The ICC World Cup opening ceremony takes place just under a month from now at the Narendra Modi Stadium, the day before the opening game at the Narendra Modi Stadium, prelude to a tournament where it turns out almost all the most urgent events, India v Pakistan at the Narendra Modi Stadium, England v Australia at the Narendra Modi Stadium, the Narendra Modi Stadium World Cup final, will take place at the Narendra Modi Stadium.
It is a spectacular Narendra Modi Stadium too, the second largest sports arena in the world after the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, North Korea, and “inaugurated” in March this year before the India v Australia Test, with a special Important Leader Excitement Event, which featured an open-top Narendra Modi parade and ended with Narendra Modi himself being presented with an exclusive signed portrait (of Narendra Modi). And this is all fine and logical and, in the end, pretty much to the point.
Last month the distinguished journalist and broadcaster Peter Oborne wrote an unsettling, brilliantly angry column about Modi and the Cricket World Cup, contrasting its mild treatment by the sporting media with that of the football World Cup last year.
Qatar 2022 was framed from the start as the acme of sportswashing, albeit that concept has been stretched so violently it has lost whatever meaning it had. Let’s face it, no one is actually washing anything here, or trying to make you like them. Qatar 2020 was not an apology. It was a Shard-scale raised middle finger to the world. These events are a show of power, the modern equivalent of the cold-war military parade with its marching battalions, warheads trundling grandly through streets like celebrities on a meet and greet.
As for India 2023, it seems highly likely this will be a wonderful World Cup. India loves cricket and stages it like no one else. There are some good teams, not to mention, in England’s case, some very old teams, the class of 2019 still out there making the scene like ageing action heroes strapped into their muscle-corsets.
Australia are pretty good. India are brilliant but also a little tied to their own ageing mini-deities. Pakistan have a sensational pace attack: the wonderfully nasty Haris Rauf, Shaheen Afridi, collector of toes, Naseem Shah, the boy from Lower Dir with an action from the gods. It will be spectacular, maybe even the best World Cup ever, just as that format finally expires.
But Oborne is also right. This is an aggressively political event, a six-week campaign rally before April’s election, in a nation where the national team in the national sport is unusually assimilated into the ruling party’s brand machine. The concern is that Modi has overseen an increasingly hard line and violent regime. Amnesty International’s annual report details censorship, state violence, the prosecution of Indian Muslims for acts such as prayer, eating beef and consensually marrying Hindu women.
Against this backdrop we have a tournament nominally run by the International Cricket Council, but in reality the property of the Indian government, sport as a vividly coloured campaign movie. Let us at least say it here, a little late, and for all the difference it will make: this is sport as propaganda and distraction, another step in the complete infiltration of politics into the show. This was always part of the spectacle, from the first Fifa World Cups to London 2012 and the Paris Olympics next year. It is now the key note. We are simply required to applaud, to add, uncritically, to the noise of distraction while real life goes on underneath.
But there are two things worth noting in this case. First, this process has surely never been so extreme and so visible, an entire sport weaponised as, on some level, a foreign policy arm. There is increasingly no sense of any real veil between these entities it feels, the direct line from ICC to Board of Control for Cricket in India to Indian government, diffused out into an umbrella of on-message global franchise interests.
Consider the rain this week in Colombo, where all six final matches of the Asia Cup, including Sunday’s mouth-watering collision of India and Pakistan, will be played after a rescheduling, this despite a weather forecast that is basically every symbol – lightning, cloud big drops, sun, all the weather.
It is simply the choice of Jay Shah, secretary of the BCCI, after India was unhappy with Pakistan as the original hosts, and because those reservations, which may well be legitimate, can now be translated into a cross-border public slapdown (this week, Shah, who is, on the face of it, just a cricket administrator, basically wrote Pakistan off as a basket case state, causing vast offence across the border).
It should be noted this same Jay Shah is also a prodigy, an administrator so talented he rose to become secretary of the BCCI at the thrillingly young age of 30; who also happens, by extreme coincidence in a nation of 1.2bn, to share the same surname as Modi’s oldest political ally Amit Shah; and who is, in an even wilder coincidence, in fact his son. It isn’t hard to draw these lines. It’s there in plain sight. Is this actually cricket? Or a government broadcast? And this sporting nationalism does matter. Because right now every other part of cricket seems also subject to the political aims, policies and influence of India’s ruling party.
An easy example: we are now a month into the first iteration of the year-round Indian cricket season. The current Caribbean Premier League (six Indian owners) leads into the Modi-sponsored World Cup. January to February brings not one but two Indian-driven T20 leagues, casually strafing the Australian season along the way.
Then it’s into the main event: Women’s IPL, Men’s IPL, followed by another World T20 and into July’s Indian-run Major League Cricket, which already has the money to profoundly disrupt the English summer. There it is, a year blocked out, the first Future Indian Tours programme.
Every aspect of cricket is bending to this wind, from domestic fixtures and financing, to the career decisions of a generation of Will Smeeds, the gym-cricketer, batting as reps, lifts, muscle flex. The Rajasthan Royals want to buy Yorkshire. Is this necessary? They already decide what happens here, how and when Yorkshire play their cricket.
And all of this flows out from the notion of sport as an expression of one party’s nationalistic politics, the urge to use this bat and ball game as economic driver, grand spectacle, celebration of the national character.
Is this a healthy situation? Probably not. It is also a case of grand, historical irony, the circle of life, colonial kismet? Probably that too. Cricket used as a colonising force. Whatever next? This hasn’t happened since the British did it.
Why does India even have this sport in the first place? Because the British brought it and allowed it to catch hold as a form of colonial control. Wearing white and following the protocols, behaving like an English gentleman: this was all as much an expression of the Victorian British character as India’s modern version speaks to its own sense of itself. Indian cricket’s reverse colonialism does still come, even now, with that edge of joyful vengeance, of turning that thing into our thing, ripping down the old flags, sticking a jukebox in this place.
No doubt this will all fade back into the margins as we kick off inside – and then return repeatedly to – the new Home Of Cricket in Ahmedabad (a stadium rebuild overseen, in another great coincidence, by none other than the prodigious late-20s Jay Shah).
But we should at least be aware of what we’re watching; and the fact that when it comes to the fine details of this fragile, enduringly beautiful summer sport, we all live in a Narendra Modi world now.
