An unending game!

Pic for representational purposes only

Raju Korti
Perhaps the most dicey and flaky aspect to any politician is you will never know from which platform he chooses to air his views. Invariably, when his bluster ends up ruffling feathers, he seeks refuge in the sheepish to 'clarify' that they were his personal views and not those of the political umbrella that he holds over his head. It is a strategy that often works whenever he throws discretion to winds.
Chief Minister Omar Abdulla who is carrying the family's considered belief that it is the sole repository of Kashmiri interests, has made public his intense displeasure over all rounder Parvez Rasool not being given a chance in the recent one-day series against Zimbabwe. "Did you really have to take him all the way to Zimbabwe to demoralize him? Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just do it at home?" Omar said in a sarcastic tweet after Rasool was not included in the last game against the minnows. As if on cue, Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor also expressed disappointment over Rasool not making it to the playing eleven in the final game of the series. "Bizarre selection. Could easily have rested Jadeja and Raina for Rasool and Rahane. What's the point leading 4-0 if you can't give every member of the touring team a chance to play at least once by reshuffling the deck now?"
In a country where majority people prefer to watch Indians losing a game of cricket than winning in any other form of sport, any references to contexts are redundant when it comes to know how the likes of Abdullahs and Tharoors are connected with the country's sport-scape.
This is not to suggest that politicians are not entitled to their views on sport. Nor is there any attempt to stir up a debate on whether sport and politics mix. It is a subject that has been chewed to cud. The point to be pondered over here is whether whoever are at the helm of the sporting bodies are competent and clean enough to administer them by keeping their personal and political interests scrupulously out of the game?
Recall IPL Commissioner Rajeev Shukla's pompous, clique-ridden PR speech during a game when he was patting himself on the back (by proxy) over how smoothly the tournament was conducted and its phenomenal popularity. A few days later the IPL and its managers were grappling to cope with the brickbats thrown at them from all quarters when the match-fixing skeletons started tumbling out. A few years before, "Pune Strongman" Suresh Kalmadi, who couldn't hide his smug expressions behind his thick beard, fell into disgrace in what even a child knows as Commonwealth Games Scam.
Even as he was handling ministerial portfolios, Sharad Pawar never made any secret of his grubstake in the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA). One doesn't know whether Laloo Prasad Yadav even held a bat or ball in his life, but he had a field day holding the reins of Bihar Cricket Association. Most people came to know only recently that BJP leader Arun Jaitley had started involving himself more in the murky affairs of the Delhi Cricket Association than in his own chosen profession of legal practice. In many cricket associations, if the battle lines are not drawn between politicians and the players, they exist between players themselves on the basis of their political affiliations. How do you identify an administrator? By his sporting capacities or his administering abilities? And finally, what exactly is politics in sport? Is it the entry of politicians or the political mindset? How do you read someone like, say, Kirti Azad who has been a sportsperson initially and forayed into politics later? Ditto with cricketer Chetan Chauhan. It is a tough and tricky call.
Remember, how in 1971 even a respected cricketer like Vijay Merchant as the Chairman of Selectors, threw his casting vote in favour of Ajit Wadekar to  pull down Nawab of Pataudi as the Indian captain. And then we had the regional cricket associations and their honchos pushing their own players into the Indian team. It threw up the question whether players should be selected on the basis of regional representation or solely on their playing merit. Time was when of the eleven playing the Indian team, almost ten would be from Mumbai and the 11th would be Venkataraghvan.
Politics in sport is per se not about politicians trying to capture sports bodies through coups and political machinations. It is also the backroom game players play. It could also take on the hue of a  captain arguing for a particular player to be included or kept out of the team. Politics is rife between the players too and it often gets exposed in public domain obliquely. The other games are not free from this malady either. Cricket perhaps gets center-stage because of the high financial and political stakes. All is rarely well with our Hockey, Soccer, Table Tennis and other sports bodies who often become turfs to settle some of the worst personal and political battles.
What our sporting bodies need are a clean regimen and a cleaner administration that will not succumb to the lucre of money and petty politics. It is irrelevant where it comes from. The moot point is can or will it be possible when those who are supposed to hold the steering arrogate to themselves the status of a sovereign?
Internationally, even bodies like the IOC, UEFA, and FIFA have had questionable regimes. Politics and sport are abiding companions. Although the host city of the 1936 Berlin Olympics was decided before Hitler came to power, there is no denying that the Nazis used the Olympics to promote their evil ideas.
Sport does not take place in a social vacuum. It will admit poisons of many different flavours and intensities. What happened in Boston was at the most terrifying limit of the spectrum. But over the past months we have also seen cricket revisit its corruption trauma and a vile regression in English football fans.
If sport, on and off the field, serves as a microcosm of social challenges and behaviour, then it can only profess innocence by refusing guilt. And that's why it's ludicrous to say that sport and politics don't mix. They have no choice. After all, there is no denying that there is a political dimension to everything.
With due apologies for twisting Leon Trotsky, the Russian Marxist revolutionary's quote "You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you." Read politics in place of war and the case rests.