by BADRI RAINA
Shiv Sena activists burn posters of Shahrukh Khan’s upcoming movie ‘My Name is Khan’ in Mumbai after the actor advocated for Pakistani players in IPL 3. Photo/Outlook Magazine
Shah Rukh Khan is a Delhi boy turned a bouncy Bollywood actor. He is married to a Hindu girl, and like most actors, lives in Mumbai. Alas, I do not much like his movies.
He is also staunchly proud of being an Indian (often too loudly so), and unselfconsciously avails of everything that a shining India has on offer—game shows, talk shows, sundry public events, and the IPL T20 cricket tamasha. His groupies span delerious young Indian women from every community and caste. Solid contribution to national unity there.
IPL is a privately owned and conducted tournament. Its inaugural event is a public auction in which different franchisees (of which Shah Rukh owns one) bid for and buy cricketers from India and sundry other nations, complete with the gravel and shouts of “sold” (see my “Cricket as Surrogate Kill,” Znet, May, 01, 2008).
As in all private enterprises with an eye on the main chance, players are evaluated for their commodity value regardless of what nationality they belong to.
Currently, as per international rankings, the world’s top-rated T20 national team is the Pakistani team.
At the recent auction for the coming IPL tournament, some eleven or so swashbuckling players from Pakistan
were up for the bid.
Not one of them was bought.
A silent and considered pall of denial seemed clearly to have been at work across competing franchisees. Cricket and money-making seemed to have yielded to politics, however the franchises’ spokespersons pleaded a disinterest in everything except cricket and money.
Laudably, many voices came to be raised at this blanket boycott of players from the world’s top T20 team. Among them that of India’s most hawkish home minister who refused to be taken in by the disingenuous disavowals peddled by the franchises. He was gentleman enough, as he always is, to point out that any nation whose players were thus rejected enblock had some cause to feel slighted.
The home minister is a Hindu (indeed a Brahmin) and most hard on Pakistan for fomenting terrorism. He not only quashed the rumour that the government had anything to do with the sinister decision of the IPL bosses to refuse the Pakistani players, but expressed an enlightened disapproval of what they had done.
Among those others who decried the IPL plot was Shah Rukh Khan. Like all other decent commentators, he expressed the view that the Pakistani players should have been bought, given that they are indeed some of the best in the business.
Which is when all hell broke loose in Mumbai.
II
The Shiv Sena supremo, Bal Thackeray was quick to comment in the party organ, Saamna, that Shah Rukh was, after all, no ordinary Indian; he was a Muslim.
Unlike any other comment favourable to the discarded Pakistani players, his comment clearly must be seen to harbour a pro-Pakistani bias.
Once the supremo had given his signal, what was to prevent the lumpen armies to go to work. Shah Rukh’s posters and effigies have been duly consigned to the flames of patriotism, and his house besieged and vandalized. Instructions have gone out that his forthcoming movie must be boycotted. And he has been advised to make Karachi his home.
All that when one would have thought that the prime target of the “patriots” ought to have been the home minister whose job, after all, is to secure the nation from Pakistani perfidy rather than express sentiments favourable to their cricketers!
But then he is a distinguished Hindu. Whereas, “by favouring the inclusion of Pakistani cricketers, Shah Rukh has proved that he is a Muslim first and foremost and that he will continue to support Pakistan at the cost of our own national interest” (this from the inimitable Praveen Togadia of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, whose voice was among the loudest at the time of the Gujarat anti-Muslim massacre of 2002.)
As luck would have it, another one of India’s finest actors, Aamir Khan—one whose work I do much like—also concurred with Shah Rukh and the home minister to fault the IPL plot. But, as his luck has it, he also is a Muslim. Thus, the Shiv Sena’s Dopahar Ka Saamna was quick to rope him in: “according to Aamir, if any cricketer is good, he would like to have him in his team, it makes no difference to him which country he belongs to.”
Incidentally, this same Aamir Khan has just received a national award on India’s Republic Day when distinguished Indians are thus honoured by the state. No end, the Sena would say, to the Congress Party’s “appeasement” policy.
ZNet for more