| In
the midst of the frenzied euphoria after India’s victory
at the Twenty20 World Cup Championship, it may seem
churlish - or even suicidal - to argue that some of
the ecstatic response at this admirable feat is slightly
overdone.
After all, people will say, it is not often that we
get a chance to celebrate and feel good about something,
so why begrudge us our moment of happiness? Why cavil
at cash prizes as reward for victorious cricketers,
or raise eyebrows at Ministers who drop everything to
hang out with "the boys" all day during the
public homecoming celebrations?
Especially as this is apparently just one more sign
that we should feel good about ourselves as Indians.
The cricket victory has been interpreted in much of
the English language media as one more sign of India
not just shining but absolutely radiant, a country confidently
striding forward to take its rightful place as among
the leading world nations.
The day after the "new" World Cup victory,
the Sensex crossed the 17,000 mark for the first time,
going up by more than 1000 points in a shorter time
than ever before, led by record inflows of investment
by Foreign Institutional Investors. Mr. Vijay Mallya
announced that he had purchased shares in Epic, an American
aeronautics company. The rupee increased in value versus
the US dollar – a huge problem for domestic producers,
but a sign of macho strength to others, especially TV
commentators. Do we really need any more evidence that
we will shortly rule the world?
Even if this particular victory is seen as the symbol
of many other sources of national "pride",
however, the reactions do appear excessive. State governments
that have declared themselves to be so strapped for
cash that they cannot provide basic sewerage systems
for the cities or minimal protection to farmers in desperate
financial straits, quickly find enough resources to
shower vast quantities of rupees as prizes for the conquering
heroes. Politicians who have had no time to visit scenes
of major calamities or listen to the woes of citizens
in deep distress, can find enough time to spend the
day fawning publicly on the young cricketers, in an
effort to catch some of the reflected glory.
The cash awards indicate both lack of proportion and
the copycat effect. The Board of Control for Cricket
in India, the richest cricket association in the world,
has generally been extremely niggardly in funding training
facilities and other incentives for young talent, and
especially for women cricket players. The Indian women
cricketers have actually won World Cups before, but
their victories have hardly been noticed, much less
celebrated or rewarded financially by the BCCI. Yet
the Minister for Agriculture, who is also the BCCI Chairman,
announced a cash award for two million US dollars for
the Indian men’s cricket team for its victory in the
new and relatively untested format of Twenty-20 over
cricket, and Rs. 1 crore to star batsman Yuvraj Singh.
This is a somewhat startling sum, even if Mr. Pawar’s
intention was not only to honour the men cricketers
but also to score a point over the upstart Indian Cricket
League. Yet this display of enthusiastic largesse-throwing
was quickly copied by the state governments of Maharashtra,
Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat, all of which announced
fairly large cash awards to the members of the victorious
teams hailing from their own states.
Contrast this with the complete lack of generosity –
or even attention given – to the Indian hockey team
when it won the Asia Cup for hockey less than three
weeks before this. Even after public interest in hockey
was briefly revived because of the success of the (admittedly
wonderful) film Chak de India, the successes of the
Indian men’s hockey team did not lead to much beyond
a few media comments about life imitating art. No victory
processions down the street of any city for them, and
certainly no cash awards in recognition of their achievement.
This is why the Captain and some other team members
of the Indian men’s national hockey team have publicly
expressed their disappointment and even outrage at this
unequal treatment. Yet it could be argued that their
anger misses the point. After all, sport is not really
sport any more, it is primarily spectator entertainment,
and therefore media, and therefore big business. And
so the winner-takes-all tendencies of big business also
affect not just individual sports, but also categories
of sportspersons (women players getting lesser treatment
compared to men players, for example) and the relative
ranking of different sports.
So the government representatives could well argue that
they are simply reflecting the public perceptions and
demands. Cricket currently captures the public imagination
in a way that hockey simply does not, notwithstanding
the recent hugely popular movie. And if hockey players
are to be feted and felicitated, then why not kho kho
players or weightlifters?
The truth is that we are not really a sports-oriented
nation, we are essentially a spectacle- and festivity-oriented
nation. And we have currently chosen cricket as one
of the main vehicles for expressing this tendency. The
shoddy Indian performance at the last one-day World
Cup tournament dealt a blow to this particular avenue
for social obsession, leading to great concern not only
among the cricket establishment, but also - and more
tellingly - among the sponsors and advertisers. There
is surely now a great collective sigh of relief that
this drought in public attention and sponsorship is
now over, at least for now.
It is really this which is the key to everything else.
Bug business – and associated with it, big politics
– is into cricket because it is popular, but it also
has to be kept popular because so much is now at stake
in this game. There are huge financial interests that
benefit from the public celebration of cricket, and
for them, perhaps even more than for the jubilant youth
rejoicing wildly in the rain, India’s victory in this
tournament was important.
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