Ban on Yorkshire cricket club

Cricket earned a victory in the effort to root out bigotry and racism from the sport when the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) banned county club Yorkshire from hosting international matches. The action was taken over the failure of the Yorkshire County Cricket Club (YCCC) to act on complaints by a Pakistan-born player, Azeem Rafiq, who alleged racist abuse when he played for the club for 10 years from 2008. Rafiq alleged that as a Muslim and South Asian, he was often made to feel like an ‘outsider’ during his stint with YCCC. This, he alleged, pushed him to the edge of suicide. Rafiq, now 30, had made 43 allegations of bigoted behaviour toward him during his time with YCCC. However, the club had decided that none of its employees would face action over his allegations of institutional racism.

Advertisement

The scenario changed after two events: one, several of YCCC’s sponsors abandoned deals with the club over its handling of the case; and two, a former teammate of Rafiq’s, Gary Ballance, admitted that he used a racist slur against Rafiq. Cynics would argue that the ECB’s ban on Yorkshire came only after the sponsors started pulling out — that the ECB, despite mounting protests and evidence about institutional racism in English cricket, had pushed the dirt under the carpet for decades. However, loss of revenue is often greatly persuasive in changing attitudes and minds and however belated, ECB’s stern penalty must be welcomed.

We in India must become resolute in stamping out bigotry, too. Our own record on this problem is far from clean, both in society and on the sporting field. But bigotry is so deeply internalised in many people that they don’t recognise it in themselves. For example, in 2017, a BJP MP, Tarun Vijay, blithely declared: ‘If we were racist, why would we have the entire South? Why do we live with them? We have blacks, black people all around us.’ The same year, Tamil Nadu cricketer Abhinav Mukund disclosed that right from his childhood, he had been subjected to name-calling over the colour of his skin. And it was only last year that Daren Sammy, the former West Indies captain, revealed that when playing in the IPL, fellow cricketers had given him a name based on his complexion. Many Indians have buried their heads in the sand regarding their racism problem — they think they can’t be racist. Correcting this would be the first step toward solving this problem.