Cheering for the enemy?

Santosh Desai
09 March 2014, 07:35 PM IST

The sedition case against the Kashmiri students in Meerut who celebrated when Pakistan beat India in a cricket match has been dropped but the controversy about the police action rages on. A private university has added fuel to the fire by expelling 6 students for the same reason. On the face of it, both actions are unbecoming of any country with pretensions to allowing the freedom of expression. It opens the door for greater intolerance and hatred. For instance, would clapping for a Pakistani contestant in a TV singing competition fall under the same head? What about praising Pakistani TV serials and arguing that they are better than their Indian counterparts? Would that too be a mark of unpatriotic behaviour?

The problem is that popular sentiment would disagree and do so strongly. A cricket match with Pakistan is seen (and aggressively promoted) as a form of war. The idea of any Indian supporting the opposing team instead of the home team tends to be as a sign of betrayal but when the team in question is Pakistan, the feeling gets magnified. When a group of students celebrate Pakistan's win publicly, there is no question that they are being deliberately provocative. The action is full of symbolic intent, of emphatically underlining where their sympathies lie.

In the case of Kashmiri students, the disenchantment with the Indian state is hardly a matter of surprise, and an occasion of this kind becomes fertile ground for communicating their sense of alienation. Regardless of the reasons for their action, and whether one thinks of them as legitimate or not, the fact is that they knew what their actions represented and actively sought a reaction. They succeeded, maybe too well, in eliciting a reaction. To many, the police reaction seemed appropriate because in their view, the students had challenged a fundamental tenet of nationalism- their action was unpatriotic and sedition is the name we give to such acts.

The trouble with this view is that in viewing sport as a legitimate site for patriotism, and in equating support for a particular team with the notion of loyalty, it walks into an old trap. Any number of Britishers of Indian origin publicly and very noisily support the Indian team against the home side much to the chagrin of many of their fellow citizens and the approval of Indians. The so-called 'cricket test' dreamed up by Norman Tebbit in 1990 used the same premise as the one being used today. And remember, in the British case, we are talking about people without any grievance against the state. These are people who have voluntarily and in many cases, after great effort, chosen to make a life in that country because of the many advantages it confers on them.

The resentment that both the Kashmiri students and the Britishers of Indian origin invite in their respective countries is natural. Sport is after all, an arena designed to deliver to some very abstract needs, important among which is that it serves as a vehicle for identity. An alien looking at the phenomenon of sport would find our fanatical investment in what are otherwise arcane activities of little consequence quite baffling. Viewed this way, there is little reason for us to cheer any team, let alone equate eleven people with the idea of a country. To believe that 'we' win or lose every time the team is essentially an act of mass hypnosis. But it is an illusion we passionately believe in, and it is one of the reasons why sport exists.

What is important is to separate our espousal of what we see as our team with any larger notions of loyalty or patriotism. For the artificial construction called sport can produce the same illusion for a made-up formation like a club, to which we can feel the same sense of belonging. In a pub full of Manchester United supporters, cheering for Manchester City would be seen as an act of treachery in ways that are not too dissimilar from what we are seeing today in Meerut. Sport, by detaching itself from real life, allows us to feel these magnified, child-like emotions and gives us licence to behave badly when things don't go our way. Sport is designed to create this illusion, but it is an illusion nevertheless.

That the act of cheering for the opposing team should raise hackles is not surprising. It is easy to understand and even sympathise with those that get aggravated by the behaviour of the Kashmiri students. But when any institution be it the police or even a college takes note of this and acts to punish the students, the meaning of sport gets dismantled. Tomorrow, we could charge a player who fails at a crucial juncture in a match against Pakistan with treason, who knows?

The other and perhaps more important factor to remember is that while what the students did was without doubt an act of deliberate provocation, we need to be able to live with that. Increasingly, symbolic acts of provocation are being shied away from whether it involves speech, writing or in this case, cheering. The right to be provoked is increasingly superseding the right to provoke. Provocative actions leave room for the other side to act with a sense of proportion. You might get provoked by someone sticking their tongue at you, but you don't shoot them dead in response. The fact that my feelings might be hurt by your actions does not automatically give me licence to expel, ban or imprison you.. Of course, for this argument to work, it cannot be selective and needs to cut across the ideological and religious spectrum. The Kashmiri students will probably bear some social cost for their actions, but for them to be penalised by any institution for an act of symbolic protest is going too far.