Loyalty beyond a boundary

In 1980, if the Left Front government and Calcutta police had followed the practice adopted by their 21st century counterparts in Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, they would have had to arrest and slap cases under the sedition law and/or the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on some 90,000 of us crowded into Eden Gardens. That’s because we rose spontaneously to a man and woman to give Pakistan’s Asif Iqbal a standing ovation as he walked back to the pavilion after he was out. He had just played his last Test, and we Calcuttans were keen to demonstrate our appreciation of a cricketing great whose elegant batting had given us so much enjoyment.

The next day The Statesman carried a poignant photo taken through a fish-eye lens of Mr Iqbal, bat raised in acknowledgement, dwarfed by the cheering crowds in the stands (sadly, a 2011 renovation has almost halved Eden Gardens’ capacity). Nowhere in the accompanying reports were there sly innuendos about seditious Indians cheering a Pakistani. Or the fact that crowds at Eden Gardens, as much as those in Madras and Bombay, as those cities were called then, thought nothing of applauding Pakistani bowlers and batsmen.

Now, of course, India, once a confident, rambunctious melting pot of sport and culture, has become so neurotic about the loyalty of its citizenry that its state apparatus has morphed into a moral police force that would have appalled even that High Tory, Norman Tebbit, he of the notorious “Tebbit Test”. 

Mr Tebbit’s lightbulb moment came around the time Britain realised to its dismay that it had become a society of immigrants. Absorbed from the former colonies initially to do menial work, the second generation of immigrants were becoming alarmingly qualified and educated, a threat to white Britain.   

Mr Tebbit, unwilling perhaps to go to the same extremes as his inflammatory Tory colleague Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech earned him expulsion from the shadow cabinet, devised a “test” that entailed checking whether immigrants cheered, say, India or the West Indies cricket team when they toured England. No punishment was devised if they failed. The fact is, though, many cheerfully and openly flubbed this test. In his latest book Why We Kneel, How We Rise, West Indian quick Michael Holding writes about how the team in their heyday was roundly ticked off by West Indian spectators in the UK.

But even in an era of Brexit-fuelled xenophobia, failing the Tebbit Test has become irrelevant; people in this globalised world have become comfortable in their multiple identities. So what’s wrong with an Indian cheering a Pakistani victory over India over a game of cricket? There is no law or constitutional provision that stipulates that all Indian citizens must support only their national team in sports tournaments. Cheering Pakistan does not mean an Indian is being seditious, unlawful or even disloyal. And are we so insecure that a couple of Pakistan Zindabads among the millions of cricket-mad Indian fans galvanise the security apparatus to jail and assault people?

Unlike elsewhere in the world, Indo-Pakistan cricket has been overwhelmed by the high-pitched cultural chauvinism that is indispensable for muscular majoritarianism to thrive. It is worth noting that right up to the late nineties, spectators around India applauded good performances by the Pakistani team, even when they beat India. That was also a time when Pakistani artistes regularly visited India and cultural exchanges remained vibrant no matter what the state of politics. It should have been, so to speak, a Jaishn-e-Rivaz,  a celebration of tradition between two neighbours who were once one people.

But that healthy sporting respect was already being eroded as the Shiv Sena dug up, with impunity, pitches in Wankhede, Mumbai and Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi to stall Indo-Pak matches. Neither country has toured the other since 2013. It’s come to a point where Pakistani cricketers are barred from the Indian Premier League (IPL). Judging from the talent in the current Pakistani team, that’s the IPL and Indian spectators’ loss.