The politics of revenge

Asia is the ICC, said Ehsan Mani. But the real question is, does Asia deserve to be the ICC? After spending most of the last century as the weaklings of world cricket, our nations now hold the whip hand. This peculiarly English game becomes more and more an Asian one despite Australia's dominance. Yet, moving from a position of weakness to one of strength is never easy. Robert Mugabe's regime has shown the dangers of the politics of revenge. And our 21st century, Asian-dominated, ICC is guilty of this same sin - no better demonstrated than in its response to the crisis that Mugabe has engineered.

There was a time when you could justify cricket relations with Zimbabwe. The argument ran something like this: Zimbabwe's cricket board is struggling to uphold a fair system (in terms of race) and the team needs support. Moral considerations for deciding on tours are untenable because you could make a reasonable case that most regimes are immoral in some way, and in any case moral justifications are proxies for political decision-making. And teams, Australia and England in particular, had little justification for boycotting Zimbabwe after hosting them.

But recent events have exposed a systematic politicisation of the cricket administration in Zimbabwe, where the cricket board has been taken over by government thugs. White players have been sacked, including ones who stuck with Zimbabwe cricket while others fled. The board has indicated that selection for the national team should be on a population-based race quota rather than on merit. The arguments for ongoing cricket relations with Zimbabwe are now redundant.

Despite overwhelming evidence of the racially motivated polices of the Zimbabwe government and now the cricket board, the ICC sees no evil in its stance of supporting cricket relations with that country. This is the first major test for our Asian ICC and it is failing miserably. Leadership of the cricket world carries more responsibility than simply that of signing the biggest contracts and polling the highest viewership figures. Great leadership is about championing values that enhance cricket's image as a noble and all-inclusive sport. Caught up in their own politics of revenge, Ehsan Mani and his friends from the Asian cricket boards have lost their objectivity.

What would have been their reaction if whites had treated blacks this way in Zimbabwe? I suspect outrage, followed by sabre-rattling, and then Zimbabwe would have been kicked out of the ICC. Remember how outraged we felt when rebels toured apartheid South Africa? We questioned their morals. We called them racists. We demanded bans - and got them. Mugabe's Zimbabwe doesn't feel much different. What happened to our outrage, our acute sense of racial injustice? It looks like it disappeared in the euphoria of power.

The major responsibility for this abdication of responsibility rests with the two most powerful men in the ICC: Ehsan Mani and Jagmohan Dalmiya. While it is understandable that Dalmiya will pander to the constituency that he represents and take a narrower view, Mani needs to take a step back and remember that he is the custodian of the ICC's integrity - which means the welfare of all its members. He is not the special envoy for Asia. Instead of making political statements against Tony Blair and stamping on Zimbabwe's white cricketers, Mani needs to focus more sharply on his area of responsibility, which is whether or not the cricket administration in Zimbabwe is suitable to be a member of the ICC. I would argue that an administrative body that is as racist as the Zimbabwe Cricket Union has become is not fit to be a member of the international club.

Yet, as chief kingmaker and the most powerful player in the international cricket community, Dalmiya must share the blame. Again, the politics of revenge, a peculiar antagonism towards English administrators, is blinding Dalmiya to the gravity of the moment. For Asia's leadership of world cricket to ring true and inspire the rest to follow, judgments must be driven by a desire to promote a sport that flourishes through equity. Asian prejudices are no more palatable than the white prejudices that they have replaced. Dalmiya and his fellow Asians on ICC's board are yet to fully realise that their actions are judged by global standards and those global judgements feed back to influence public opinion at home.

Our world has changed, and Asia's leadership of world cricket needs to change with it. At the moment our cricket administrators are revealing that Asians only care about discrimination when it is perpetrated by white people. When it suits our pockets and our prejudices, we turn a blind eye. If that really is the way we are then we are not fit to rule.

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