Enemies of reason

Rohit Mahajan

WHEN HS Prannoy of India played China’s Li Shifeng in the men’s badminton semifinals at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, we were prepared for venom being directed at our man — badminton evokes great passion in China, the huge stadium was packed with home fans madly waving red flags, everyone wanted Shifeng to win and reach the final.

Since they spoke and shouted in Chinese, it was not easy to figure out what venom, what poison the spectators were throwing at Prannoy, but it was clear that they were wildly partisan. The most common shout went something like ‘Li Shifeng, chai-you!’ Did these words evoke feelings of strong Chinese nationalism against India, at a time when the two neighbours are pitted against each other at the border and in international geopolitics? What venom did ‘chai-you’ hide? We got two Chinese spectators to translate for us, and double-checked with an Indian citizen residing in China for two decades. It turned out that the most intense cry at the stadium could not be translated into anything more vicious than ‘Li Shifeng, come on!’

When the Indian cricket team played Pakistan in their World Cup round-robin match in Ahmedabad on October 14, there were disturbing scenes at the Narendra Modi Stadium. Religious chants were directed aggressively at Pakistan’s Mohammed Rizwan after he was dismissed; videos of the incident doing the rounds on social media would make you extremely uneasy, irrespective of your religion — maybe even more so if you have no religion.

Though it does not excuse the behaviour of the crowd, Rizwan himself is no slouch when it comes to self-aggrandising use of religiosity, which most often is less for self and soul, and more for the spectator. He’s been criticised by some for offering namaz in cricket stadiums, though many Pakistanis, including the great Waqar Younis, see it as a virtue. Two years ago, when Rizwan prayed on the ground during a match against India, Younis had said: “‘Usne Hinduon ke beech mein khade ho ke namaz padhi’ (He stood in among Hindus and offered namaz). That was something very, very special for me.” Younis later came up with a trite statement of regret — ‘sports unites people regardless of race, colour or religion’; he attributed his original comments to “the heat of the moment”; this only suggested that being an international player and traveller for more than 30 years is not guaranteed to free you from prejudice and spiteful religious indoctrination.

During the recent World Cup match against New Zealand, Rizwan had prayed at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad in front of spectators. Was this a factor in him being serenaded with aggressive shouts of ‘Jai Shree Ram’ by an obnoxious section of the crowd in Ahmedabad?

Interestingly, Danish Kaneria, the former Pakistan cricketer — and possibly the most famous Hindu celebrity of that country — has spoken critically about Rizwan offering prayers at the ground. He also spoke about being ‘invited’ everyday to convert to Islam by fellow players: ‘Be it the dressing room, the playground or the dining table, this happened to me every day.’ Four years ago, former fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar had said that the team discriminated against Kaneria because of his faith.

Sharpening the focus on one’s own identity — religious, ethnic or linguistic — leads to another identity group emphasising its own identity. This creates conflict, and this conflict is the sharpest when it involves faith in belief systems — this is surprising because faith systems are not based on demonstrable evidence.

Pakistan, the first modern country carved out on the basis of religion, is not a great place to be a minority in because of the overbearing religiosity promoted by the state and the military-mullah union. The second modern country created on the basis of religion, Israel, is in a state of war. There are great lessons to be learnt from these two of the pitfalls of exclusivist religiosity.

When the late Christopher Hitchens, the anti-religion polemicist, declared that ‘religion poisons everything’, he may have been exaggerating grossly, but he did have a point; it’s perhaps the lack of belief in a faith system due to which Chinese spectators could support Shifeng intensely without spewing any sort of faith-based invective at Prannoy in Hangzhou. Over 90 per cent Chinese are not affiliated with any religion — that doesn’t necessarily make them better than the rest of the world’s citizens, but it does remove one more reason for people to hate each other.

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#Asian Games #China #HS Prannoy