Underlying the campaigns of the Presidential candidates in America, irrespective of party affiliations, is a shared repudiation of all that Bush stands for. “Change” is the catchword Obama has chosen. It remains undefined but most of his rivals have also endorsed it in varying degrees without appearing to do so. No player on the international stage has been as vilified as Bush has been, not only by his fellow citizens but by his critics around the world. Yet this vilification has not been directed against the man alone but against America, the sole superpower, and beyond this against the community known collectively as the West. Some of us would like to see America restored, warts and all, but the clock can’t be put back.

Phantom itches of a superpower

Disparagement of this community has not been confined to its policies with a bearing on its relations with the non-West world. It is a community mired in the incredible Iraqi mess of its own creation. Iran and North Korea defy it at every turn. Taliban, supposedly eliminated, refuses to die. Afghanistan shows no sign of ceasing to be a no man’s land. Entrepreneurs from the Third World have made dramatic incursions into an economy hitherto the exclusive domain of the West.

Yemen, despite furious American protests, has released a terrorist allegedly involved in the attack on the US destroyer Cole. The Iraqi government, in theory a creature of the US, has frustrated the Americans by appearing to restore the Baathists while in reality compensating the victims of the Baath party. Both the World Bank and the IMF have been overtaken by second thoughts on democracy and a “free market capitalism” that has — in the words of the Bank’s new chief economist — “taken care of their own and favoured third world clients”.

Tectonic shift in global power

At another level there was the to-do over the Danish cartoons and there is also the ongoing dispute about the religious and identity implications of Sikh turbans. American “allies” do not now bother to conceal the reservations they have always had. This is a list of resistance, defiance and assertion by the non-West world that can be indefinitely extended. The West is not in retreat but is notably on the defensive. More than half-a-century ago the then President of Guatemala, installed in office by the CIA, said to Nixon, “Tell me what you want to do and I will do it.”

Not all countries have been as obsequious as that but nearly all, in different ways, have doffed their caps at the superpower and toed the line as laid down by Washington. The point which all this underlines is that the beginnings of a global power shift are now there for all to see. In the short term the West, with its resilience, has no serious concerns. But in the long term the fear lurking at the moment somewhere behind a confident facade will begin to take on the character of an angry backlash.

More to cricket than meets eye

Here in India haven’t we seen in the cricketing fracas with Australia a small scale mirror image of what is going on in the larger context of world affairs? Unknown to themselves all those in the ICC, Cricket Australia, the BCCI, and cricketers playing the game in the middle were and are puppets in a drama that owes its origins to the distant colonial past. Mike Procter, formerly of South Africa, argues in defence of his Harbhajan verdict, that he understands racism. But there are two sides to the racist fence and Procter predictably chose the one he was destined to prefer.

In the global world human rights, liberty, democracy, the rule of law and all such admirable concepts have been defined to suit the interests of those empowered by money and the clout it provides. Similarly the rules of cricket are defined by an Aussie and white dominated ICC, and the money power that has now shifted to the BCCI is the subject of querulous complaints and is being condemned as a blackmail weapon.

What started as an exhibition of outrageously incompetent umpiring became a racial issue not by any initiative from the Indian side but from Ponting whose formal complaint developed into a major confrontation. Of interest also is Peter Roebuck’s criticism of the Aussie players, in particular Ponting, and his subsequent accusation of the Indian side as guilty of “naked aggression”. In the first instance he looked at cricket as cricket. In the second he saw, however dimly, that cricket in the present case was more than cricket and reacted accordingly.

Cricket and colonialism

Taking their cue from this the Aussie players have accused Cricket Australia of letting them down and surrendering to money power. Since when has the West’s money power not been deployed to bolster its dominance? Then there is the confusion deliberately or inadvertently created, between the racial charge against Harbhajan and later charge of “verbal abuse,” a distinction not always made clear in the Aussie media. The first has been summarily dismissed. It was in relation to the second that Hansen spoke of a harsher penalty if he had known of the “bowler’s past record”. Yet this stiffer penalty was highlighted in the Aussie media as linked to the racial charge, fuelling resentment among the Aussie players against Cricket Australia.

Over the centuries the East has been the victim of discrimination, humiliation and often brutal exploitation. How ironical that, in a reversal of this historical injustice, it is now accused of racism by Australian cricketers whose apparent purpose in life is to win always whatever the cost and means. One moral from all this ugliness surely is that colonialism is no more but the attitude it fostered, openly displayed until the recent past and now discreetly concealed, nevertheless survives.