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| True colours |
Did Queen Elizabeth pass or fail the Tebbit test? It’s said she could barely contain her excitement during a Test match in Australia when the England team did something spectacular. Jumping up and down in her seat, she clapped and exclaimed “Oh, well done! Well done!” until her spouse muttered, “Your Majesty forgets you are also Queen of Australia!”
The ultimate test of loyalty, held Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers, is the side an immigrant cheers. He would heartily have approved of Sonia Gandhi’s noticeable excitement at Mohali, “grinning ear to ear atop a drinks trolley” among ordinary folk, according to Sankarshan Thakur in this paper. Two days before the match, The Telegraph published an exultant picture of her with arms aloft and mouth open, presumably in full-throated war-cry, at last year’s Commonwealth hockey match. Nit-pickers might quibble that Italians don’t play hockey and aren’t in the Commonwealth. But you can bet your bottom dollar she would have cheered the Indian side even more lustily if it had been engaged with 11 good men and true from the land of her birth.
The queen’s multiple identities and loyalties are more challenging, as Prince Philip, who was Greek and Danish before becoming British, should appreciate best. His uncle outraged Lord Beaverbrook’s xenophobic Daily Express by once signing himself “Prinz Louis von Battenberg” (whence Mountbatten) at a German hotel. Since cheering betokens identification, and the Commonwealth Her Majesty heads symbolizes inclusiveness, she must root for the teams of all 52 member-countries, though rather more enthusiastically for the 16 (including England and Australia) that acknowledge her as sovereign. She probably also claps especially warmly for the five other monarchies in the Commonwealth, feeling their hearts are in the right place even if they have the wrong monarchs. Suspended Fiji merits a cold stare until it recants and is readmitted but Her Majesty has every right to boo and hiss at Zimbabwe which stormed out sulkily instead of taking suspension sportingly.
Given India’s societal complexities, we knew the logic of Tebbit’s argument long before he voiced it in 1990. I recall angry murmurs in the Sixties when a well-known Anglo- Indian sports commentator was seen to hold his head in his hands and wail “Noooo!” because an English player missed a catch. I also remember cosmopolitan Muslim friends grumbling about a conspiracy to exclude Mohammedan Sporting fans — poorer, they said, than Mohun Bagan or East Bengal supporters — by increasing the gate money for football matches. They also complained of the stands groaning when Mohammedan Sporting scored a goal and rejoicing when it suffered one.
Consider the two incidents. One appeared to confirm that a then very visible and highly articulate minority identified with its British parentage while suppressing its Indian blood. The other expressed the fear even among sophisticated apolitical members of India’s largest minority that they are being squeezed in insidious ways. Syed Shahabuddin listed other such ways: lighting inaugural lamps or cracking green coconuts to launch ships, he said, are Hindu, not Indian, rituals.
So, the passions unleashed on the cricket pitch and football ground should not be underestimated. Sport is war by other means, witness lurid phrases like “scalped”, “mother of all battles” and “fight to the finish” so beloved of sports writers. Anglo-Scots fixtures resonate to the strains of Flower of Scotland, celebrating victory over England in what historians call “the decisive battle of the First War of Scottish Independence”. That was Bannockburn in 1314. Seven centuries of smouldering patriotism led to devolution in 1999. The British football song, Two World Wars and One World Cup, directed at Germany, more brutally expressed the xenophobia that drives sporting contests but was notably absent at Mohali.
The welcome message could be that some equations are changing. Zaheer Khan was a boon to bowling but as unnecessary politically as it is for any of today’s Bollywood Khans to masquerade as Dilip Kumar. The dog-in-the-manger communalism that prompted Mohammad Ali Jinnah to insult Maulana Abul Kalam Azad rears its ugly head only among British-Pakistanis who jeered at the Lancashire-born bowler, Sajid Mahmood, as a “traitor” for playing for England and Wales against Pakistan at Headingley in 2006. No one taunts Nasser Hussain, possibly because a Madras-born British Muslim can’t be pinned down in the subcontinent’s ethno-political geography. Someone without an obvious tribal home cannot betray it.
It’s a moot point whether the 2007 London bombers with their Yorkshire accents would have rooted for Pakistan. They must have known that English nationalism carries the British National Party’s ultra-right taint. Yet they still cultivated English tastes and played cricket, probably in the spirit of Madame Defarge encouraging Jacobin initiates to cheer what they were committed to destroying. But religious fanaticism and alienation from conventional politics had taken them to another plane of engagement. Tebbit would have been prouder of Anwar Choudhury, Britain’s ethnic Bangladeshi high commissioner in Dhaka, who refused to speak Bengali because — so the locals whispered — his broad Sylheti would come tumbling out. They also sniggered that His Excellency had taken care to pass the Tebbit test before kissing hands on his appointment as Her Majesty’s first non-white envoy.
Some imponderables remain. Who would the 1.13 lakh inhabitants of 55 Bangladeshi enclaves in West Bengal or the more than two lakh people in 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh support if the occasion arose? Indians who complain of discrimination would undoubtedly back India. But Bangladeshis with ration cards and other Indian documentation, thanks to Left Front opportunists, have the best of both worlds and might consider which side their bread is buttered most. And the wives that Indian Muslims sometimes import from Pakistan? Or vice versa? Residents of Nawaz Sharif’s ancestral village near Amritsar might also be in a quandary since they still benefit economically from the connection.
Such linkages might explain the demand even in Calcutta for green jerseys and Pakistani flags. Kautilya’s enemy’s enemy theory also accounts for some bizarre partnerships. But Rehan Butt, Pakistan’s veteran hockey player, told us that Pakistanis supported India against Australia because they didn’t want to be done out of the drama of Wednesday’s match. They were also inspired by a genuine desire in the best spirit of the game to see Sachin Tendulkar, their favourite, in action.
The 1952 India-Pakistan Test must have held poignant memories for the two captains, Lala Amarnath and Abdul Kardar, who had played in the same team earlier. “All said and done, I am a Lahori,” Amarnath reportedly told a friend. But however moving at a personal level, that sense of lost belonging doesn’t help political ties with either Pakistan or Bangladesh. Watching from a distance I would say that a big gain of Mohali was that it engaged two countries without any of the bogus sentimentality that is one (there are many others) obstacle to understanding. Neither Shahid Afridi nor Yousaf Raza Gilani could complain of being treated like errant Indians who had to be coaxed back to the fold. Neither could India fault their generous response to defeat for holding any tinge of bitterness.
It’s all a question of identity and identification. Defying genetics, Lord Swraj Paul boasts of being simultaneously 100 per cent Indian and 100 per cent British. Britain’s more modest royal family was content with 50 per cent of that heritage but, sadly, its name — Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, derived from Queen Victoria’s husband — was more aggressively non-English than the ambiguous Paul. Realizing that people seek instant recognition, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather changed it to Windsor, much to the merriment of his cousin and rival, Kaiser Wilhelm, who demanded a stage performance of ‘The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’.
He lost his throne but relations normalized once the umbilical cord was severed. It would be a small beginning if the Pakistanis didn’t have to fly back via Dubai.
