A day before NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were to return onboard a SpaceX crew capsule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi published a letter in which he said he had inquired after her when he met U.S. President Donald Trump and that even if “you are thousands of miles away, you remain in our hearts”.

Union Minister of State Jitendra Singh declared “a moment of glory, pride and relief” when Williams, whom he called “this illustrious daughter of India”, splashed down in Florida Bay. He lauded her “for the courage, conviction and consistency with which she endured the uncertainties of space”.

If one had only Singh’s note to read, one may not have realised another person, Barry Wilmore, endured what she had or that there were two other astronauts in the capsule when it descended. Yet Singh’s peers, including Jyotiraditya Scindia and Piyush Goyal, also published similar posts on their LinkedIn profiles extolling Williams alone. Scindia even thanked the other two astronauts “for rescuing our brave warriors of the space”. ISRO chimed in as well.

Williams was born in Ohio to Indian and Slovene American parents; her father emigrated from India in 1958. As such, she lived, studied, and worked all in the US. While the extent to which she is “Indian” per se is debatable, self-identity is personal and ultimately for Williams to determine.

In the last half year, however, many news reports in the mainstream press have referred to her as being of “Indian origin” or as “Indian-American”. Labels like this are poorly defined, if at all; writers and authors typically use them on the basis of a pulse or a sentiment. Are they accurate? It might seem that it does not matter whether a minister refers to Williams as a ‘woman of India’, that there is no price to pay. But there is.

In and of themselves, the pronouncements about Williams are not problematic. They become that way when one recalls what has been given to her, and by whom, that has been denied to many others, some arguably more deserving. An example from recent memory is wrestlers Vinesh Phogat and Sakshi Malik, whose peaceful protest to reform India’s professional wrestling administration was quelled violently by police acting on orders of the Union government. They were not “India’s daughters” then.

The year after, in 2024, when Phogat was disqualified from participating in the finals of the 50-kg wrestling event at the Paris Olympics, the immediate reaction was to allege a conspiracy, blame her for not trying hard “enough”, and to ask whether she had let Indians down even though the prime minister had “let” her participate despite her role in the protests.

There was no meaningful discussion or dialogue in government circles about systematically averting the circumstances that saw Phogat exit the Olympics, instead it seemed to grate that she had come so close to a monumental success yet still missed out.

The chief minister of Haryana, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre, celebrated Phogat’s return to India as if she had had a podium finish, arranging for merriment on the streets of her home state. It was an attempt to paper over his peers’ accountability with sound and fury.

Williams occupies a similar liminal space: as Phogat had lost yet not lost, Williams was not Indian yet Indian — both narratives twisting the lived realities of these women in the service of a common message: that India is great. Williams’s feats in the space and spaceflight domains have been exceptional, but neither more than other astronauts who have gone to space on long missions nor because India had any role in facilitating it.

Presumably in response to an excellent article by Chethan Dash at The Times of India, Singh said on March 19 that the government had not arranged for India’s own astronaut-designates — the four men in the shortlist to pilot Gaganyaan’s maiden crewed flight — to have conversations with the press and the public at large, at a time when an exceptional number of people were interested in Williams’s life and work. The government had clearly missed an invaluable opportunity to build interest in the Indian space programme. Its excuse did not wash either: that the astronauts had to not be “distracted”.

The loud and repeated bids to coopt Williams’s success as India’s by extension has been disingenuous, a continuing pattern of crusting the shell with as many jewels as possible to hide the infirmity within.

The space to disagree with the Election Commission’s position vis-à-vis the integrity of electronic voting machines without finding oneself backtracking into the Congress or the BJP camps is shrinking, and both national parties as well as the Supreme Court have been wilfully engendering this state of affairs at the expense of — ironically — logic.

The Congress on November 24, 2024:

Dr. Parameshwara, who was also the AICC observer for Maharashtra elections, told presspersons that his party leaders, including former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, discussed the EVM issues and were planning to appeal to the Election Commission of India (ECI) in this regard. “We are now sure that till the EVMs are used, there is no hope for the Congress or any other party other than the BJP. There is an urgent need to return to ballot papers,” he said.

The Supreme Court on November 26, 2024:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday (November 26, 2024) indicated a level of hypocrisy attached to criticism about Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), saying “EVMs are tampered when you lose and fine if you win”. The oral remark was made by Justice Vikram Nath before dismissing a petition filed by evangelist K.A. Paul, who sought a judicial order to return to paper ballots.

Also the Supreme Court in April 2024:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday underscored that it cannot ask the Election Commission of India (ECI) to disclose the source codes of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) as it can result in its misuse. The source code often called “the brain” refers to a set of instructions that tells the machine how to function. A Bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta made the observation while hearing a batch of petitions seeking 100% cross-verification of the vote count in EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips.

The BJP on November 27, 2024:

Taking a swipe at the Congress president over his latest remarks on the EVMs, BJP Lok Sabha MP and national spokesperson Sambit Patra also said Mr. Kharge can go to “planet Mars” taking Gandhi with him and “live there happily” if he doesn’t want electronic voting machines, Election Commission, Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation, judiciary and the Modi government.

And the Congress on November 30, 2024:

In his opening remarks to the CWC, party president Mallikarjun Kharge mentioned the electronic voting machines (EVMs) making the poll process “suspect”. And that set the tone for the speakers who followed him, as the discussions mostly focussed on EVMs and the Election Commission (EC).Veteran leader Digvijaya Singh was the first among CWC members to question EVMs. While Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Singhvi argued for a nuanced approach and pitched for 100 per cent voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT), Ms. Vadra said the party should press for a return to ballot paper. Mr. Gandhi urged his colleagues to “adopt a firm stand and take the issues to the hilt and convert it into a movement”.

We don’t need a “movement” because we don’t know that EVMs are the issue! This is a farce. It’s helping only the Congress — and then again only by fanning the flames of a misguided suspicion. The BJP’s overreach vis-à-vis many of the institutions of Indian democracy, including the Reserve Bank (RBI), the Enforcement Directorate (ED), and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), has rendered all of them suspect, especially when some outcome goes the BJP’s way when it wasn’t expected to.

But a mismatch between expectations and outcomes alone can never be conclusive proof of malfeasance. Today many people harbour similar doubts about the Election Commission — and it’s easy to understand this isn’t implicitly unwarranted or even unfair. However, the Election Commission’s integrity vis-à-vis the tallies of votes cast in an election offers a handle on the situation that the RBI, ED, the CBI or any other such institution can’t offer: mathematics.

Contrary to the Supreme Court’s views about electronic voting machines (EVMs) harbouring some kind of “source code” that must be protected at all costs, EVMs are simple signal counters whose security arises from more sophisticated means. Their electronics are isolated from external sources of input and their ability to count votes is tested in a specific way at each polling booth before the machines are set up for public use. Indeed, as a counter of votes, ‘leaking’ the “source code” of EVMs is pointless because anyone can write it up on their own: it’s after all an algorithm to count how many different buttons are pushed, each of which produces a distinct signal.

But thanks to the Election Commission’s reluctance to submit its machines to independent testing and abetted by the Supreme Court’s refusal, inability or disinterest in the technical architecture of EVMs, any questions about the integrity of EVMs — specifically their abilities to count votes a specific way and of an external actor to interfere in this process — falls under the wheels of contempt of the Supreme Court or, thanks to the BJP’s habitual overreach, allegations of anti-nationalist activity. This is unfortunate.

EVMs make use of mathematics to operate just the way modern computers do. They both have the same fundamental components, just put together differently for different purposes. And just as it’s possible to test whether a computer is working as intended without taking it apart, it’s possible to test EVMs without taking them apart. Independent researchers can test an EVM without touching it, without in any way being able to access its constituent components (except to supply input signals and receive output signals), and without even knowing its internal logic — and with an Election Commission official monitoring the whole process.

Even Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Singhvi’s demand for 100% VVPAT has met with a corresponding fate at the apex court (brought there by a different petitioner) — and yet which is similarly unnecessary. From The Hindu, April 15, 2024:

The VVPAT-based audit of EVMs … very similar to the “lot acceptance sampling technique” that is widely used in industry and trade. If the number of defectives found in a randomly drawn statistical sample is less than or equal to a specified acceptance number, the lot (or ‘population’) is accepted; otherwise, the lot is rejected. … The hypergeometric distribution model should form the basis of the sampling plan for the VVPAT-based audit of EVMs because it is an exact fit. In the discussion that follows, we assume the percentage of defective EVMs in the population (P) to be 1%, and calculate sample sizes, for various population sizes, for 99% probability of detecting at least one defective EVM. We also compute the probability that the ECI-prescribed sample size of “five EVMs per Assembly constituency” will fail to detect a defective EVM for different population sizes. The great merit of the hypergeometric distribution model is that the sample size is the greatest when P is very close to zero (which is what the ECI claims it is), and it becomes lesser as P increases. …

We can use the ‘plateau effect’ of sample sizes to divide the bigger States into ‘regions’ (an integral number of districts) with EVM population sizes of about 5,000 each. We treat “EVMs deployed in the region” as the ‘population’. On average, there would be about 20 Assembly constituencies in a region. The sample size required is 438 and the average number of EVMs per Assembly constituency whose VVPAT slips are to be hand counted is 22. For example, U.P with 1,50,000 EVMs can be divided into 30 regions with roughly 5,000 EVMs each. In the event of a defective EVM turning up, the hand counting of VVPAT slips of the remaining EVMs will confined to the region. This option is statistically robust and administratively viable.

But like the Supreme Court, the Congress isn’t interested in mathematical tests of EVMs’ integrity. This sounds bizarre because the Congress wants something the Supreme Court won’t give — but instead of disagreeing with the court’s refusal to have EVMs independently tested, which is where the problem really lies, the party has elected to disagree with the Indian government’s decision in the 1990s to switch paper ballots with EVMs.

A return to paper ballots is a terrible, terrible idea that forgets how much EVMs simplify the vote-casting activity (while removing ‘bad votes’) and speed up the whole process, all the way up to recounting, while requiring fewer safeguards to prevent mistakes or interference. But worse: neither the Congress nor any activists supporting the demand to revert to paper ballots can claim to understand how EVMs work or what really could be going wrong, if it is.

The party may lack a member with the skills to test the machines and the Election Commission may be disinclined to comply to requests — but this doesn’t mean “it’s working as intended” and “it’s not working as intended” are the only two possible outcomes here. There’s a third: “we don’t know”. And the ignorant views of both political and judicial leaders are eroding the space for this possibility in public dialogue.

Because the outcomes in the Maharashtra state assembly election defied the expectations of Congress et al., the party and its allies have stretched their latent distrust of the Election Commission to the extreme of assuming they also know the EVMs malfunctioned and/or the commission misbehaved. No one in this milieu is stopping to consider they don’t know something because they lack proof of malfeasance and/or misbehaviour.

Thus no one will pursue even a public debate on an independent democratic mechanism that acquires and places in the public domain data from the integrity tests of EVMs slated for use in specific elections. But they will pursue a (presumably) national “movement” by attributing with no evidence their loss in a recent election on EVMs with or without the Election Commission’s imaginary complicity while demanding a return to a primitive voting system, and about which the commission and the national government will do nothing other than to make snarky comments while the Supreme Court issues uncritical remarks.

Featured image credit: Dmitrii Vaccinium/Unsplash.

From my article in The Hindu today, New science awards, old political project:

The government has been trying repeatedly to shut … the opposition to its policies and world view emanating from academia, a space the Hindutva programme has thus far failed to breach by choking funding and revenue through the Finance Ministry and provisions of the Foreign Contributions (Regulations) Act, using bad science or pseudoscience, interfering in administrative matters, and even using violence. …

This said, nothing illustrates the ham-fisted character of the government’s attempts … as clearly as the sites of ‘alternative’ scholarship it has set up. The purpose of these sites appears to be to realise or sustain the plausibility of the claims of the Hindutva political project. … Having failed at political capture from the outside, the BJP has been taking the inside-out route. The RVP awards seem like an attempt to bring scholars in line by hijacking their reward mechanisms.

The headlines in Indian mainstream media over the course of June 6, after Boeing (finally) launched its Starliner capsule on its first crewed test flight…

… betray a persistent inability to let go of the little yet also false pride that comes with calling Sunita Williams an “Indian-American” astronaut. This is from the Wikipedia page on Williams:

Williams is a native of Needham, Massachusetts, was born in Euclid, Ohio, to Indian-American neuroanatomist from Mumbai, Deepak Pandya, and Slovene-American Ursuline Bonnie (Zalokar) Pandya, who reside in Falmouth, Massachusetts. She was the youngest of three children. … Williams’ paternal family is from Jhulasan in the Mehsana district in Gujarat, India, whereas her maternal family is of Slovene descent.

Williams’s national identity is (US-of-) American. She was born in the US and spent all her formative years there, studying and working within an institutional framework that had little to do with India. Why is she still “Indian-American” or even “Indian-origin”, then? By the simple, even facile, virtue of her father having left the country in search of greener pastures after his MD, the forced India connection reeks of a desperation to cling to her achievements as at least partly our own. India doesn’t have a woman astronaut and facing up to this and other impossibilities and eliminating them is an important way that every country has to grow. But keep thinking she’s partly Indian and you may never have to think about what could be stopping women in India from becoming astronauts in future.

This said, I know very little about Williams’ upbringing. According to Wikipedia, she’s a practising Hindu and has taken copies of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads to space with her. But I fail to see why these features would make her national identity “Indian-American”. Like me, I imagine the people at large know little about her cultural identity considering her shared Indian and Slovenian heritage. I’d also be wary of conflating the social and political culture of India in the 1950s, when her father left the country, with that prevalent today. A close friend who grew up in India and now lives in the US told me in a conversation last year that pre-2014 India seems lost to her forever. I think even the recent outcome of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections may not change that: a lot of damage Hindu nationalism has wrought is irreversible, especially — but not restricted to — making it okay to aspire to inflicting violence on minorities and liberals. Thus, by all means, even the contrived “Indian” in “Indian-American” refers to another India, not the one we have today.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

— LP Hartley, The Go-Between

Yet in the eyes of those penning articles and headlines, “Indian-American” she is. They’re using this language to get people interested in these articles, and if they succeed, they’re effectively selling the idea that it’s not possible for Indians to care about the accomplishments of non-Indians, that only Indians’, and by extension India’s, accomplishments matter. It’s a good example of why beating back the Hindu majoritarian nationalism in India has been such an uphill battle, and why the BJP’s smarting win in the 2024 polls was so heartening: the nuclei of nationalistic thinking are everywhere, you need just the right arguments — no matter how kettle-logic-y — to nurture them into crystals of hate and xenophobia. Calling Williams “Indian-American” is to retrench her patriarchal identity as being part of her primary identity — just as referring to her as “Indian origin” is to evoke her genetic identity; to recall her skin colour as being similar to that of many Indians; and perhaps to passively inculcate her value to the US as an opportunity for soft diplomacy with India.

As of 4.25 pm on June 4, the NDA alliance stood to win 294 seats in the Lok Sabha while the INDIA bloc was set for 225 seats. This is more than a pleasant surprise.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) consumed everything in its path in its aggressive bid to stay in power. If it is being pushed back, it is not a feat that can be the product of nothing.

After a decade of resistance without outright victories, in a manner of speaking, the pushback is a resounding abnegation of the BJP’s politics, and by doing that it embodies what the resistance has stood for: good-faith governance informed by reason and respect for the spirit and letters of the Constitution.

Embodiment is a treasure because it gives form to some specific meaning in our common and shared reality, which is important: it needs to breach BJP supporters’ pinched-off reality as well. There needs to be no escaping it.

Embodied meaning is also a treasure because the meaning is no longer restricted to “just” shouts of protest carried off by the wind, words left unread or protests the national government saw fit to ignore.

This is 294-227 — or whatever the figures are once the ECI has declared final results in all constituencies.

It’s a win for democracy, but a lot of my elation is coming from the notion that the outcome of the polls also demonstrate not only that journalists’ work matters — we already knew that — but that we’re not pissing into the wind with it. It’s being read, heard, and watched. People are paying attention.

Congratulations. Keep going.

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.

Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.

As of 4.25 pm on June 4, the NDA alliance stood to win 294 seats in the Lok Sabha while the INDIA bloc was set for 225 seats. This is more than a pleasant surprise.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) consumed everything in its path in its aggressive bid to stay in power. If it is being pushed back, it is not a feat that can be the product of nothing.

After a decade of resistance without outright victories, in a manner of speaking, the pushback is a resounding abnegation of the BJP’s politics, and by doing that it embodies what the resistance has stood for: good-faith governance informed by reason and respect for the spirit and letters of the Constitution.

Embodiment is a treasure because it gives form to some specific meaning in our common and shared reality, which is important: it needs to breach BJP supporters’ pinched-off reality as well. There needs to be no escaping it.

Embodied meaning is also a treasure because the meaning is no longer restricted to “just” shouts of protest carried off by the wind, words left unread or protests the national government saw fit to ignore.

This is 294-227 — or whatever the figures are once the ECI has declared final results in all constituencies.

It’s a win for democracy, but a lot of my elation is coming from the notion that the outcome of the polls also demonstrate not only that journalists’ work matters — we already knew that — but that we’re not pissing into the wind with it. It’s being read, heard, and watched. People are paying attention.

Congratulations. Keep going.

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.

Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.

Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.

It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.

Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:

… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].

That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.

But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.

The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.

And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national government, the T20 World Cup will begin.

The electoral bonds release has been reassuring on one count. For some time after the (new) BJP first rose to power in 2014, with a groundswell of support (but arguably also because of the ‘first past the post’ system) I used to think it represented an ideology that I’ve been ignorant about, that the INC allowed to take root and overlooked – the way Obama’s second term seemingly laid the groundwork for Trump. But with the bonds being released and the associations we’re finding in the data, it’s becoming asymptotically more clear that there’s no ideology at work here, just as it has on many occasions before. We haven’t missed or overlooked anything, at least nothing other than the inner workings of the legerdemain we’ve found at the ends of every other rainbow drawn by this party. Brutes have taken to power, using the social media and people who wanted to get rich, in order to get rich themselves. Correlation isn’t causation but that doesn’t mean we’re going to ignore the enormous mountains of correlation, especially when read together with the BJP government’s practice of surgically withholding exactly those bits of data that establish causative links. I’m also increasingly convinced that any of the other good stuff they’ve actually managed to do (not unconditionally so, of course) – a.k.a. the foundation of the bhakt‘s whataboutery-based defence – could have been done by any other party. Because other than that, there’s only the desire to continue to occupy the national government for its own vapid sake and the pseudo-ideology that that’s okay to do.