A tale of two countries

The Indian and Pakistani cricket boards could write a book on absurd decision making.

The Pakistan Cricket Board’s decision to ban two senior players and punish others in the aftermath of the team losing all its matches in Australia may look like an overkill. It may have also created a fear psychosis, as seen in its hockey team’s decision to resign en masse after finishing last in the World Cup. The Pakistan board has earned all the criticism that has come its way, but there is little cause for us Indians to gloat — and some of us have appeared to — given that the Indian cricket administration is not much better. The real difference between how the two countries have managed their cricket lies in the paths they chose to take after the Partition and the institutions they built.

When Indian cricket was in its infancy, questionable decisions were the norm — without surprise, since decadent princes commanded enormous influence. Lala Amarnath, the first Indian to score a Test century, was sent back in the middle of the England tour of 1936, because he ran afoul of the captain, who bore the lofty title of Maharajkumar of Vizianagram. In reality, he was a zamindar from Uttar Pradesh who had never played first class cricket. Amarnath’s fault was that he objected to the bizarre playing tactics of ‘Vizzy’, who is believed to have curried favour with the Viceroy and his wife through flattery and gifts, and presented gold coins to the opposition captains so they would go easy on him.

The story may have continued even after the princes faded out, their privy purses abolished, since the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI, has time and again sought to wriggle out of our legal and constitutional framework. It went to the extent of saying that it was a private club and implying that our international cricketers did not really represent the country. Secondly, India’s cricketers, mostly educated and well brought-up men, learned sometime in the 1980s to unite and fight for their rights, in sharp contrast to their Pakistani counterparts, who have a history of bickering and plotting the downfall of one another.

BCCI has often tried to put cricketers in their place, using customary tactics of dropping them from the team or banning them altogether. In some cases, it has had its way; many a career has been nipped in the bud. But more often, the cricketers have been bailed out by the judiciary and others.

For lack of space here, let’s look at the case that embodies it all. In August 1989, the board banned six top players — Dilip Vengsarkar, Kapil Dev, Ravi Shastri, Mohammad Azharuddin, Kiran More and Arun Lal — for a year and fined them for making money by playing unofficially in the US and Canada. The players had done this after a disastrous tour of West Indies. The players, helped by top journalists including Kuldip Nayar, took BCCI to court and won a three-month battle when the Supreme Court castigated the officialdom. Such a thing is unlikely to happen in Pakistan.

(suveen.sinha@bsmail.in)