JOIN USCricket and fairness: A missing conversation
Published two months ago by Cricket South Africa (CSA), the main cricket authority of South Africa, the Social Justice and Nation Building Project (SJN) report offers a picture of the racial tensions in their cricketing world. When the Black Lives Matter movement elicited support from Black South African cricketers, a few White cricketers didn’t wish to go along, revealing serious moral differences among them. In response, CSA put together the SJN to “promote unity and reconciliation” through “promoting equality in cricket” and discovering the causes and nature of racial discrimination in South African cricket. Over a five-month period, former and current cricket players, cricket clubs, coaches, cricket administration personnel as well as journalists and academics testified at the SJN hearings.
The aim of reconciliation and the method of public hearings clearly reveal the influence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the epic experiment started in 1995 to enable South African society to deliberate the racial violence in its past with deep honesty and a spirit of forgiveness and show a commitment to build a non-violent post-apartheid future. The SJN hearings, which were live-streamed, saw renewed public discussions on a familiar problem. While the submissions made at these hearings weren’t cross-verified, which make their findings, in the words of the SJN report, “merely tentative,” they did confirm the prevalence of occasional racial bias in player selection and of racial hostility among a few White players. The continued lack of access to sports resources and training among large numbers of poor South Africans also came to the fore.
While the SJN report was being written, an English cricketer’s complaint of racism from his teammates, in mid-November, made England, Wales and Scotland put serious effort into addressing racism in their cricket.
These events cannot not provoke curiosity about the institutional realities of cricket in India. Although formal complaints of discrimination of any kind are rare to find in Indian cricket, cricket lovers in the past did talk about the clout exercised by certain regions - “Bombay lobby” and “North Indian lobby,” -- and the high handedness of team captains costing, at times, talented players a spot in the team.
Chroniclers of Indian cricket have also noted the disproportionately high number of Brahmin players from large cities and the lower proportion of players from tribes, lower and Dalit castes, and Muslims and Christians in India’s cricket teams.
These facts cannot, of course, be presumed to have surely resulted out of discrimination and might as well have come about due to the better economic backgrounds of upper caste cricketers and their greater access to better education and sporting facilities in cities.
Indeed, in recent years, the presence of players from middle castes and small towns in the Indian cricket team has gone up. But, in any case, it is crucial to have a reliable sense for how the institutional processes surrounding Indian cricket work, and not settle for a lazy faith in automatic course correction over time. In this regard, alas, Indian universities are yet to host solid social science research on the country’s sporting realities.
The CSA’s homepage lists “Mutual Respect and Fairness” among its three core values. In contrast, words like respect, fairness and equality are tough to find on the homepage of the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI) or even in its 100-page-long constitution, reflecting the absence of conversations, either internally or in the wider public, on tackling the social obstacles to democratic cricketing culture, on acknowledging religion, caste, tribe and regional identities as potential sources of uncivil conduct among the players, coaches and the cricket administration, on imagining proper ways of addressing the tensions they might occasion. The BCCI’s endorsement of the International Cricket Council’s Anti-Racism Code can do little to help address the ethical dilemmas unique to the Indian context.
India could wait for a crisis to erupt before awakening to the moral gaps in its institutional imagination of cricket. Or, it could start doing something about it right away, not in the spirit of social engineering as much as of a graceful effort in sportsmanship, a virtue that continues to make up the soul of cricket.
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