Is
It Safe To Play Cricket In India?
By Raja Swamy
www.countercurrents.org
23 February, 2004
Who won the match? Havent you heard
this question hundreds of times? What was the score? Who beat who? Or,
who thrashed who? Since Indias national cricket team went on to
play and win and lose with Australias national team, the whole
web is abuzz with talk about whether India should tour Pakistan. Pakistans
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, Indias 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 Indias 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?