Demystifying the Indian Punters League

A deafening reminder encrypted in Winston Churchill's reluctance to grant "self governance" to the Crown's prized colonies seems to be echoing across India and Pakistan these days. His references to Indians as 'rascals, rogues and freebooters', 'leaders of low quality and men of straw' with 'sweet tongues and silly hearts' reverberate ever so strongly in the administrations of most of the subcontinent's present-day institutions, and have left people blowing the dust off the rose-tinted glasses with which they had regarded their 'glorious post-colonial future'. The mysteriousness that has characterized Indian society, from the opaqueness of its deep rooted social ills to the bewildering complexity of its customs, clothing and food habits is a perennial exciting proposition to travelers and journeymen, but the stomach bug will eventually get to them.

The latest institution to fall from grace is the corporatized cricket syndicate known as the Indian Premier League. Based, not so stealthily, on it's soccer original that runs in England, it debuted in 2008 like a glamorous product launch from the Indian subsidiary of a global consumer goods multinational. Coming on the back of a successful two decades of tireless fan following of the ODI format (played over 8 hours in one day) and the more erudite fan following of the Test format (played over 5 days), IPL, as it started to be called, had all the components the burgeoning Indian middle class segment was aspiring for:  short duration games to accommodate modern day work and family,  multicultural teams with domestic and 'foreign' players' and some Eastern European hotties thrown around to pop out our conservative eyes on-screen. Add the jingoistic pulse of Indian ethno-regionalism to boot with each of the franchises representing North, South, East and West of the country - and a new consumer juggernaut was unleashed on to simpletons who found the offering too good to be resisted by their growing wallets and impressionable minds.

To clarify this naiveté, one needs to understand that sports has not had any strong cultural roots in India as much as fun and games. Getting together to form successful teams to score or defend a goal is as much a difficult objective off the field in India as much as on it, and sooner will the treachery of an individual lay waste to the albeit moderate labors of the thousands. Growing up in India, one learns the game pretty early - you need a bat and a ball, four wickets you can get hold of (three for the batting end and one for the bowler's end), and half decent space with restrictive rules on hitting the ball so you don't keep hitting 4s on the side which cannot man enough fielders, or break window panes or worse still, lose the ball. But most importantly, as the owner of this modest equipment, I realized very early that I had entitlement to the loose balls which gave me some chance to hit the clearly superior bowling that could easily knock off my stumps (and sometimes break them into pieces) any given day. I had my fair share of the privileged on the other side too - and it was important for me to not inflict Shahid Afridi's fastest hundred on their laughable bowling on large manicured gardens. In India, it is important to learn that no matter what your profession, you are in play because the owners 'let you play', not for the heck of playing. And when you play, treachery and tricks are commonplace - shocking leg-before-wickets and caught behinds because I did threaten as a batsman, but which I amply returned through cellotape-on-one-side-of-the-ball to 'reverse swing it' to amplify my very modest capabilities as a bowler. In the end, winning was joyous and losing did hurt but there were many ulterior motives and hidden feelings played out on the field.

Maybe this sordid tale of my corrupted youth masks the more likely mediocrity as a sportsman but it put to rest any and all qualities of true sportsmanship. But really, whatever big grounds there exist in India are either taken over by retired army generals for beautification or real estate barons for building new housing complexes, and with little or no peer pressure in anything other than the 'sexy college degree', many like me make the wiser choice of attempting in academics and management, what cannot be achieved truthfully on the sport field. In the end, really it was about a good contract at a good company and lots of money. 

To those, like my sister with a keen eye for human behavior, IPL was always 'mostly fixed'. Could it be anything else, really? Maybe the Bollywood-addicted viewer has not been able to differentiate movies from sport, because like I said, it is all in fun and games here. Rochelle and Karishma dangling besides Sunny and Ramiz Raja make far more interesting viewing, as much as Navjot Sidhu's tiresome theatrics  appear so stark in comparison to the staid English women's cricket team captain during pre and post match reviews. Clearly, there was a lurking danger ever present in a volatile Sreesanth, who seemed to be focussed throughout his now gatecrashed career, more on stupid antics (check them here) than fast bowling variations. The danger was seen to the keen observer when a bewildered Adam Gilchrist saw Chandilla actually appeal for a run out off a dead ball. And to those who are deep into the English League and Bundesliga, is it common for the chairman of the league's regulatory body to also be the owner of one if its franchises? And not just any team, rather one that can make it to its 5th final out of 6 appearances! Really, if it is broken, in India you can fix it.

And truth be told, I think I was a wasted talent in batting.

The Case for the Hindu Right

I recently read probably the most insightful, though a not entirely bi-partisan piece on Narendra Modi in Caravan Magazine titled The Emperor Uncrowned, which drew oblique parallels between the rise of the Gujarat Chief Minister to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. While the 11 page research on the man is one of the most detailed, factual and independent opinion in mainstream journalism, if one were to really analyse the opinion, it seems mainly to build a caricature of the fascist personality without establishing any meaningful connection with his rise to the socio-political realities in India. I will proceed to establish this connection, though the objective of this article is primarily to give an understanding of the unique nature, relevance and the role of the Far Right and National Socialism in societies like India.

India represents a large, diverse and complicated nation bound together in a state, and salvation for such a society is a long drawn process who's vision is nebulous, in much the same way as the nation states of the world put together in the United Nations assembly have really established very little of  their vision as a group other than as symbolic guardians of world peace and harmony and international champions of the oppressed. Cementing their legitimacy on the devastation across two World Wars, such a diverse group of people do not have clear cut issues that leaders can voice in Presidential debates like those that occur in the United States, and go about resolving them if a clear mandate provides the opportunity to do so. The absence of this clarity on national issues is precisely the cause and not the effect of a fractured mandate, like those that have been occurring in India since the end of the Rajiv Gandhi era. India today, in many ways like America, is a divided nation, more so than it has ever been since its birth. The cause of this division is, ironically, the never ending continuity of "secular" powers at the helm of national affairs, acting in concert with vested interests overseas for keeping India divided. For a proper understanding of the "secularism" nonsense that is touted in India, Rajiv Malhotra's book Breaking India presents the true perspective.

The Hindu identity over years of absorbing influences from invading forces, has become cloudy. It was an established identity with its richness of wisdom and human achievement across myriad fields that was praiseworthy. Sanskrit, now a dead spoken language, harbors some of the most fascinating thoughts and documentation of history of the Indian nation. It was the language of Indians. The caste system was a societal division of labour involving separation of skills into Education (Brahmins), Military (Kshatriyas), Business (Vaishyas) and Workers (Shudras). Such a system existed even in Europe with the Nobility, Educated Class and the Peasantry, and it was but natural for societies to have such broad classes in order to grow in a disciplined manner.  However, the annihilation of the guardians of the language, and the creation of the Aryan Invasion Theory leading to the Aryan Dravidian divide and the Dalit / Non-Dalit divide by the West, and the Islamic conversions and plunder that preceded the English rule, have colored our lenses at looking at the truth and logic of sub continent history and culture. The resulting fractured identity lies at the root of our country's problems. Once you forget who you truly are and are taught to disrespect your identity and chase a foreign one, your demise is almost certain.

The Hindu Right of today aims to correct our misinterpretations of history and offer a credible alternative to the governance philosophy of the the Congress. Whereas the Congress has steadfastly remained in power all these years owing to the fracturing of both the Hindu vote on lines of caste, and the hold on the "minority" vote, there is change on the horizon. The idea is to both fracture the minority vote and convince "majority" Hindus to vote for a nationalist party on credible grounds of economic development, social renaissance, good governance and most important of all a national awakening - all of which are markedly absent in India these days. Narendra Modi represents this new spirit of an India desiring to clean up its act and stake its place in the world of tomorrow, and must be distinguished from Far Right ideologies in Germany and Japan that started as efforts of similar national resurrection but ended up colossal failures down the road of expansionism that alienated them from the rest of the powerful world.

American Dreams

The problem with American involvement in distant lands was very well summarised, coincidentally, in 1960s World War II film - Judgment at Nuremberg. In the movie, Col. Lawson, playing the public prosecutor in the trial of four judges of the Third Reich remarked to Judge Hayward over drinks - 'We Americans are not cut out to be occupiers. We are new at it, and not very good at it. We like to forgive easily. We like to give the other guy a chance. That's the American way. We've got a built-in inferiority complex.' This identity crisis of the United States gets it embroiled in dilemmas time and again in its relentless pursuit of security, justice and change the world over. America is relatively new to the centuries old colonial pursuit of European powers, and has developed a warped understanding of what constitutes homeland security as well as the costs and benefits inherent in economic and political aims in foreign lands.

To fully grasp the extent of this dilemma, one must turn the pages of history and you will find that American foreign policy was an immensely successful one in so far as it remained primarily a trade policy, i.e when it focused on opening 'markets' overseas for corporations, the true American export. Both the First and Second World Wars proved to be hugely beneficial to this trade with American contribution to the rearmaments of countries, and it actually had a fantastic business model going for itself, until Pearl Harbor necessitated military involvement to exact revenge. And there has been no more brutal a revenge extracted over a treacherous enemy as America extracted over Japan. But the ensuing misplaced fears of Bolshevism running over the world, much like Nazism, sowed the seeds of the present condition of the United States, with military spending rising to illogical levels for a country relatively secure geographically from attempts at annihilation!

From a senseless bulwark development costs close to 40% of GDP in he beginning of the Cold War era, America continued to plough billions of tax dollars evey year over the next few decades to fund a security program against the veritable nuclear-armed alien invasion. No leader on Earth possibly ever harboured a belief that it would be plausible and profitable to attack a geographically secured American continent through conventional means, including Adolf Hitler, who was candid even in Mein Kampf, of the foolishness of such a misadventure. An army of madmen would sooner risk another shot at lebensraum in the East, Napoleon and Hitler's Operation Barbarossa being forgotten, than try an occupation of the American continent through military means. But by building imaginary scenarios across the world on 'threats to American interests',the Americans turned from profitable arms exporters to wannabe colonists in a post colonial world whose erstwhile rulers had already learnt their lessons and started embarking on nation rebuilding and non-militaristic domination of their spheres of influence. And quite intelligently, the Western European powers outsourced, so to speak, their military adventurism to the United States which quite foolishly took over the mantle of global papa. Cut through to the present War On Terror, a justifiable war, but undertaken on a scale that is not only unnecessary but also hopelessly counter-productive in that it ends up feeding militancy. America has spent 1.3 trillion taxpayer dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan, spending between 40 to 50 per cent of the nation's tax collections to secure a continent from thugs with AK47s and minds hypnotized to die in vain. The spending is done in so unsystematic and belligerent a manner as to render the Department of Defense's accounts 'unauditable' till 2017, and a nation higher over an already stiff fiscal cliff over which nothing awaits but death for the US and it's veritable pied pipers of Hamlin. America, and possibly, the entire world, are in the midst of a deeper recession and are more insecure today thanks to these militants, but more thanks to Washington that has made monsters of the rats hiding behind desolate mountains in Af-Pak. The American Dream is really now a Global Nightmare.

Political Will through Compulsory Voting

Throughout my life, whenever there have been elections of any kind, be it for national or state legislatures, provincial or for associations, I have never been able to make sense of the ridiculous turnout percentages. Science taught me the concept of efficiency of machines, and if one were to, for an instance, look at a country's democratic institutions as machines, their inefficiency is but obvious considering only 50 to 60 per cent of input energy effectively goes into their functioning! By this I imply that how can a democratic system that apathetically leaves out sometimes close to half of the electorate during polling can ever be an efficient system of governing a people? How can the individual feel ownership in his choice of leader and governing ideology, or even the will to take a different stand by standing up for elections himself, if he has never felt the will or compulsion to go and exercise such a vital choice? How can a people, if they stop to think of their real contribution to the process that elects their national leaders, feel, they genuinely deserved better from the state? Do they not sometimes think of how futile are their discourses and rants in their living rooms or bars and tea stalls on the issues plaguing their society and individual well being, when the one time their thoughts and complaints would have made a difference, they sat in their living rooms watching the outcome passively on televison sets? In a world that has throughout history shown repeatedly the predisposition to commit crimes that beggar the imagination against individuals, people, races and nations, will it really be a 'crime' and 'violation of rights in a democracy' if participation in elections is made compulsory for every citizen, from whom a few hours of standing in queues is the only sacrifice asked for, in return for which, each citizen gets to observe the outclome of his or her decision for the next several years? Freedom of choice comes hand in hand with the active participation in duties, as an individual, family member and as a citizen, and there is so less thought given to this, that in all honesty, the morass we often find ourselves in is because of our own apathy and indifference. This apathy would be but obvious when the choice of the elected representative goes wrong, which one can see, is such an ever present danger since the myriad tasks before the elected are so vast and complex that few really justify the positions they hold in the councils. But it is precisely when the entire citizenry gives thought to and puts into purposeful action the process of putting differently able and qualified people to their various positions, repeatedly year after year, will the system become efficient, and can the democratic potential of a people be realised and likely shown to be a more credible alternative to authoritarian rule.

The Left Right Horseshoe

It is important to understand that the left to right spectrum is not a straight line but bent like a horseshoe, such that Fascism (far right) and Communism (far left) are ideologically closer than the right and left. This is a well researched but less commonly understood theory of French writer Jean Pierre Faye. And just like a horseshoe magnet exerts its magnetic pull strongly owing to this particular shape, so do far right and far left politics on people hold much greater influence than their more moderate colleagues. The fear of both these extremes have been evident in history, particularly the West's fear and appeasement of Nazism, which, following the latter's defeat in Germany, was immediately replaced by a fear of Communism. This has held true no matter which side the polity was bent during different Governments on the American content - Right or Left. As a corollary, the Far Left and Far Right are much more ideologically predisposed to form working alliances, than the members preceding them on the spectrum, who, in whichever democracy you consider, never seem to come together on anything and paralyse effective collaborative work. History has shown, that Hitler was far more effective in forming these working relationships with Stalin's Soviet Union in the East, than what he could ever hope for in the culturally and geographically closer England and France. His miscalculated invasion of the Soviets, never really helped cement any alliances of the West with Communism, but only opened Germany's west-facing bulwark against invasion. The important lesson  for people here is this. The Left and Right have to understand the importance of coming together as the people who represent them are not extremists but effective, functioning moderates who live in collaborative societies, despite fundamental differences in how they view social and economic inequality! Clearly, the Right will continue to see inequality as a necessary and even desirable condition, which the Left will always see as evil, but amongs it's adherents, everyone collaborates in real life in spite of the ideological differences! The failure of this collaboration by their representative in Parliament, is what makes extremism, whether in left or right form, an ever present danger in every democracy in the world. Sadly, foolish people are condemned to repeat the fallacies of history. And that is what still leaves humans searching for answers when they thought they knew it all. 

The Myopia and Hypocrisy in dealing with Terrorism

The approach of most of the world's civilized nations, and some in the midst of becoming civilized (like India) is most baffling in their strategy to tackle terrorism. There has been no disease known to man that has so confounded civilisation, from the Black Death to Nazism to HIV, that has flourished for as long as terrorism has, unscathed, right in our midsts. Humans have well understood that attack is the best form of defence in any battle for survival, but as far as terrorism is concerned, the impotence of the response is simply beyond reason. India, recently, hanged the sole surviving murderer of 26/11, and spent years in arriving at a decision, that, if it had to be effective, should have taken the form of a public execution at India Gate. But by giving him a voice in a trial and taking almost 4 years to eliminate a surrendered enemy living under our nose is laughable for a country that has even the faintest desire of securing its homeland. There seems to be a collective surrender from every country in the midst of or in the neighbourhood of Islamists, except for Israel and the United States, the only countries pursuing these madmen to their desired extermination - no trial, no jury, straight execution. Can there be a bigger professor of this solution, than Israel, a country surrounded by maniacal enemies for the past 60 years? A country that lives under rocket fire on its capital cities and continues to struggle for survival through a necessary policy of attack as the first form of defense? India, and any other nation, for example, needs to contribute in men, materials and money to the Allies Against Terrorism. Instead of escorting mass murderers on flights to Afghanistan and making a laughing stock of the whole nation in the eyes of the world, we need thousands of men on ground fighting the wars in Af-Pak and the Middle East as a training ground for its armed forces in understanding this menace and tackling it successfully should it strike our homeland again. We need to admit to the dangers present in our country's religious extremists and terrorist cells in Universities, and eliminate the threats, without losing time and hours of sleep over when the next bomb targeting innocent civilians will go off. Wake up!