An animated wave of anger swept across the Indian electronic media soon after the Pakistan hockey team downed its archrivals in the semifinals of the recently concluded Hockey Champions Trophy in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar.
The anger would surely have been aimed at the Indian team who lost the hard-fought game 4-3, but the team escaped all and any scrutiny when the Indian media instead turned its guns against the Pakistan side.
Indian TV channels bemoaned and decried the way the Pakistan team had celebrated the victory when some of its players took off their shirts and ran towards a section of the large crowd present at the stadium.
South Asia’s potion of patriotism is prepared with roasted emotion, a smattering of misdirected anger and a dollop of drama
The players were shown indulging in a dance clearly aimed at mocking the crowd. But even more telling was the way two of Pakistan’s players used their fingers in this respect. One of them sneaked in a quick gesture with his index finger while the other put his finger on his lips as if mocking the silence that had greeted Pakistan’s victory from an otherwise boisterous crowd.
Pakistan’s coach, Shahnaz Shiekh, rushed towards his most animated players and reigned them in, maybe fearing that the nature of his players’ spontaneous celebrations might just spark off a riot from a crowd that was already incensed by India’s loss.
The international hockey body, the FIH, decided not to impose any serious penalties on the Pakistan team after Shahnaz and his players submitted an unconditional apology.
But this only managed to aggravate the anger of the Indian media.
The hue and cry on Indian TV channels and in the editorials of some of India’s leading newspapers succeeded in mobilising India’s hockey federation to now threaten to cut off all hockey-related ties with Pakistan if the FIH did not take a harsher stance against the Pakistan side.
In an equally sudden about-turn, the FIH decided to ban two Pakistani players from playing the finals against Germany.
Though it is true that some of Pakistan’s players did get a tad too excited by the victory and ended up conducting themselves like wags swinging uncontrollably on an unprecedented adrenalin rush, not much digging was done on determining exactly why this happened.
Buried under all the finger-wagging tirades of the Indian media against the Pakistan team are also certain newsy tit-bits about what some sections of the crowd were up to.
On Twitter some Indians after condemning the antics of the Pakistan team did confess that the behaviour of the crowd towards the Pakistan side was entirely rude, chauvinistic and abusive.
The Pakistan team arrived at the ground packed with more than 10,000 or so noisy and partisan Indian spectators.
The situation on the Pakistan-India borders has been rather volatile and tense of late and the election of a controversial right-wing Hindu nationalist as India’s new prime minister has emboldened the more acidic strands of the anti-Pakistan sentiment and narrative in the Indian polity.
As Pakistan accuses India of fuelling separatist insurgencies in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Sindh provinces, India has often blamed Pakistan of funding ‘Islamist’ insurrections in India.
What wasn’t reported at all in the Indian media was the fact that the Pakistani players were constantly taunted throughout the game and even when they were singing their country’s national anthem just before the game got under-way.
For the Pakistan players (most of who are in their late teens and early 20s) the packed, loud stadium became a giant pressure-cooker. And once the final whistle was blown and Pakistan managed to hold on to a slim 4-3 victory — in what was a classical display of Asian hockey by both the sides — some Pakistan players behaved as if being suddenly released from the claustrophobic grip of a coliseum cramped by 10,000 people who wanted to see them fed to the lions.
But that’s the attractiveness of it all — the paradoxical beauty of a tense Pakistan-India cricket or hockey game punctuated by frequent displays of passion and patriotism.
What’s a sport without all this? In a short essay of his titled ‘The Spirit of Sport’, famous author and journalist, George Orwell, wrote: ‘sport is frankly mimic warfare …’
Psychologists for decades have maintained that sporting events (especially between two hostile countries) have been a way to substitute actual warfare because they help channelise aggression in ways that do not require firing of guns and yet make people feel the glory of victory or the pain of defeat the way they would in an actual war.
In one of America’s foremost scientific magazines, Psychology Today, Steve Taylor, in his essay, ‘Sport and the Decline of War’, writes: ‘Sport satisfies most of the same psychological needs as warfare, and has similar psychological and social effects …’
Tylor quotes early 20th century psychologist William James who believed that war actually works as an elixir for a nation to unite.
But Tylor then goes on to suggest that after the horrors and brutality of the first and second world wars, it is sport that has become the tool to satisfy the people’s subliminal and primate urge to find a release through war.
Tylor adds that ‘watching a popular sport is an empathic, rather than a passive experience. It is an experience of complete, passionate engagement, generating powerful emotional responses.’
He suggests that ‘if sport is a moral equivalent of war then it should be able to serve as a substitute for it, and to bring about a decline in warfare.’
One is always reminded how the Australians generally can’t stand the British. The pent-up animosity between the two nations is allowed to emerge during cricket games in which not only both the teams are constantly at each other’s throats (through aggressive tactics and verbal brawls), the crowds make it a point to grind the players from the opposing side to the ground with colourful language and outright cursing.
In his autobiography, former English batsman, the flamboyant Kevin Pietersen, writes that he always wanted to immediately fly back to England at the end of an Australian tour due to the months of abuse that the English players are bombarded with on the grounds and even at shops and bars.
Same is the case during soccer games between Germany and Netherlands in which many Dutch fans still mimic the animosity of those Dutch men and women who faced oppression when German armies invaded the Netherlands during WW-II.
But the acrimony that moulds the behaviour of a nation treating sport as warfare and teams as armies is not only the domain of sporting events between nations who are politically or culturally at odds with each other.
For example, what is it that constitutes the passionate rivalries (that often witness fist fights) among fans of soccer clubs in the UK and South America and football and baseball state teams in the United States?
Psychologists and anthropologists studying this phenomenon largely agree that identifying with a soccer club (in Europe) or a state’s football or baseball side in the US fulfils the need of many men and women to experience a ‘tribal unity’ in the modern world.
Tylor suggests that sporting events in this context create artificial life and death situations (which, in a way, deters and deflects episodes of horrific violence found in actual wars).
In one of the chapters of his famous book, How the States Got their Shape, American author, Brian Unger, explains how sometimes historic animosities between different states within the US that once actually saw the states go to war with one another are now channelised through football and baseball games between the once warring states.
In such games fans are often seen mocking their opponents (and vice versa) and the teams play the games as if they were at war (but without guns and tanks).
So, the increasing legislation attempting to tame the inherent warring sprit of sport is missing a point. As long as sport is not encouraging actual warfare, it may actually be deterring it!
Talking about legislation, when the Indian TV channels demanded a ban on the Pakistan team by suggesting that these days even soccer players in Europe aren’t allowed to take off their shirts, they must be reminded that certain laws also apply to crowd behaviour.
Spectators guilty of racial and other sensitive abuse are at once evicted from the grounds in Europe. Thus so should have that section of the crowd that ended up provoking the Pakistan players.
It’s nice to believe that one’s country has become some kind of a finger-wagging ‘superpower’ in Asia. But dear South Asian cousins, the internationalisation of Bollywood do not make a superpower. Peace.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, December 21st, 2014