, some of these ‘Trojan horse’ players from the weaker team cross-over to the dominant one or score self-goals inexplicably.
So does this all mean that there is no hope at all for a real, professional football team to ever win this game? Is this the end of the road for Indian democracy as we have known it all these years?
Yes and no, says a football expert who has observed the Indian game for a very long time. According to her the current reigning champions keep winning because they are not playing football at all!
Instead, dressed like footballers and going through the motions, their team is playing the traditional Indian sport called kabaddi! This allows them to make all kinds of below-the-belt moves that are beyond the rules of normal football.
This she says is the real secret of their success. They have captured the entire world of Indian football by fooling everyone into thinking they still believe in the integrity of the game.
So, any team that wants to win the prized trophy has to understand that just sticking to playing old-style football and its rules is futile. The only route to victory is to mix their football skills with some other game altogether, particularly the martial arts.
The expert recommends using the ancient Indian form of wrestling called malla-yuddha, that later on evolved into modern-day kushti. It would mean rolling in some mud for a while but there is no other way.
Or perhaps they could try and master kalaripayattu – the weapons and combative techniques that are unique to Kerala. After all, it seems to have done wonders for that state, which has the best development indicators in the country.
Either choice would however require great commitment, training, discipline and above all a fierce motivation to win. As of now, almost all within the opposition political spectrum seem to be in the ‘tumse na ho paayega’ or ‘Bro, it’s beyond you’ category.
The true game changers, waiting for their moment under the sun, may be those teams, which have never been allowed to win or even enter the tournament all these decades because they don’t have the right Vedic genealogy or corporate loyalties.
They are the ones who will have to bring the current stadium down, build a new one and start a completely different game altogether – where they will always be the winners.
Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health worker who can be reached at [email protected]
