When the state behaves like a teenager in love

Charges of sedition for cheering the Pak team will only get laughed at

It was a field day, no pun here, for all at Twitter, after Kashmiri students in a Meerut university got charged with sedition for cheering the Pakistan cricket team on Sunday.

Nigel Britto, a Goan, tweeted his wonderment in a meme at how Indians will now fear cheering the Brazilian football team, something most of us have done. He commented on the amount of green in the Brazilian flag.

Nilim Dutta tweeting from Guwahati, asked why the Indian cricket team, playing in Pakistan, should not also be declared seditious. Ramesh Srivats, whose Twitter fan following is enormous, said he cannot eat Mysore Pak any more without wondering if he will be caught under this ridiculous charge.

It is clear that the Indian state, just like a teenager in love, will not tolerate any nonsense in the affection we return. We must love the union of India with a clear, unstinted and undivided enthusiasm – in cricket matches and otherwise.

Now, no one is naïve enough to take rooting for the Brazil football team and show of loyalty for the Pakistan cricket team in the same spirit. Our equations with our neighbours, both Pakistan and Bangladesh, are not without a historical context, most stark of which is the painful partition and consequent border tensions.

But most of us thought this you-are-Muslim-and-cheering-for-Pakistan was behind us, but it clearly isn’t. Could not the authorities behave calmly and look the other way when students cheered Pakistan on Sunday. If suppose that was impossible given that cricket gets us emotionally charged, wouldn’t a reprimand from the university in Meerut be sufficient? When students behave precociously, surely college authorities have ways to put them in their place without booking them.

Mature opinions on social media agreed.

“So wrong, in principle and its fallout,” tweeted Myra MacDonald, who has written on India and Pakistan for Reuters.

“Finally while what the boys may have done in Meerut is misguided it certainly isn't illegal, regardless of whom them were cheering,” tweeted Omar Abdullah.

“The sad fact is that some of these students are recipients of the PM scholarship for Kashmiris. Perhaps They need to introspect,” he added.