I REALLY should be in the best of moods. I have two women, friends from way past, with shows on at the Fringe, both exploring and transposing their Asian heritage, two and three generations, bang up to date. But then, while abroad visiting family, I spied friend and colleague Aamer Anwar on TV. Definitely not what I was expecting, and so ended my feelgood factor.
What does it say about our society that it took a specially commissioned report into Scottish Cricket – Changing the Boundaries – for this specific case of institutionalised racism, experienced and witnessed, to be acknowledged and potentially acted on?
Two very brave men, Qasim Sheikh and Majid Haq, were victimised and deprived of their places within the sporting arena they loved, trained for and excelled in. This was not two men who were peeved and threatening to take their bats and balls home because they weren’t selected.
The report found evidence that Cricket Scotland displayed 29 out of the 31 indicators of institutional racism with referrals, including 31 allegations of racism against 15 people, two clubs and one regional association. What happened to “see it, report it, call it out”? Well, Qasim Sheikh experienced it and called it out: no action, no support, he went to the press and from then on, he was the “bad guy of Scottish cricket”.
Believing his superiors and expecting to be reinstated, he apologised through a journalist selected by them, only to see the earlier humiliation – just part of the tactics common in racism – getting worse with headlines like “Sheikh eats humble pie”. No reinstatement followed, and the reality was him never playing for his country again.
The National quoted fellow player Majid Haq extensively and we must all wonder at the empty gesturing, virtue signalling, social media trolling from those who should have listened, acted and supported these two (Haq points out ‘deafening silence’ from Scots players, July 27).
As this comes to light, their names, experiences, traumas have been bandied about as before, in the press and TV. Funny though, I’ve not seen any pictures nor the names of the board members of Cricket Scotland in place as this all took place.
As alarm bells rang in England, when the truth was uncovered and action started to redress the situation there, was the board here so complacent, so hidebound that they felt they could say “move on, nothing to see here”. Oh wait, they’ve all resigned. What happened to transparency and accountability?
It’s not too much of an imagined leap for me to move from here to there and the Commonwealth Games. How paradoxical that the opening ceremony referred to Britain’s links with the slave trade after the organisers voted not to ignore the Commonwealth’s “problematic history”.
The problem is more that countries such as Barbados chose democratically to become a republic. That the royal tours by the Cambridges and Wessexes were disastrous. And that Westminster, currently mired in a succession battle, continues as a democracy-denier. You may change from empire to Commonwealth but the yearning for the past by many is echoed through the ideology.
So was the Changing the Boundaries report a surprise? Sadly no. The gut pain returned along with the questions: after all those years, all that work, just how much has changed? Injustices are not someone else’s problem. Wrongs are neither challenged nor righted through a legal process unless there is first a determination to bring about change. Where are the allies, where is the determination to bring about change?
Selma Rahman Edinburgh
