Sunday Times 2
Musing about India after Asia Cup fiasco
View(s):For the past week, although I was sadly disheartened by the result of the Asia Cup cricket final, I have been musing about India.
The loss at the Premadasa Stadium on Sunday night was hard to stomach. From playing with a commendable never-say-die attitude to providing such exciting entertainment for us spectators, our national cricketers had done us proud over the past few weeks. Despite the long and hard road to get there, the defending champions (having defeated Pakistan in 2022 by 23 runs in the final held in the UAE) got into the 2023 final. They had only India to beat to retain their positions as champions.
Unfortunately, for all of us fans—octogenarians like myself who were watching on TV at home and others who had queued and paid to get into the stadium—it was a colossal letdown. Some of those who turned up to watch the match and cheer our team on had spent more time travelling to the game than the cricketers actually spent playing on the field.
There have been and will be numerous post-mortems about what went wrong. Virtually everybody will have an opinion. Some say this and some say that, but my personal view (despite what famous Pakistani commentator Wasim Akram has asserted) is that one need not look for dark, devious, and dastardly designs to explain this disaster. The most likely explanation is incompetence—simple and foolish. It is a combination of incompetence on the part of the selectors and incompetence on the part of the players.
Now that the game is over, what needs to be done is to learn from the mistakes made (whether these were errors in player selection, shot selection, captain selection, or whatever) and then rectify these mistakes so that the team can come back strongly for the next encounter, which will be next month’s ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup in India.
Our current team is not the only national cricket team to have played disastrously and been bowled out for a paltry total.
In October 2000 India, playing against Sri Lanka in the Coca Cola Champions trophy final in Sharjah, were bundled out for just 54 in reply to Sri Lanka’s total of 299 for 5 (of which Sanath Jayasuriya made 189). The Indian team that succumbed on that occasion to the bowling of Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralidaran included giants like Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Yuvraj Singh.
In 2012, at Boland Park in Paarl, a Sri Lankan team that included such legends of the game as Upul Tharanga, Tillekeratne Dilshan, Kumar Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardena, Dinesh Chandimal, and Angelo Mathews was bowled out for a paltry total of 43 runs against South Africa, which had amassed 301 for 8.
So what happened at the Premadasa stadium on Sunday night is nothing new. Low totals have happened before to the best of teams, and no doubt they will happen again in the future.
Of course, what hurt most was that this happened in front of a capacity crowd of Sri Lankan fans who expected more from their heroes and who left the ground disappointed, disillusioned and deflated.
But what of India, apart from its success on the cricket field? What is our neighbour across the Palk Strait doing off the cricket field these days, in addition to putting a space probe on the moon?
On September 19, the government of Narendra Modi introduced a bill in parliament to reserve one-third of the seats in their newly built lower house of parliament for women. Whether the bill will be passed remains to be seen, and if it is passed, how it will be implemented remains a mystery.
Why this disparity in the proportion of women legislators? Is it that women have better things to do than come forward for the hustings? Is it the reluctance of party powerbrokers to give party nominations to women? Could it be the reluctance of voters to entrust governing to females?
I saw a recent article that drew attention to the fact that the United States let the people choose, and they gave power to Donald Trump. In Britain, they let the people choose, and they gave power to Boris Johnson. Sri Lanka gave the people the opportunity to choose, and they gave power to Gotabhaya Rajapakse. Need more be said about the foolishness of electors?
Are the people best placed to choose who should govern them? Left to the voters of India, they have elected just 78 women to its lower house of 542 members, although women (as they do in most countries) account for about half the population. We in Sri Lanka are much worse; of the 225 members of parliament in our country, only 13 (just over 5%) are women.
Can passing a bill reserving one-third of lower house parliamentary seats for women end this gender disparity? How will they get women into these seats—by getting them elected or by nominating them? Will potential members of parliament have to undergo sex verification and chromosome tests to prove they are women, like Olympic athletes have to do?
Passage of the ‘Women’s Reservation Bill 2023’ will raise a lot of problems for Narendra Modi’s government, and solving these problems will be much more difficult than defeating Sri Lanka in the Asian Cup Final.