What if Dalits want Team India to take the knee?

After dancing along the jagged precipice of cultural “wokery” the Indian cricket team is back on its feet again. Aside from the forgettable opening game against Pakistan in all its subsequent encounters at the T20 World Cup, it did not “take the knee” in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s wise to have stopped taking the knee Perhaps the Indian team was rattled by fan ire and put its foot down. And that’s natural. While the team is accustomed to being panned by fans for their on-field performances, they’ve seldom ever been trolled for placing the wrong foot forward on the even more unpredictable political pitch. In the absence of any official reasoning, one doesn’t know what prompted the rethink, but shouldering arms to a potent symbolic googly bowled on the global stage by the BLM movement was a wise decision. No one has a problem with the Indian cricket team taking a stand against racism. Least of all the fans. To be sure those that criticised the Indian team for taking the knee are not racists. Indians have collectively suffered racial abuse for centuries under the British Raj and need no reminding, much less from woke folks, that we are obliged to fight it. This wasn’t like the stand against Apartheid Fans were appreciative when, for the latter half of the 20th century, BCCI became one of the few sporting bodies to laudably stand in solidarity with blacks in South Africa, who were stigmatised and scarred by Apartheid enforced by the white supremacist regime there. Till the regime was ousted, BCCI resolutely refused to play against South African teams in line with economic and political sanctions imposed by a select club of conscientious countries in the free world. Closer to home, the Indian cricket team and BCCI have been enthusiastic champions of worthy Indian social causes. But the recent “cultural awokening” of BCCI and its embrace of the iconography of the BLM movement was threatening to force our cricketing heroes to chase curved balls best left alone in a larger game of gesture politics. BLM is a divisive issue even in the US Taking the knee is the appropriation of an American movement that is specific to a very particular set of social and political circumstances in that country. A section of American political analysts will tell you that the agenda of the BLM movement in America is very different from the message that gestures like taking the knee were originally intended to send out: Fighting for the right to life and liberty of the historically discriminated black community. Taking the knee is now considered a controversial and divisive call to action against American “white male privilege” and “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”, to transform America. into what no one knows. But here’s one possible insight. BLM founder Patrisse Cullors admitted to being a “trained Marxist”. Another founder Opal Tometi has commended Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro for “championing participatory democracy” through revolution in Bolivia. Since then, United Nation’s investigators have singled out Maduro for ordering the systematic killing and torture of critics in clear violation of human rights. Politics shouldn’t be dragged into sports So why then did BCCI allow itself to get pulled onto the altar of US partisan politics? Who came up with the idea of taking the knee that clearly goes beyond virtue signalling? Of course, some speaking in defence of BCCI are saying that creating dissonance and sparking debate was the whole point of the gesture. People need a proverbial knee in the shins to feel the pain felt by blacks for centuries. And a suitably “awokened” conscience fuels empathy. This is a moot point. After all, there are consequences of dragging politics onto a sports ground – one of the few remaining spaces that allow people from different persuasions to rally together. How would BCCI react if the Sri Lankan board were to decide that all visiting players should take the knee in solidarity with the countless Sinhalese who perished in the war against LTTE? Closer to home, what if Dalit organisations or Kashmiri Hindu groups wrote to BCCI to also take the knee for causes dear to them? This is not entirely improbable and may yet happen now that a precedent has been set. If BCCI were to turn down these invocations to justice, would the board be guilty of selective discrimination? The last over hasn’t been bowled and BCCI must now hope that it isn’t forced onto the backfoot over a silly point. The writer is Editor-in-Chief, Times Now