Let's not be the big bullies of cricket
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
February 10, 2008

So our cricket tour of Australia continues, with Harbhajan Singh newly certified as a foul-mouthed non-racist. This has occurred to general approval in our country, where it now seems that abusing someone's mother is deemed less offensive than abusing his genes (which, of course, were transmitted through his mother).

No one seems to want to end the dreadful exchanges of insults that pass for conversation between opponents on the cricket field these days; rather, there is a general determination to give back as good as one gets, with Indian players assuring the media that their vocabulary is as colourful as the Australians, and more polyglot to boot.

So, there is no point in delivering yet another lecture on how cricket used to be a gentleman's game, where the only chatter that escaped the players' lips used to be a decorous and sporting "well done, old chap." Such lectures have been delivered all too often before, and I am sure I am not the only one to lament the disappearance of decencies from the cricket field.

The obscene gestures made by bowlers when they capture a wicket, the filthy "sledging" uttered by Australians (and now others) to distract the opposition, and the reduction to the routine of the kind of language that in one's schooldays would have led to one's mouth being washed out with soap are all, alas, commonplace in cricket now. The evil genie has escaped the lamp, and there is little prospect of its being stuffed back in by the world's pusillanimous cricket administrators.

So, I would not waste a column on that subject.

But since cricket is in the air (and on the tube) these days, I'd like to address a broader issue of incivility: the great danger that the resolution of the crisis might have ushered in a new cricketing reputation for India, as the big bully of the cricket world. In my January 20 column, before the Hansen hearing that allowed Harbhajan back onto the cricket field, I had warned: "Once we have lodged an appeal, we have every obligation, as a responsible and law-abiding country, to honour its findings.

To imply that we would reject any guilty verdict as a slight to our national honour is to undermine the very process in which we have engaged." Yet, it does seem as if the BCCI did precisely that. The Indian players who had arrived in Melbourne to join the team for the One-Day series were told to get onto a plane and fly to Adelaide, where Harbhajan was being "tried", instead of practising and getting accustomed to the conditions where they were expected to play their next match.

The BCCI described this as an "act of solidarity." Word soon spread - whether inspired by official Indian sources or not, no one can say - that the BCCI had even chartered a plane to take the players back home in the event of the independent judge finding against Harbhajan.

Whether Judge Hansen was even aware of this prospect, we will never know, and I have no reason to believe the implied threat of a premature end to the tour weighed upon him at all during his deliberations. His well-reasoned judgement suggests that he would have reached his conclusions without anyone else's urging him to do so. But the widespread belief that India would have walked out on the rest of the tour had Harbhajan been found guilty - an attitude that Americans call "my way or the highway" - lay behind much of the negative Australian (and not only Australian) reaction to the outcome.

Peter Roebuck, a former cricketer who was sympathetic enough to India to call for Ponting to be sacked over his team's conduct during the Sydney Test, wrote that "India's performance in the Harbhajan Singh case counted amongst the most nakedly aggressive actions taken in the history of a notoriously fractious game.

If this is the way the Indian board intends to conduct its affairs hereafter, then God help cricket." Hyperbole? I'm afraid not. It is dangerous, I had observed in my previous column, to act as if the undoubted financial weight of India in world cricket entitles us to our own set of rules.

A senior BCCI official had privately joked that we were now strong enough, and rich enough, to behave in the ICC as the US has always behaved in the WTO. Even the Number One team in world cricket, Australia, needs India more than India needs them; it's Indian advertisers, pursuing several hundred million Indian eyeballs glued to their TV screens during a match, who enable the BCCI to account for nearly 90% of the game's global revenues. Had we pulled out of the tour, the Australian cricket board would have been crippled.

Sure, India would have had to pay a huge fine, but the BCCI might soon have recouped its losses by organising a bilateral tourney in Singapore or Abu Dhabi against Pakistan. It is this sense that it's our money that makes the cricket world go around, and the rest had better treat us appropriately, that has led to our petulant threat to go home if things don't go our way - and the resulting perception, on the part of the rest of the world, that we are becoming insufferable.

Of course, we shouldn't take abuse lying down. Of course the Australians, by complaining, demonstrated that they can dish it out but they can't take it. But our cricket administrators would be better off trying to change the way the game is administered - trying to ban sledging, reviewing the rules on appointing umpires and referees (and the guidelines governing their work), promoting greater recourse to technology in contentious moments - than threatening not to play the game at all.

For the last six decades we've built up a global reputation, at the United Nations and bilaterally, as a nation that respects the rule of law. Let's not throw it away by tearing up the laws of cricket.