One of the biggest challenges facing any colonized country post Independence is the process of mental decolonization. If the leaders of the post-colonial nation do not explicitly tackle this as part of their nation-building agenda in the formative years, the mental slavery can remain deeply embedded in the body politic, and the resultant lack of self-awareness and self-respect among citizens can keep damaging the nation from within for decades after.

This project of mental decolonization is something Bharat has by & large failed to implement from the outset, and is only just beginning to awaken to. One good way of tracking our decolonization journey is by looking at our relationship with cricket, a sport introduced by our erstwhile British colonizers. While we have come a long way from the days of utter Anglo-Saxon domination of the sport, there is a long way to go and the erstwhile colonizers have invented new methods of perpetuating their hegemony.

The IPL is arguably the most envied as well as hated tournament in the entire cricket-playing world – a ‘world’ which consists of only 12 full member nations, all somehow or the other connected to the brutal and genocidal British colonial empire. If you were to believe some Anglo cricket commentators, IPL is responsible for everything that is ‘wrong’ with cricket today – over-commercialization, impending death of test cricket, poor technique of batsmen etc.

So what explains the visceral hate that IPL seems to cause in some quarters? Simple: IPL is run by the Indian cricket board, BCCI, and has enriched that board and made it the global financial engine of the sport; a fact that those nursing serious colonial hangovers just cannot digest. The shift in balance of financial power from Anglosphere (UK, Australia) to Bharat that started in the game from the late 1980s onwards under Jagmohan Dalmiya, is now complete.

However, it is pertinent to note that the Anglo powers still exercise control over the administrative machinery of the game via the sport’s overall governing body, the ICC. Sample this – the ICC CEO post was created 30 years ago, and since then White men have occupied that top post for 23 years; the only Bharatiya-origin man who was appointed as CEO, Manu Sawhney, was unceremoniously sacked after just 2 years in the job (most other CEOs served for 8 years) after a ‘cultural review’ of ICC undertaken by the British consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCooper (PwC). Sawhney called the entire exercise a ‘premeditated witch hunt’.

And while most current and former cricketers want a piece of the lucrative IPL pie, there is a growing chorus of commentators and ex-cricketers from the Anglosphere who want the BCCI to ‘do more to save cricket’. Yes, they often couch it as a demand being made of the Big 3 i.e. Bharat, UK, Australia…but the real target is obvious – ‘BCCI better start shelling out more cash to other boards so that the latter can pay their players enough to stop them from gravitating to lucrative T20 leagues around the world’, is the implied argument.

Anyway, we digress – questions on the sustainability of cricket, especially test cricket, is a perennial topic of discussion among cricket afficionados and beyond the scope of this article. The self-righteousness in some who keep going on about ‘spirit of cricket’ is mildly amusing. There is no golden age of cricket which has been lost: Test cricket is as ‘healthy’ today as it was in the 1970s. Cricket has real limitations as a global sport, and will likely not grow beyond the British ‘Commonwealth’. To be honest, the world will not stop if the game dies out.

So, back to the IPL. It has attracted some of the best cricketing talent across the world, and also opened up several lucrative roles for former cricketers as coaches, team directors etc. While this is welcome, as it helps improve the overall standard of Bharatiya cricket, many of the foreign appointees have proven to be lackluster or unproductive members of bloated coaching staffs, just enjoying the gravy train. Why IPL franchises have not chosen to cultivate more Bharatiya coaches and support staff, is puzzling until one realizes how mentally colonized Bharatiya society still is.

And then there is a category of foreign ex-cricketers who should never have been considered for any role in a Bharatiya cricket league, irrespective of their cricketing or coaching credentials. Men like Mark Boucher, who during his playing days made racist remarks targeting his own colored South African cricket colleague Paul Adams, calling him “brown sh*t”. This was revealed in 2021 during Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) Social Justice and Nation Building hearings, where this and other incidents of racial discrimination in South African cricket since that country’s re-admission in 1991 following the formal end of Apartheid regime were revealed by Black and other non-White cricketers.

In 2022, Mumbai Indians appointed Mark Boucher as its head coach starting with IPL 2023.

What message does this send to ex-cricketers who have been clearly outed as racists? That you can sh*t on people of color, and still rake in their money and be treated as stars by the very people you despise. Unfortunately, this is the situation in Bharat, that our elites, including respected businessmen like Mukesh Ambani, seem to be either unaware of or turn a blind eye to. The same colonized mindset sees them funding the very Ivy League universities that concoct poisonous academic theories against Hindus, Bharat and Hindu Dharma.

One of the legends of Bharatiya cricket, Sunil Gavaskar, has called upon IPL teams to hire Bharatiya coaches as they can communicate better with young Bharatiya players. He has also reasoned that foreign coaches get insights on Bharatiya players and conditions during IPL, which they can then put to use against us while coaching international teams. But there is another important reason for promoting Bharatiya coaching staff at all levels. It will help our coaches gain valuable experience and improve their skills. The current coaching market in cricket is dominated by Whites. Surely, with the resources at Bharat’s disposal, we can create a pool of talented coaches making best use of our large pool of talented former cricketers?

One look at the coaches for Australia’s domestic T20 league BBL, versus the coaches for IPL will be instructive

The names of Ricky Ponting and Justin Langer on the list of coaches is also very interesting, to say the least. Ponting was the captain of the Australian cricket team during the contentious 2008 series when he went to atrocious lengths to win the Sydney test, refused attempts by Bharat’s captain Anil Kumble to defuse the tension, and insisted on bringing a ludicrous racism charge against Harbhajan Singh. To this day, most of the Australian cricket fraternity believe they were the ‘wronged party’ in that episode, despite an investigation finding that the racism charge was baseless! Australian cricket writer Peter Roebuck’s stinging indictment of Ponting and the Australian team he led in that Sydney match, should be mandatory reading for all IPL franchise owners.

Ponting’s hostility and barely concealed contempt for Bharat’s media contingent was clearly visible in that 2008 series, and then in 2009 he captained the Australian squad that made a mockery of open media session held in Mumbai.

Ponting and Langer are two of the key individuals responsible for creating the abrasive Australian team culture of win-at-all-costs that later culminated in the shocking ball tampering saga in South Africa. Langer also harbors the widely held belief in Anglo cricketing circles that BCCI and players like Kohli ‘get away’ with things, despite the ground reality being that White cricketers still exercise a lot privilege in the ICC scheme of things as was clear from the 2014 instance when English bowler James Anderson got away despite admitting that he had abused, pushed and verbally threatened Ravindra Jadeja.

Langer is also likely a cheat, who in 2004 flicked off the bails during change of overs in a test match in Sri Lanka, and then allowed his team-mates to appeal for a hit-wicket dismissal, before TV footage caught him as the one who had flicked the bails off. Langer told match referee, Englishman Chris Broad, that he had removed the bail ‘sub-consciously’, an ‘explanation’ readily believed by Broad! Langer also jumped to the defence of disgraced Australian batsman Steve Smith in 2021 when Smith was caught engaging in some dubious gamesmanship, yet again.

Surely, there are White Anglo cricketers who are both talented and decent human beings – the likes of John Wright, Shane Bond, Pat Cummins come to mind, who should be welcome to play and coach in Bharat, if they so desire. But it is disappointing, to say the least, that dubious figures like Boucher, Ponting and Langer are being given lucrative contracts by IPL teams. It is also disheartening to see that White cricketers like Jos Butler, Eoin Morgan and Brendon McCullum were neither reprimanded nor quietly stripped off their IPL contracts after their tweets mocking Indian accents and English proficiency surfaced in 2021.

Decolonization is a journey, and Bharat is slowly recovering its self-respect that will hopefully allow us to avoid such self-harming actions going forward.