Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by theBritish, Ashis Nandy wrote long ago.
On the lazy, balmy pre-winter weekend morning of November17, as England batsmen meander from nowhere to deeper into nowhere in the firstsession, one feels Wikipedia, which describes Nandy as “Indian politicalpsychologist, a social theorist, and a contemporary cultural and politicalcritic”, should as well have called him a futurist. His lines appeared in thebook ‘Tao of Cricket’ back in 1989, when cricket wasn’t still the sole propertyof the BCCI.
It now is.
Lazying around in office on the same lazy, balmy pre-winterweekend morning, minutes after the England batsmen had begun their studied andgrim-faced march back to the dressing room at Motera in Ahmedabad, almost as ifby rote, one came across a lovely link posted by a former colleague onFacebook, that mother of all tools to kill time while appearing to act busy. Itwas the London Telegraph, telling its readers the visual tale of the firstIndia-England Test that began on November 15. Nothing unusual, save the smallfact that it was bizarre; those images, that is: a series of line drawingsetching out what was happening out there on the field, a frame full of sarcasmfollowed by 16 similar frames.
“India v England, first Test: in the only pictures available”,said the headline.
It was, of course, an allusion to the BCCI’s honourable actof barring certain agency photographers, including Getty Images, that mother ofall archive images source for sports journalists, from covering the Testseries. In protest, international agencies like Reuters, AP and AFP said they,too, would not cover the match. The BCCI thought (an act it does a little toooften for anyone’s benefit) it has a point, like it always believes.
“The board has a policy not to accredit photo syndicationservices like Getty Images and other similar foreign and domesticagencies," BCCI’s media manager Devendra Prabhudesa had told the mediabefore the Motera match got under way.
Instead, the board gave foreign papers, and agencies putunder the stinking blanket of ban, the option of using images from its ownwebsite. That no one might want to do so, for issues related to quality, amongothers, is a minor legal knot for the board’s head honchos.
But what, pray, is the board trying to achieve with this?Aside from making the already irate players and foreign media, vexed alreadywith the Indian board’s bureaucratic bandobast, further livid?
But then, who puts a lid on BCCI’s penchant for saying no?If the board thinks it owns Indian cricket and -- by virtue of the moneygenerated -- the game itself, what stops its autocratic satraps from extendingthe ban to news agency photographers tomorrow? They can all be asked to fetchimages from BCCI’s pool. And put a bar on newspaper or magazine photographersthe day after, using the same, ahem, logic?
Or, this sounds scary but is merely an extension of the sameline of argument, restrict even reporters covering matches on the pretext thattheir reportage is too disparaging for Indian cricket so they should cut-and-pastefrom the BCCI's hired writers on its website?
What the decision has done is open a can of worms: who ownsIndian cricket? Can an average fan be asked not to take cameras and phones tothe stands while watching the match, lest s/he ‘shoots’ copyrighted photos withthat treacherous phone-cam?
Is BCCI only a business entity, broadcaster and regulatorrolled into one, and gradually shaved off its principal role function asadministrator of a popular game bankrolled by the paying public?
In association with Governance Now
