If any sport can bring most Indians together in front of the television, it is cricket, the gentleman’s game. In the late eighties and early nineties in most of the villages, cricket was the only entertainment. There were lush, green fields before the market-driven economy hit India. Villagers, boys, mostly irrespective of caste and class played cricket together and the girls were the spectators cheering for them.
Sometimes the girls used to form their team but there were no boys to cheer for them. In most of the villages, there was a set of television and the entire village used to gather together to watch battery-run TV, since electricity was not there. But things started changing after the Babri Masjid demolition and the rise of Hindutva in India.
Cricket was a festival for all Indians, now the minorities are being robbed of the joy.
The Babri Masjid demolition and the rise of Hindutva politics started appropriating every festival in its way and the choice of the minorities started being questioned
Cricket was a festival for all Indians, now the minorities are being robbed of the joy. Now it’s celebrated in a certain way and the minorities are always afraid, in a dilemma about whether to participate in the celebration or not.
In most of the cases, they are not allowed to celebrate it either. With every win of the Men’s Cricket team, the rally that they take out comes out with the exclusive slogan – Jai Shree Ram replacing the earlier slogans like Jai Ho or Indian Cricket Team Zindabad.
Cricket has been turned into a litmus test of patriotism for the Indian Muslims. Indian Muslims have to prove their Indianness every day now and cricket is not an exception. During the 2025 Champions Trophy, a 15-year-old boy’s father’s shop was bulldozed because allegedly he gave a slogan in favour of the Pakistan cricket team. The buck didn’t stop there, Shinde Sena MLA Nilesh Rane has been quoted in a report saying, ‘ensure he [the minor’s father] is eventually thrown out of the district‘
In 2017, 15 men were arrested as they allegedly supported the Pakistan cricket team. This has been a regular exercise now. But now things are taking a communal turn even after the Indian Male Cricket Team’s match with other teams. After the Indian Male Cricket Team’s victory against New Zealand in the Champions trophy’s final match, a communal clash erupted in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. Every victory is now being portrayed as a shameful display of majoritarianism. And it’s being done with the absolute support of the government, both state and central.
Every victory is now being portrayed as a shameful display of majoritarianism. And it’s being done with absolute support of the government, both state and central.
The right to choice has been reduced to a norm on paper only. Now, Muslims have to prove their Indianness through food, songs and attires. Diversity which keeps India going is under attack. In the 2003 Cricket World Cup, the match between India and Pakistan caused a communal riot in India. As Emily Crick, a researcher at Bristol University writes,
‘The Cricket World Cup of 2003 is an interesting case study, because, unlike previous occasions, there was little or no public support for Pakistan from Indian Muslims. In Calcutta, a discussion was held within the police force, which decided that Muslims should be prevented from supporting Pakistan during the match. While this proposal was not carried out, it suggests that the authorities were sufficiently concerned that some Muslims would support Pakistan and that this support was against the ‘national interest.’ India went on to win the match and there were wide-scale celebrations throughout the country. Indian Muslims joined in these celebrations, but were, in some areas, actively prevented from doing so. In Ahmedabad this caused rioting. Violence had similarly occurred during the India-Pakistan encounter in the 1996 World Cup.‘
For Muslim mothers, now a match between the Indian Male Cricket Team and the Pakistan Male Cricket Team is a cause of worry. The television channels make every duel between these two neighbouring nations on the field a war. After the Indian Male Cricket team lost to Australia in 2015, Times Now ran the #ShamedInSydney hashtag on social media.
No other political party in Indian history has used Cricket as a way to propagate hypernationalism as the RSS-backed BJP did. The breath of fascism is mass hysteria. The fascist parties create hysteria of hatred in the masses to vilify the minorities. The cricket-frenzied mobs lynching and bulldozing houses in absolute impunity is a sign of a country heading towards fascism.
Gender and Cricket in India
From print media to electronic media, everywhere it’s written as Indian Cricket Team. To call a male cricket team the Indian Cricket Team by default is a blatant invisibilisation of the Indian Women’s Cricket Team. It’s a recent phenomenon that the Indian Women’s Cricket Team is getting some space after lots of struggle.
To call a male cricket team the Indian Cricket Team by default, is a blatant invisibilisation of the Indian Women Cricket Team.
Still, there can’t be any comparison between the privilege and power of the Indian Male Cricket Team and the Women’s Cricket Team. From media presence to income, there is always a gross inequality. But the hope is things are changing. So when male cricketers are shown as heroes, and master blasters; the women cricketers are portrayed as “beautiful.”
Indian cricket cannot be absolved of hyper-masculinity. For instance, in an interview on the popular celebrity chat show Koffee With Karan in 2019, cricketer Hardik Pandya boasted about his “sexual conquests.” He went on further to describe how he and his fellow cricketers decide who “gets the girl” based on “talent” and said things like, ‘I like to watch and observe how they [women] move.‘
However, his comments were immediately slammed in the media, earning him a suspension from the governing body. Yuzvendra Chahal mentioned in a podcast how he was treated by Andrew Symonds and James Franklin, they taped his mouth, hands and legs and left him in a room.
Fascism in sports
History should not be forgotten and people should read what Mussolini and Hitler did with sports. In 1932 when FIFA awarded the second edition of the Football World Cup to Italy, Mussolini seized the opportunity to spawn fascism. General Giorgio Vaccaro, the Mussolini-appointed head of the Italian federation, said:
In 2023 India organised the Cricket World Cup and the cricketing world watched how BJP used the world cup as a platform to come to power next year (2024).
In 2023 India organised the Cricket World Cup and the cricketing world watched how BJP used the World Cup as a platform to come to power next year (2024). The critics went on to say that was BJP’s World Cup.
From the naming of stadiums to the choice of venues to the vilification of minorities, the World Cup saw it all.
On patriotism and cricket, the former Bangladesh cricket captain Mashrafe Mortaza’s comment is worth mentioning:
“I say, those who cry ‘patriotism, patriotism’ around cricket if all of them for one day did not drop banana skins on the streets or did not spit on the streets or obeyed traffic rules, the country would have changed. If this huge energy was not wasted after cricket and was used to do one’s work honestly even for a day, that would be showing patriotism. I don’t understand the definition of patriotism of these people.“
How does cricket do any good to us? The critics often accuse that now the BCCI is nothing but an organisation of those in power. BCCI’s obscene financial muscle flexing over all the other cricket-playing nations is hard to ignore. Now Cricket has stopped becoming a fair game, rather it echoes George Orwell’s famous scathing quote about people painting sport as a force for good:
Things are looking grim now. Only cricketers and cricket fans can save the true spirit of the “gentleman’s game”. Until then the minorities have no choice but to add a disclaimer that ‘We Are Not Supporters Of The Pakistani Cricket Team.’
