IPL 9 cannot be blamed for Maharashtra water crisis

Popular culture in India has three touchstones, each of which functions as a morality play. The first is Bollywood which as a fluid myth captures all the contradictions of modernity. Bollywood was creative about the opposition of town and country, family and law, resident and non-resident Indian-ness. Yet, Bollywood of late has not been able to create or unravel a myth.

Cinema seems more like a collection of fragments in search of a great philosophical theme.

Crisis

Democracy too is facing a legitimation crisis as a majoritarian world imposes its own world view of intolerance on minoritarians. A majoritarian Hindutva consensus dominates a pluralistic, syncretic society. It is almost as if a warped and coercive idea of electoral majority threatens the Indian democratic imagination. Minorities, dissenters and marginals find themselves threatened by a majoritarian way of life.

Cricket, the remaining iconic symbol also finds itself under duress. Cricket has been threatened as an imagination both internally and externally. As a rule game, it began as an attempt of colonised countries to outplay the West, not just in the art of the game but in articulating the very norms of the game.

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So powerful was the normative and cultural impact of cricket, that the psychoanalyst Ashis Nandy commented that "Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English." Almost all colonies could make a variant of this statement.

As cricket changed literally and formats were designed for a quicker logic like the 50-overs-game or T-20, speed also altered the perception of cricket as culture. Cricket became an act of conspicuous consumption, with shades of a circus. The externalities of the game got commercialised and Americanised.

Even the slow-moving thoughtful commentary with its periodic bouts of repetitiveness acquired a feverish pitch. Cricket became a moneyed game and an attraction for political leaders Modi, Jaitley and Sharad Pawar to consolidate their influence and patronage.

However as the game became a cynosure of attraction, expectations of cricket went beyond the sporting realm. For instance, Maharashtra has been suffering from drought for the last two years. Worse areas in Vidarbha, Karnataka have been confronting, a huge epidemic of farmer suicides. The crisis of agriculture is not something the state or nation has responded to. It hangs like a Damocles sword and often produces bouts of hysteria and hypocrisy.

Arguments

A PIL funded by an NGO claimed that the use of water by the IPL was obscene and the matches should be shifted out. Sadly the Supreme Court, in a moment of high political correctness, upheld the plea despite rational arguments.

Economist Surjit Bhalla did a comparison of cricket and the almost hyperbolic uses of water by the sugarcane industry. The usage was excessive and obscene. The use of water in sugarcane production was excessive. Bhalla added that watering the grass in cricket used recirculated water which was hardly fit for consumption.

There is no doubt that IPL verges on frivolity and conspicuous consumption but to make cricket bear the moral responsibility for drought and an irrationally wasteful agriculture was unfair. In fact, cricket as an imagination was at loss on how to respond. The authorities offered to transfer containers of water and make huge donations to the game. Cricketers also pointed out that Maharashtra would lose revenues from if the games were transferred out.

Recognise

There are dangers here that we must recognise. First, to place the moral burden of what a state was supposed to do on cricket is unfair. Knee-jerk, many cricketers felt transferring the games was the correct thing to do. Considering the long run, one could thoughtfully say like Ajay Vir Jakhar that drip irrigation in stadium could bring down the consumption of water by 50 per cent.

However apart from the debate on the political economy of agriculture, what we are facing is a different kind of crisis which refuses to be knowledgeable about public cultures. A particular style of hysteria takes over attacking authorities for crimes they did not commit. Yet few challenge such analyses because they firmly believe than in a world where apathy and indifference are dominant, hysteria and scapegoating is the only avenue to a quick response and a quicker idea of justice.

Also read - Targeting IPL is making a poor joke of water crisis

There is a bigger argument I want to make here. In an age of global media and brand preoccupation, our major symbols whatever their versatility can only operate within restricted domains.

To ask democracy to solve the problems of modernity, or Bollywood to work out a solution or a myth for every crisis may be unfair. Cricket offers us fine examples of ethics and aesthetics, of the worlds of discipline and sportsmanship.

Yet cricket is not a universal solution or metaphor. To burden with questions of political economy is to turn the game into a dismal activity, where cricket might lose the power of its playfulness.

As citizens we need to treasure the role of our symbols. To misuse them is a dangerous form of political illiteracy.

Symbol should be treasured and to misread and misuse symbols be an act of idiocy the future may not forgive us for.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)