(picture source: Cricinfo)

As I write this the covers are being pulled on the square at Edgbaston and MS Dhoni is preparing for another ‘loosing captain’ speech (his third in a row, an unusual event in itself) and searching for reasons to offer for a loss that was as big and humiliating as the margin suggests – an innings and 242 runs. India now have been wiped clean 3-0 by an ascending England that completes a remarkable one year of test cricket for the hosts and raises perplexing and troubling questions for visitors.

The last time India performed with such abject hopelessness in an away test series (or any test series for that matter) was Down Under in the winter of 1999. The Sachin Tendulkar led team was demolished by a rampaging Australia under Steve Waugh and the extent of the defeat then bears a close resemblance to the ones we are seeing now –

• Adelaide – Lost by 285 runs
• Melbourne – Lost by 180 runs
• Sydney – An innings and 141 runs

It was a tour equal to the current one in terms of complete batting failure with only 2 centuries and 3 half centuries being scored in response to a batting flood from the Aussies. And despite the tireless efforts of the Karnataka trio of Srinath, Prasad and Kumble, the team never even won a session against the Aussies, let alone coming close to threatening them with a draw or a loss.

View the results of the current embarrassment in England and notice the pattern – Defeat by 196 runs at Lord’s, by 319 runs at Nottingham and the latest by an innings and 242 runs. The bowlers have tried and have been handicapped by injuries but the batting has opened the floodgates and let the invaders through. The three test matches have seen only 2 centuries and 7 seven half centuries and in neither case have the hundreds been big enough or the fifties been accumulative enough to push the total beyond 300.

The difference though lies in the expectations and the historical performance. No one gave the 1999 team a chance against the Aussies. There was not much you could expect from a team that had a support cast of MSK Prasad (opening the batting mind you), Hrishikesh Kanitkar, Devang Gandhi and SS Das for the likes of Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly. It was a complete collective batting failure with no opening stands of note and no stand out middle order performances. During the intervening 12 years though, India have done enough to wipe the stains of that humiliation and improve their reputations from easy cannon fodder to worthy contenders on overseas tours. Between 2000 and 2011, out of 54 tests played away from home (excluding Zimbabwe and Bangladesh), India won 15 and lost 21, giving them a win ratio of 27%, which while not comparable to an Australia or South Africa, is certainly much higher than those of any previous decade in Indian cricket.

During this period, the team was served by the bowling efforts of Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble, but the foundation of the victories and match saving draws were often laid down by the batsmen. It is India’s batting core of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Ganguly (assisted during the later part of the last decade by Sehwag and Gambhir) that enabled it to post significant overseas victories (Headingly 2002, Adelaide 2003, Perth 2008, Hamilton 2009, Durban 2010) and often save games that could easily have been lost with a batting collapse (Nottingham 2002, Brisbane 2003, Adelaide 2008, Napier 2009, Cape Town 2011). This picture is perhaps appropriately reflected in the batting averages of the Indians away from home (admittedly not excluding Zimbabwe and Bangladesh this time) – Tendulkar expectedly leads with 55, followed by Gambhir at 57, Dravid at 53, Sehwag at 47, Laxman with 44 and Ganguly at 41. Each of them has, over the years, played a part in the setting up totals for bowlers to defend or responded to opposition’s attack with equal gusto.

It is based on the above that we must confront the critical hypothesis that now stares Indian cricket in the face as it awakens from the shambles of the England tour – India was and certainly for the near and medium term future shall remain a batting team. The bowling quartet (and a quartet it will be, for there is no genuine seam or spin bowling all rounder on the horizon) shall always possess one or at most two (if we are lucky) world class bowlers and not more. Kumble’s mantle passed onto Zaheer and from him it is now a toss up. Ishant Sharma perhaps possesses the best talent to claim it but is yet to stamp himself as a match winner as Zaheer did in 2007. The spinners will be effective at home but will remain predominantly stock bowlers outside and the seamers will never run through batting sides as the English and the South Africans now do. We will not have a Steyn or a Morkel and our seamers will always need receptive pitches to make the opposition batsmen hop.

It will therefore be the batsmen who have to bear a good 2/3rds (and at times even 3/4ths) of the burden of responsibility for winning games. They will need to compensate when the bowlers are hacked around during the first innings of a test match and will need to give enough to the bowlers to defend in the 2nd and 4th innings. This has been a pattern quite obvious in our recent one-day successes and will have to be the template if we are to be successful as a test side going ahead. Unless the soil of our pitches where Ranji games are played dramatically changes, we will need to look at our top 6 to win and save games for us.

It is here that India’s problems lie, not just as of now with the batsmen failing to fire in England, but also in the future as each of Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman will not last beyond the next 2-3 years. Behind them, warming the benches is a lot that has justifiably failed to inspire confidence thus far. The spot vacated by Sourav Ganguly in 2008 is still up for grabs. And neither Yuvraj Singh (overall test average of 35 and an away average of 29) nor Suresh Raina (test average of 32) have managed to cement that slot as their own. Both have been patchy and inconsistent and have shown major shortcomings against the short ball and an inability to graft when the pitch is not to their liking. Yuvraj is now out with an injury and Raina, who after his knock at Lord’s could have made this his breakthrough series, has frittered away the chance and seems set to lose his place in the playing XI. That leaves four other young men who currently are lined up in the queue with an eye on the future – Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. Kohli has started disappointingly and shown a visible discomfort against pace and bounce, even on docile West Indian pitches; Rohit Sharma has perhaps the most amount of talent but also the most fickle temperament; Pujara is only 3 games old and needs more chances and with the batting failures of England, Rahane may well find himself a part of the squad in the upcoming test series at home and in Australia.

The cupboard is not exactly bare for India’s batting but it’s a bit like sending cadets out of a military academy to replace experienced field commanders in the middle of a war. The transition, given the problems of the new crop of batsmen away from home, has to be phased and will necessarily involve pain such as that experienced in the last three weeks. It is critical that India’s new generation steps up to the mark in test cricket or else more such hidings may be in the offering. Test cricket is about the quality of effort and display of temperament and less about statistical rankings. The loss of the top spot must hurt but it is time to be realistic. A weak bowling and a declining batting line up will not take us back to the top of the summit. A more realistic short term goal would be stay in the top 3, keep in the hunt with the likes of England and South Africa and groom a new batting line up that can perform away from home. It is good to aspire for the numero uno slot but India’s priority in the near future has to be a Jardinesque obsession with building a strong XI that can play well away from home. The results and the rankings will take care of themselves by consequence.

Much would be written and lamented about the three tests lost. The bowlers were always suspect but the batting failure is inexplicable and as Ganguly has said, it seems more of a mental block than an issue about adapting to the environment. The batsmen, as has been pointed out, have been having a sub-par year and have not crossed 400 even once in the 7 test played in the calendar year thus far. It is not as if India did not have their chances in the series – they were 158/2 at Lord’s replying to England’s 474, only to get bowled out for 280 odd. Even after England recovered from 124/8 at Nottingham, the batsmen only had to score 350 in the first innings to get a sizeable lead. Instead the last 4 wickets were lost for 20 odd runs and the Houdini act enabled England to grab the psychological advantage. India turned up at Edgbaston conditioned for defeat and that is one mental spell that champions must immediately break out of.

The fourth test returns to the Oval in London. A ground where the blue of Indian fans will match the blue of the English as at Lord’s. A ground also where the pitch will seem flat and the batsmen may finally manage to play through the line of the ball with lesser risk. A 4-0 whitewash prediction was sacrilege when the series began but now seems realistic. India have been shuffling players, managing injuries and patching up their batting order. To use another military analogy, England has been pounding the heavy artillery while the Indians are still getting their battle formations in order. It is up to the batsmen to pull the team out of the current abyss. It is perhaps too much to expect a victorious turnaround or even a simultaneous coming to form for the top 6, but in this bout where India have been a mute punching bag instead of a living animated boxer, a batting effort exceeding 350 may well be a starting counterpunch.

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'Oh my love, it's a long way we've come
From the freckled hills to the steel and glass canyons
From the stony fields, to hanging steel from the sky
From digging in our pockets for a reason not to say goodbye'

U2 - The hands that built America


Noise is the hinge on which the doors of democracy open. It is the one characteristic that distinguishes it from any other alternative political system. Not for no reason was Eastern Europe referred to being under an ‘Iron Curtain’ during the years of the Cold War. And not for no reason do we see the rich and supposedly destined for greatness China going all out to block internet chat forums, Facebook and Twitter whenever civil disturbances raise their feeble head in the country. Noise denotes life, liveliness and interest. When combined with opinion it reflects participation. Democracies cannot run on mute and unlike our television channels, in our systems of governance we have to listen to all kinds of noises, wherever they emanate from and howsoever unpleasant they may be.

Developed and to some extent emerging democracies are increasing hearing new and perturbing voices. Voices they always believed the locomotives of their nations were far too superior to produce. Voices that are increasingly shrill and radical and are making those in the seat of power squirm uncomfortably. There is a direction that they are coming from. You only have to turn to your right and try and see far ahead, beyond the immediately obvious.

On 22nd of July, Anders Breivik single-handedly committed the deadliest armed attack in Scandinavia since the end of the Second World War. He blew up the façade of the Prime Minister’s office and then went on a shooting spree at the youth camp of the ruling party killing 69 and injuring many others. Before Breivik’s arrest the initial suspicion fell on Islamic terrorists and for good reason. Scandinavia has been under threat since the publication of the Prophet cartoon by a Danish daily a few years. It could have been entirely plausible that revenge had finally been sought for that perceived insult in the quiet of Oslo.

All convenient theories were however torn to shreds as Breivik laid down his automatic weapon and surrendered to the police on the island of Utoya where for more than hour he had emptied bullets on defenseless teenagers. Something that not just Norway but all of Europe and dare I say all of the developed West had overlooked or believed not to be of major consequence, had occurred right in their midst – Right wing home grown violence and terror.

Breivik’s action were an eventual culmination in practice of an ideology that has been spewing hate in theory (and internet chat rooms) across Europe over the last few years. As ‘indigenous’ population stagnated and migrants from poorer countries started entering the workforce, Western Europe’s much vaunted multiculturalism has increasingly felt the pressure coming from a Right that believes the ‘original’ nation is under siege. While till the turn of the century this debate was purely a fight for scarce resources and jobs and at one level even justifiably about illegal immigration, post 9/11 and the Afghan war, the toxic ingredient of Islamophobia has been added to the already unstable compound of frustrations.

These emotions are not confined to Europe alone. North America has also been experiencing a political divide that sharpens by the day. In the US, on the one side stands the Republican party that is shrill it is denouncement of everything that represents government. Ironically it cites the fiscally broke welfare states of Western Europe as examples of what US should not become and what its opponent, the Democratic party is hell bent on doing. The Republicans have never known to be anti-immigrant but their often harsh and illogical stance on illegal immigration (specially through Mexico) and perceived bias towards affluent and middle class suburban whites and Christian conservatives, has pushed the minority vote of blacks and Hispanics away from them. The Democrats meanwhile are ranged on the Left, resisting overt attachment to faith and counterbalancing the concerns of those who are ‘non-white’ in America. The political dialogue is mostly sharp, accusatory and bordering on the unpleasant. And it did not take long for a country where owning a gun is at times as easy as buying groceries from the nearest store, for violence to emanate from someone owning allegiance to the extreme right. In January of this year, Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives was shot at in an assassination attempt by a man who claimed that the government was ‘mind controlling’ the country and listed Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his influences. The shooting was clouded by what preceded it. Giffords had barely managed to get re-elected the previous November and during the campaign her office had been ransacked once and her constituency had been shown in the crosshairs of a gun in an election map put up on Sarah Palin’s website. As speculation over the cause of Gifford’s shooting continued, the political rhetoric only went up.

No society is free from violence and no society is completely open enough to accept everything and everyone it comes in touch with. But society itself is collection of individuals that have not always consented to living together with each and every one of them around. Unless we are ready to live in gated communities and by extension in gated colonies and gated nations, we will always have someone in every generation joining us as a new neighbor. Our fear of the outsider will only confine our world view, for the universe is large and our shells too small.

It is a question that we in India have grappled with as well. Our major metropolitan cities today are bursting at their seams and anti-migrant chants are not hard to hear. In Mumbai, self proclaimed cultural defenders have taken to attacking those they perceive as coming from outside and robbing locals of their jobs and draining the city of its resources. While the fight for our cities is a relatively new phenomenon, the tussle to own the heritage of the land and the country has been ongoing since the collapse of the Mughal Empire. Hindu nationalists have claimed the land as belonging to the nation’s largest faith on the basis of simple numbers and a view of history that begins only from 1000AD onwards when Muslim victories started resulting in permanent inhabitation of the conquered land. But India is much older than that and while Hinduism may have originated here, were the Aryans or the Indus Valley settlers the original squatters as far as history can logically see or did they too travel a distance before setting camp in the north-west of our subcontinent?

Within this debate are layered contexts of migration and movement? Both my father’s and mother’s family moved from comfortably settled and well to do households in Pakistan to the newly independent India during Partition. How much entitlement that does legacy bestow on people like me to call Delhi as ‘my city’ or more importantly to deny anyone else the right to enter its gates? And do I get that entitlement by virtue of birth or by ancestry? And how long does the bloodline have to run before the footprints of migration are erased forever and I become an accepted part of this city and the country?

Both Europe and the US, thus far, have experienced controlled and peaceful influx of outsiders, unlike India. Their engagement with multiple religions and cultures has been at the level and extent of their own choosing. Globalization has expanded boundaries of economies and nations while also expanding insecurities. The Indian sitting in far away Bangalore is no longer a mystic yogi for the average American but a potential job stealer. The turban wearing bearded man from the Middle East is not a carpet seller but a potential suicide bomber. The natural human response is to build walls, to appropriate resources, land and culture for those found ‘home grown’ enough. But every passing generation is layer upon one that came seeking a home. The blacks in the US came from Africa, the whites from England, Germany, Ireland, Russia and Eastern Europe. England was a Viking raiding territory before being conquered by Romans and then by the Anglo-Saxons. Germany was inhabited by fearful tribes before organized empires emerged in the middle ages.

The problem is not with nations defining boundaries or rules for admission, for that is how the modern civilized world must live. The problem lies in the politics of hate or more clearly the politics of the ‘other’. A strand of polity that solely focuses on the supposed negatives of the ‘other’ corrodes the moral correctness of the accuser. The need to banish the outsider and protect the native has now been combined with the need to protect the native culture and religion. This is the translation of the extreme right. The extreme left translated it as a battle between the earner and the seeker. Both demonized one against the other and both have not proven shy of pressing the trigger of a gunshot to make their voice heard. And while governments of the day have maintained that these mini-volcanoes of hate are too small and too dormant to release any harmful lava in the mainstream, incidents like those in Norway only reflect how day to day political speech is influencing those on the margins. It sounds uncomfortable but an Oslo bombed by an Al-Qeada trained Muslim would have been a terror attack but an Oslo shaken up by a Breviek becomes an act of a loony nutcase. As we never tire of saying, terror has no identity, religion or language. If it does not discriminate between the victims then why the discrimination between perpetrators?

The onus is on the center to balance the scale and push the hardliners to the margins. Both the Left and the Right have a place in polity but the language of political discourse needs to consider its message and those that interpret it on the outside. The shrillness and vitriol of words can soon be matched by deadly action as demonstrated in Oslo. Nations cannot open their gates with accepting arms to every outsiders, but they also cannot run around rubber stamping their citizens as owners and dependants. The creation of the planet preceded the creation of the species that now inhabits it. That should settle all disputes claiming ‘original ownership’ of land.

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