Zaheer, Riyaz, Abdul, Sammad were caught bursting crackers after Pakistan team’s victory in Champions trophy final on Sunday. They were arrested and no bail was granted to them. They are Indian Muslims, and showing their love for Pakistan has led to their imprisonment. These men have been accused of attempting to hurt religious sentiments, and their offence was registered under a non-bailable section. The arrests in communally sensitive Kodagu were made after two BJP workers lodged a complaint with the police. The arrested men’s families said they were celebrating Pakistan’s victory over India. In a first in the history of Champions Trophy, Pakistan had beaten India by 180 runs to lift the cup.
Similarly in 2014, around 60 college students from Kashmir were arrested in Uttar Pradesh on charges of sedition. Though, the sedition charge was withdrawn later, they are still accused of promoting enmity between two groups. On that occasion too, India had lost the Asia Cup.
In a strange demonstration of overbearing nationalism, a university in Uttar Pradesh suspended 67 Kashmiri students for cheering for the Pakistani cricket team. This may be a clinical sign that the sore-loser syndrome has reached its terminal stage. But Indo-Pak cricket matches are anything but “normal”. On the Indian side of the border, they are nothing but battles to be won, and once victory has been achieved, to be celebrated by humiliating, vilifying and demonising “the other”, that is, Muslims. And when there are Kashmiri Muslims, the viciousness has increased manifold.
Shapoorjee Sorabjee, the first historian of cricket in India, had cautioned more than a century ago in 1897- “… to expect all political difference to disappear or all available self-interests to be foregone on the institution of cricket relations is to live in a fool’s paradise.” Sorabjee’s words echo loudly in the persecution of 67 Kashmiri Muslim students in the city of Meerut. Historian Ramachandra Guha’s statement- “Post-independence, cricket was equated with patriotic virtue”, echoes louder.
These local college students had cheered the Pakistan cricket team, which trounced India in a cricket tournament. In normal circumstances, cheering a team would not have been considered perfidious or criminal. Unless of course one is thrown back to 1945, when Orwell acerbically noted that there’s nothing like certain spectator sports to add to the fund of ill-will between nations and their populations. Or, more recently, to the times of Norman Tebbit and David Blunkett for whom a cricket match was the perfect crucible to test one’s loyalty to his country.
So it happened that these students were charged with sedition, which under Indian criminal law, is equivalent to treason, and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which in its present incarnation can give the British National Party and United Kingdom Independence Party lessons in jingoism and xenophobia, quickly bared its fangs, and raised a din about bringing these “terrorist” students to justice.
An incident of 2010, Arundhati Roy had criticised the government for decades of brazen civil rights violations in Kashmir, and demanded that the people of the disputed territory be allowed to exercise their right of self-determination. The “patriotic” Hindu right went ballistic, and demanded that she be tried for sedition and also deported. Charges were pressed, and even some sections of the media were complicit in an all-out attack against her.
Sedition is easy to allege but difficult to prosecute. Nationalism is easy to profess but difficult to define. Shouting “Pakistan hai hai” through a match is cheap nationalism, but fun nevertheless. One can be a nationalistic cricket lover, but can abhor supporting a team. One cannot be a genuine cricket lover without appreciating the greatness of a batsman who annihilates the opposition in the last ball of the last over. Sedition in the statutory sense requires a perpetrator who “brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law in India.” The section does simply not cover hatred or contempt of sports team.
Sedition in the criminal sense began to be defined in the Elizabethan era as a crime short of treason but as a “notion of inciting by words or writings disaffection towards the state or constituted authority.” Some Commonwealth countries like New Zealand have abolished sedition as a crime. In independent India, even after the constitution came into force, the crime remained on the statute book to be invoked against dangerous dissenters. While introducing the first amendment to India’s constitution which imposed restrictions on free speech, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru said: “…Take again Section 124A of the IPC. India losing a close match is a cricketing tragedy and just that. Those who cheer such an event may lack discretion and taste but their conduct is not seditious.
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
