It’s hard to run experiments in geopolitics because the world is a dangerous place and the fate of millions is not to be trifled with, but for anyone who wants to know how Narendra Modi’s India would behave in the world if it ever became the muscle-bound vishwaguru that it longs to be, there is a natural experiment afoot that has lessons to offer.
If cricket is a world, India is its de facto ruler. Indian hopelessness at most major world sports (hockey and badminton are partial exceptions and no, chess is not a sport) and a historical passion for cricket have created a television audience for cricket worth untold billions. Given how small cricket’s footprint is globally compared to football, no cricket market outside India generates a fraction of the revenues that the Board of Control for Cricket in India controls.
It took a while for cricket’s erstwhile bosses, England and Australia, to come to terms with this reality, but 25 years into this century, every cricketing nation has come to accept that India is world cricket’s paymaster. The Indian Premier League is cricket’s golden goose; its example has inspired T20 leagues all over the world. None of these other leagues begins to rival the IPL for profitability, but they show us cricket’s direction of travel as its calendar begins to prioritise T20 competitions over longer forms of the game.
The BCCI controls the IPL as the regulatory body for cricket in India. Modi’s government used to control the BCCI through Jay Shah, the son of the Union home minister, Amit Shah. Jay Shah wasn’t important in himself; he merely illustrated the capture of the BCCI by the government. Anyone who serves as the secretary of the BCCI is likely to be a creature of India’s party-State.
There have always been connections among cricket, business and politics in India but when the game wasn’t as lucrative as it is now the nexus was looser. Now the Union government directly controls the BCCI, which, in turn, controls franchise cricket’s obedient tycoons, its other national boards, and the International Cricket Council. The current chairman of the ICC is the former secretary of the BCCI, Jay Shah. When his term comes to an end and he is replaced by a chairman from another national board, the ICC will continue to defer to the BCCI because India generates more than 70% of the ICC’s revenues.
Since this piece began with geopolitics, it’s useful to remember that when the United Nations and its auxiliary institutions were established, it was the winners of World War II that dominated them. Rich countries, principally the United States of America, paid for the UN system’s functioning and their pre-eminence was formally recognised by their permanent membership of the Security Council and their lien on the leadership of powerful institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Likewise, the lopsidedness of cricket’s finances is what it is and the BCCI’s clout in the cricketing world is not bad or wrong in itself.
What is interesting is the use that the BCCI has made of this power. The de facto dominance of Test cricket’s calendar by India, England and Australia is understandable. You could argue that this triumvirate could play more Tests with other full members of the ICC, but Test cricket has been unequally distributed since it began. For example, after Australia played an inaugural Test against New Zealand in 1946, it didn’t play another Test against the Kiwis till 1973! India didn’t pioneer the unequal distribution of bilateral Test cricket and it is unreasonable to blame it for not
creating a perfectly equitable cricketing order.
You could, though, reasonably expect a country like India, which has been at the receiving end of first-world hauteur, to use its standing as a leader of the non-Western world and its leverage as the richest cricketing nation to leaven its dominance with the appearance of statesmanship. A country becomes hegemonic when other countries accept its leadership voluntarily, without overt coercion. The West became hegemonic after World War II because it managed to project itself as the guardian of the rules-based international order. While this order was rigged to suit the West and mainly honoured in the breach, it gave Western dominance a certain legitimacy. It isn’t hard to see the difference in the look of a hegemonic United States under Barack Obama and the nakedly coercive juggernaut run by Donald Trump.
In 1996, post-apartheid South Africa played its first Test in India. There was a symbolism to this: India had shunned the apartheid regime since it became independent, and the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela saw India as a moral ally. In 1996, India’s cricketing establishment co-hosted a World Cup with Pakistan and Sri Lanka and a joint Indo-Pak team toured Sri Lanka after the Australians pulled out of a match citing security concerns raised by Sri Lanka’s ongoing civil war. The Sri Lankan board acknowledged how much this gesture of solidarity meant to its cricket.
Compare this to the BCCI forcing the Kolkata Knight Riders to drop Mustafizur Rahman after the franchise had bought him at auction. A Bangladeshi player who had played for various teams in the IPL over the past decade was suddenly deemed radioactive, allegedly because of the deterioration in relations with Bangladesh after Sheikh Hasina’s ouster. The specific provocation, apparently, was the lynching of a Hindu in Bangladesh.
Politicians and godmen in Maharashtra attacked KKR for buying Rahman when their Hindu co-religionists in Bangladesh were in danger. A majoritarian political establishment, on whose watch dozens of Muslims had been lynched over the last decade, decided to make political capital out of anti-minority violence in Bangladesh. There is a state election imminent in West Bengal, the Bharatiya Janata Party has made no secret of its overweening desire to politically own the state, and it is politically useful to performatively drop a Muslim Bangladeshi to show Bengal’s Hindu voters that the BJP government, via the good offices of the BCCI, is fighting the Hindu corner. That Shah Rukh Khan, guilty of being India’s marquee king while being Muslim, is part owner of KKR, was a bonus.
This willingness to use cricketers as grist for the government’s communal mill isn’t clever. Bangladesh is not Pakistan; it is a nation that India spent blood and treasure midwifing into existence. To use cricket to aggravate an already fraught relationship is the opposite of what a canny hegemonic power would do. The BCCI’s provocation allowed Pakistan to grandstand in its turn, consolidating a nexus between Pakistan and Bangladesh that can’t be in India’s interest either in cricket or geopolitics. India might get its way in the ICC for now but, in the long term, no national cricket board is dying to be the sidekick of an 800-pound gorilla with a sideline in coercion. Hegemons don’t behave this crudely; bullies with no strategic sense do.
Britain’s BBC has recently reported that Indian owners of franchises in the Hundred (England’s version of the IPL) might exclude players from Pakistan because they want to keep the BJP government in India onside. It’s one thing for India not to play bilateral series with Pakistan or to bar Pakistani players in their individual capacity from participating in an Indian league. It’s quite another for Indian stakeholders in foreign leagues to discriminate against professional cricketers because India’s ruling party has decided to flex its cricketing muscle. Indian companies own T20 teams in several leagues in the UAE, the United States, South Africa and England. If the BBC
story turns out to be true, Indian cricket’s political masters will be responsible for poisoning the well of franchise cricket in other countries with the subcontinent’s sectarian toxins. No sovereign nation will long tolerate that.
The BCCI and its political bosses have, like Trump, overreached. If they don’t learn to play nice with other members of the ICC from a position of strength, they will find out, like Trump’s America is starting to, that no country by itself can ever be the only game in town.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
