Thursday, July 3, 2008
UNPA's position on Nuclear Deal
The clouds of political instability continue to hover over the nation. The United National Progressive Alliance (UNPA) has stopped short of giving a categorical assurance to the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on the issue of support.In the face of aggressive Congress efforts to woo one of its major constituents, the UNPA today (July 3) managed to put up a united face by apparently persuading Samajwadi Party to hold its cards on the Indo-US nuclear deal."We are not going to give a certificate of support to the Prime Minister on the deal before July six," INLD leader Om Prakash Chautala told a press conference after a four-hour meeting of the UNPA that consists of SP, TDP, AGP, INLD and JVP.Rejecting any talk of a rift within the constituents of the UNPA, the Third Front claimed it is united on its stance on the N-deal. "UNPA is united, we are one; we'll consult scientists on Indo-US nuclear deal," SP chief and UNPA chief Mulayam Singh Yadav said.The UNPA however refused to give any open certificate of support to the UPA, but stopped short of revealing whether they would back the UPA on the nuclear deal.Elaborating on the UNPA's stand, senior Samajwadi Leader Amar Singh said, "We will hold more discussions to clear our doubts...We will put forward the clarification of the Prime Minister as well as the sub-text of the nuclear deal before a trusted expert." "UNPA's stand against the Government on inflation and price rise remains unchanged," Singh added.The UNPA also called for a national debate over the nuclear deal. "Nuclear deal is a national issue. There has to be a national debate on it." Amar Singh said.INLD chief Om Prakash Chautala clearly said that there will be no decision before July 6. "We will never support this deal till clarifications are given; Prime Minister will not get any certificate from UNPA for the deal by July six."The clarification comes on the back of reports of a rift within the UNPA over its position on the N-deal. However, the Samajwadi Party, whose 39 MPs may be crucial to the UPA Government in the Lok Sabha if the Left parties withdraw support, again gave indications of tilting towards Congress when it said "communalism is a bigger danger than the nuclear deal".UNPA targets finance, oil ministerThe UNPA today targeted the Finance Minister and the Oil Minister accusing them of being responsible for inflation. Though the UNPA has not asked for their resignation the Congress may come under pressure to drop them at a later date. Amar Singh was extremely critical over the performance of the petroleum minister and the finance minister saying that it is upto the government to decide whther it wants to retain ministers who are responsible for rising prices of essential commodities and petroleum products."We have not demanded the removal of Union Ministers P Chidambaram and Murli Deora," Amar Singh clarified.Singh said the Government had banned the export of cement and steel but had not taken any such step relating to export of petroleum products by private parties. Chautala said the Government was bent upon destroying the nation.Replying to a question on his party's stand on support to the Government on the deal, Singh shot back, "why should UNPA spell out its strategy when the Government and the Left parties were yet to divorce".Amar singh's statement comes after reports that the SP wanted the removal of both the ministers in lew of their support over N-deal.UNPA consults Kalam on N-dealAs part of their decision to consult eminent experts on the nuclear deal, a UNPA delegation lead by Mulayam Singh met former President and noted scientist APJ Abdul Kalam in New Delhi tonight, sources said.The move comes following the UNPA's nearly four-hour long meeting after which the leaders said they were not satisfied with the clarifications issued by the Prime Minister's Office on the deal and would consult noted scientists before taking a stand.Amar Singh said they will consult an eminent expert whose views were acceptable to the entire nation. To a question whether they would consult former President APJ Abdul Kalam, one of the UNPA leaders remarked that Kalam was the "greatest scientist".'No problem with UNPA taking its time'Meanwhile, an embarrassed Congress party put up a brave face. Releasing a brief reaction after the UNPA meet, Congress said, it has no problems with the UNPA taking its time over giving assurance of support.Congress leader Veerappa Moily told reporters in New Delhi that they never expected 'a decision' from UNPA today."We want to take the country along with us.. I think UNPA is part of the country," Moily said."PM is going to Japan to participate in the G8 summit the agenda is climate change...UNPA is a third front, we cannot comment on that."There is no need for this atmosphere of instability. Government is stable and we have completed our term," he added.Speaking exclusively to me over phone (on behalf of Star News), Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhivi said, "It is not a deadline. This is not the way I am looking at...it is a process and that is how we are looking at it. They can take a few more day to decide as well."Left: Dialogue with UNPA is on The Left meanwhile said the Left parties are in continuous touch with the UNPA leader on the N-deal issue.Speaking exclusively to me on behalf of Star News, CPI's leader D Raja said, "I cannot comment on the UNPA meet. The only thing I can say is that a dialogue in on, particularly with the TDP.""We cannot comment on UNPA while a dialogue is on," he added.The CPI is also proposing to other Left parties to consider modalities of withdrawal of support in Friday's meeting. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leaves for the G-8 summit in Japan on July seven which the Left parties feel is an indicator that the Government is going ahead with the deal.
Should Zimbabwe be banned or Politics be keep separate from Cricket ?
In the late Seventies, when governments in southern Africa came in white racist flavours, Robert Mugabe was a hero. Leftish undergraduates in my university preferred him to Joshua Nkomo, his rival in the Rhodesian resistance movement, because Mugabe seemed more unequivocally red. And in the matter of winning liberation from white tyranny, Zimbabwe led the way: it achieved majority rule in 1980, more than ten years before its larger neighbour, South Africa. Just thinking about that time raises ancient memories: the wonderfully named first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, the leader of the Patriotic Front, Bishop Muzorewa, the new place names — Zimbabwe, Harare — that seemed so unlikely then, but which so swiftly replaced Rhodesia and Salisbury in our maps and minds.
If Mugabe was a famous resistance hero then, he’s a notorious Third World thug now. On the face of it, in this he doesn’t seem exceptional. North Korea’s deranged Stalinist regime, Saudi Arabia’s fanatical kleptocracy and Libya’s one-man State are measurably further removed from representative government than Mugabe’s Zanu-PF rule, which at least takes the trouble to hold elections before it steals them, as Mugabe has just done. Loathsome though he is, it isn’t clear that the State he runs is less democratic than China, which is going to host this year’s Olympic Games, an event which every country in the world will attend.
But Zimbabwe has been singled out by Western countries as uniquely obnoxious. Queen Elizabeth has withdrawn the honorary knighthood granted to Robert Mugabe on the advice of the British government, and Britain and America have imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe. Britain’s culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has instructed the European Central Bank to cut bilateral ties with Zimbabwe, and, specifically, to cancel Zimbabwe’s cricket tour of England next year.
This has led to some heated argument about Western hypocrisy, shored up by familiar accusations of inconsistency and partiality. Why hasn’t the West asked for Saudi Arabia to be banned from the World Cup, given that it’s run by fundamentalist despots? Why isn’t Israel sanctioned for brutalizing the West Bank and relentlessly stealing Palestinian land? Why hasn’t Andy Burnham instructed the British Olympic association to boycott the Games in the context of the Chinese ‘occupation’ of Tibet and its moral indifference to genocide in Africa?
This debate is relevant to Indian cricket in the context of the impending International Cricket Council meeting that will discuss, among other things, a proposal to strip Zimbabwe of full membership of the ICC and disbar it from playing international cricket at the highest level. The Board of Control for Cricket in India has declared that it will support Zimbabwe’s current status as a full member. The thinking behind the BCCI’s stand is straightforward: Zimbabwe’s board is a reliable supporter of the BCCI’s South Asian bloc in the conclaves of the ICC, and one vote in ten isn’t to be sneezed at.
In the debate about the rights and wrongs of sanctioning Zimbabwe, several thoughtful commentators, including John Traicos, a white cricketer who played Test cricket for both South Africa and Zimbabwe, have argued that excluding Zimbabwean teams from international matches would be to punish sportsmen for the sins of politicians, an argument that seems to shore up the BCCI’s position. They have also argued that banning Zimbabwe is a low-cost way of feeling self-righteous, but one that will do nothing to hasten the end of Mugabe’s regime. The fact that the main critics of Zimbabwe tend to be Western politicians and cricket administrators, notable for their selectively sensitive consciences, hasn’t helped the boycott cause either.
From an Indian point of view, there are two problems with the argument for keeping politics and sports apart. The Indian government, the Indian intelligentsia and the BCCI were in the vanguard of the campaign to ostracize South Africa and South African cricket for half a century, so we can’t now start being principled about the autonomy of sport. The question we need to answer is this: is Mugabe’s thuggish and predatory regime as evil as apartheid South Africa? In ideological terms, if we compare the regimes in terms of their ruling philosophies, the short answer to this question is "No". But if we were to compare the quality of life that the two regimes made possible, the answer is less simple.
Under Mugabe, the life expectancy of Zimbabweans, male and female, has been nearly halved, from 60 to the mid-30s. Ten per cent of its population is HIV positive, 20 per cent if you look at the band of people between 15 and 49. Its agriculture has collapsed, its money is worth nothing and there is a real danger of widespread hunger and starvation in a country that was once the most efficient grain producer in Africa. The redistribution of agricultural land, disproportionately held by white farmers, has been done corruptly and arbitrarily to enrich Mugabe’s political cronies and is one of the main reasons for the economy’s collapse.
Peter Chingoka, the president of Zimbabwe Cricket, is, unsurprisingly, close to Mugabe’s regime. Zimbabwe Cricket, in the last few years, has presided over an exodus of its best players and the weakening of the national team to the point where it has less competitive credibility than Bangladesh. An audit of its finances revealed serious irregularities. Under pressure from the BCCI, the ICC has done nothing to hold Zimbabwe to account.
The BCCI has to decide whether it wishes to be the patron-in-chief of a dysfunctional, politically compromised, and, in the light of the audit, very likely corrupt, Zimbabwean board. It has to work out whether it wants the ICC to continue to financially subsidize such an organization, a subsidy that, in effect, makes the ICC and the BCCI complicit in the violence of Mugabe’s regime (of which Zimbabwe Cricket is a client). It shouldn’t be a hard decision to make.
The views of the ECB and David Morgan on this matter are unimportant: what should be decisive for Pawar and Modi as Indians is the position taken by the South African cricket board, which has suspended all cricket relations with Zimbabwe. But more than the South African cricket board, the BCCI should take its cue from Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who have both in recent days, condemned Robert Mugabe’s leadership. When the two greatest political leaders of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid are driven to disown a man who was once a comrade-in-arms in their struggle against racist tyranny, it’s time for the BCCI to take a break from ICC realpolitik and follow suit.
In the late Seventies, when governments in southern Africa came in white racist flavours, Robert Mugabe was a hero. Leftish undergraduates in my university preferred him to Joshua Nkomo, his rival in the Rhodesian resistance movement, because Mugabe seemed more unequivocally red. And in the matter of winning liberation from white tyranny, Zimbabwe led the way: it achieved majority rule in 1980, more than ten years before its larger neighbour, South Africa. Just thinking about that time raises ancient memories: the wonderfully named first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, the leader of the Patriotic Front, Bishop Muzorewa, the new place names — Zimbabwe, Harare — that seemed so unlikely then, but which so swiftly replaced Rhodesia and Salisbury in our maps and minds.
If Mugabe was a famous resistance hero then, he’s a notorious Third World thug now. On the face of it, in this he doesn’t seem exceptional. North Korea’s deranged Stalinist regime, Saudi Arabia’s fanatical kleptocracy and Libya’s one-man State are measurably further removed from representative government than Mugabe’s Zanu-PF rule, which at least takes the trouble to hold elections before it steals them, as Mugabe has just done. Loathsome though he is, it isn’t clear that the State he runs is less democratic than China, which is going to host this year’s Olympic Games, an event which every country in the world will attend.
But Zimbabwe has been singled out by Western countries as uniquely obnoxious. Queen Elizabeth has withdrawn the honorary knighthood granted to Robert Mugabe on the advice of the British government, and Britain and America have imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe. Britain’s culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has instructed the European Central Bank to cut bilateral ties with Zimbabwe, and, specifically, to cancel Zimbabwe’s cricket tour of England next year.
This has led to some heated argument about Western hypocrisy, shored up by familiar accusations of inconsistency and partiality. Why hasn’t the West asked for Saudi Arabia to be banned from the World Cup, given that it’s run by fundamentalist despots? Why isn’t Israel sanctioned for brutalizing the West Bank and relentlessly stealing Palestinian land? Why hasn’t Andy Burnham instructed the British Olympic association to boycott the Games in the context of the Chinese ‘occupation’ of Tibet and its moral indifference to genocide in Africa?
This debate is relevant to Indian cricket in the context of the impending International Cricket Council meeting that will discuss, among other things, a proposal to strip Zimbabwe of full membership of the ICC and disbar it from playing international cricket at the highest level. The Board of Control for Cricket in India has declared that it will support Zimbabwe’s current status as a full member. The thinking behind the BCCI’s stand is straightforward: Zimbabwe’s board is a reliable supporter of the BCCI’s South Asian bloc in the conclaves of the ICC, and one vote in ten isn’t to be sneezed at.
In the debate about the rights and wrongs of sanctioning Zimbabwe, several thoughtful commentators, including John Traicos, a white cricketer who played Test cricket for both South Africa and Zimbabwe, have argued that excluding Zimbabwean teams from international matches would be to punish sportsmen for the sins of politicians, an argument that seems to shore up the BCCI’s position. They have also argued that banning Zimbabwe is a low-cost way of feeling self-righteous, but one that will do nothing to hasten the end of Mugabe’s regime. The fact that the main critics of Zimbabwe tend to be Western politicians and cricket administrators, notable for their selectively sensitive consciences, hasn’t helped the boycott cause either.
From an Indian point of view, there are two problems with the argument for keeping politics and sports apart. The Indian government, the Indian intelligentsia and the BCCI were in the vanguard of the campaign to ostracize South Africa and South African cricket for half a century, so we can’t now start being principled about the autonomy of sport. The question we need to answer is this: is Mugabe’s thuggish and predatory regime as evil as apartheid South Africa? In ideological terms, if we compare the regimes in terms of their ruling philosophies, the short answer to this question is "No". But if we were to compare the quality of life that the two regimes made possible, the answer is less simple.
Under Mugabe, the life expectancy of Zimbabweans, male and female, has been nearly halved, from 60 to the mid-30s. Ten per cent of its population is HIV positive, 20 per cent if you look at the band of people between 15 and 49. Its agriculture has collapsed, its money is worth nothing and there is a real danger of widespread hunger and starvation in a country that was once the most efficient grain producer in Africa. The redistribution of agricultural land, disproportionately held by white farmers, has been done corruptly and arbitrarily to enrich Mugabe’s political cronies and is one of the main reasons for the economy’s collapse.
Peter Chingoka, the president of Zimbabwe Cricket, is, unsurprisingly, close to Mugabe’s regime. Zimbabwe Cricket, in the last few years, has presided over an exodus of its best players and the weakening of the national team to the point where it has less competitive credibility than Bangladesh. An audit of its finances revealed serious irregularities. Under pressure from the BCCI, the ICC has done nothing to hold Zimbabwe to account.
The BCCI has to decide whether it wishes to be the patron-in-chief of a dysfunctional, politically compromised, and, in the light of the audit, very likely corrupt, Zimbabwean board. It has to work out whether it wants the ICC to continue to financially subsidize such an organization, a subsidy that, in effect, makes the ICC and the BCCI complicit in the violence of Mugabe’s regime (of which Zimbabwe Cricket is a client). It shouldn’t be a hard decision to make.
The views of the ECB and David Morgan on this matter are unimportant: what should be decisive for Pawar and Modi as Indians is the position taken by the South African cricket board, which has suspended all cricket relations with Zimbabwe. But more than the South African cricket board, the BCCI should take its cue from Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who have both in recent days, condemned Robert Mugabe’s leadership. When the two greatest political leaders of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid are driven to disown a man who was once a comrade-in-arms in their struggle against racist tyranny, it’s time for the BCCI to take a break from ICC realpolitik and follow suit.
If Mugabe was a famous resistance hero then, he’s a notorious Third World thug now. On the face of it, in this he doesn’t seem exceptional. North Korea’s deranged Stalinist regime, Saudi Arabia’s fanatical kleptocracy and Libya’s one-man State are measurably further removed from representative government than Mugabe’s Zanu-PF rule, which at least takes the trouble to hold elections before it steals them, as Mugabe has just done. Loathsome though he is, it isn’t clear that the State he runs is less democratic than China, which is going to host this year’s Olympic Games, an event which every country in the world will attend.
But Zimbabwe has been singled out by Western countries as uniquely obnoxious. Queen Elizabeth has withdrawn the honorary knighthood granted to Robert Mugabe on the advice of the British government, and Britain and America have imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe. Britain’s culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has instructed the European Central Bank to cut bilateral ties with Zimbabwe, and, specifically, to cancel Zimbabwe’s cricket tour of England next year.
This has led to some heated argument about Western hypocrisy, shored up by familiar accusations of inconsistency and partiality. Why hasn’t the West asked for Saudi Arabia to be banned from the World Cup, given that it’s run by fundamentalist despots? Why isn’t Israel sanctioned for brutalizing the West Bank and relentlessly stealing Palestinian land? Why hasn’t Andy Burnham instructed the British Olympic association to boycott the Games in the context of the Chinese ‘occupation’ of Tibet and its moral indifference to genocide in Africa?
This debate is relevant to Indian cricket in the context of the impending International Cricket Council meeting that will discuss, among other things, a proposal to strip Zimbabwe of full membership of the ICC and disbar it from playing international cricket at the highest level. The Board of Control for Cricket in India has declared that it will support Zimbabwe’s current status as a full member. The thinking behind the BCCI’s stand is straightforward: Zimbabwe’s board is a reliable supporter of the BCCI’s South Asian bloc in the conclaves of the ICC, and one vote in ten isn’t to be sneezed at.
In the debate about the rights and wrongs of sanctioning Zimbabwe, several thoughtful commentators, including John Traicos, a white cricketer who played Test cricket for both South Africa and Zimbabwe, have argued that excluding Zimbabwean teams from international matches would be to punish sportsmen for the sins of politicians, an argument that seems to shore up the BCCI’s position. They have also argued that banning Zimbabwe is a low-cost way of feeling self-righteous, but one that will do nothing to hasten the end of Mugabe’s regime. The fact that the main critics of Zimbabwe tend to be Western politicians and cricket administrators, notable for their selectively sensitive consciences, hasn’t helped the boycott cause either.
From an Indian point of view, there are two problems with the argument for keeping politics and sports apart. The Indian government, the Indian intelligentsia and the BCCI were in the vanguard of the campaign to ostracize South Africa and South African cricket for half a century, so we can’t now start being principled about the autonomy of sport. The question we need to answer is this: is Mugabe’s thuggish and predatory regime as evil as apartheid South Africa? In ideological terms, if we compare the regimes in terms of their ruling philosophies, the short answer to this question is "No". But if we were to compare the quality of life that the two regimes made possible, the answer is less simple.
Under Mugabe, the life expectancy of Zimbabweans, male and female, has been nearly halved, from 60 to the mid-30s. Ten per cent of its population is HIV positive, 20 per cent if you look at the band of people between 15 and 49. Its agriculture has collapsed, its money is worth nothing and there is a real danger of widespread hunger and starvation in a country that was once the most efficient grain producer in Africa. The redistribution of agricultural land, disproportionately held by white farmers, has been done corruptly and arbitrarily to enrich Mugabe’s political cronies and is one of the main reasons for the economy’s collapse.
Peter Chingoka, the president of Zimbabwe Cricket, is, unsurprisingly, close to Mugabe’s regime. Zimbabwe Cricket, in the last few years, has presided over an exodus of its best players and the weakening of the national team to the point where it has less competitive credibility than Bangladesh. An audit of its finances revealed serious irregularities. Under pressure from the BCCI, the ICC has done nothing to hold Zimbabwe to account.
The BCCI has to decide whether it wishes to be the patron-in-chief of a dysfunctional, politically compromised, and, in the light of the audit, very likely corrupt, Zimbabwean board. It has to work out whether it wants the ICC to continue to financially subsidize such an organization, a subsidy that, in effect, makes the ICC and the BCCI complicit in the violence of Mugabe’s regime (of which Zimbabwe Cricket is a client). It shouldn’t be a hard decision to make.
The views of the ECB and David Morgan on this matter are unimportant: what should be decisive for Pawar and Modi as Indians is the position taken by the South African cricket board, which has suspended all cricket relations with Zimbabwe. But more than the South African cricket board, the BCCI should take its cue from Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who have both in recent days, condemned Robert Mugabe’s leadership. When the two greatest political leaders of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid are driven to disown a man who was once a comrade-in-arms in their struggle against racist tyranny, it’s time for the BCCI to take a break from ICC realpolitik and follow suit.
In the late Seventies, when governments in southern Africa came in white racist flavours, Robert Mugabe was a hero. Leftish undergraduates in my university preferred him to Joshua Nkomo, his rival in the Rhodesian resistance movement, because Mugabe seemed more unequivocally red. And in the matter of winning liberation from white tyranny, Zimbabwe led the way: it achieved majority rule in 1980, more than ten years before its larger neighbour, South Africa. Just thinking about that time raises ancient memories: the wonderfully named first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, the leader of the Patriotic Front, Bishop Muzorewa, the new place names — Zimbabwe, Harare — that seemed so unlikely then, but which so swiftly replaced Rhodesia and Salisbury in our maps and minds.
If Mugabe was a famous resistance hero then, he’s a notorious Third World thug now. On the face of it, in this he doesn’t seem exceptional. North Korea’s deranged Stalinist regime, Saudi Arabia’s fanatical kleptocracy and Libya’s one-man State are measurably further removed from representative government than Mugabe’s Zanu-PF rule, which at least takes the trouble to hold elections before it steals them, as Mugabe has just done. Loathsome though he is, it isn’t clear that the State he runs is less democratic than China, which is going to host this year’s Olympic Games, an event which every country in the world will attend.
But Zimbabwe has been singled out by Western countries as uniquely obnoxious. Queen Elizabeth has withdrawn the honorary knighthood granted to Robert Mugabe on the advice of the British government, and Britain and America have imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe. Britain’s culture secretary, Andy Burnham, has instructed the European Central Bank to cut bilateral ties with Zimbabwe, and, specifically, to cancel Zimbabwe’s cricket tour of England next year.
This has led to some heated argument about Western hypocrisy, shored up by familiar accusations of inconsistency and partiality. Why hasn’t the West asked for Saudi Arabia to be banned from the World Cup, given that it’s run by fundamentalist despots? Why isn’t Israel sanctioned for brutalizing the West Bank and relentlessly stealing Palestinian land? Why hasn’t Andy Burnham instructed the British Olympic association to boycott the Games in the context of the Chinese ‘occupation’ of Tibet and its moral indifference to genocide in Africa?
This debate is relevant to Indian cricket in the context of the impending International Cricket Council meeting that will discuss, among other things, a proposal to strip Zimbabwe of full membership of the ICC and disbar it from playing international cricket at the highest level. The Board of Control for Cricket in India has declared that it will support Zimbabwe’s current status as a full member. The thinking behind the BCCI’s stand is straightforward: Zimbabwe’s board is a reliable supporter of the BCCI’s South Asian bloc in the conclaves of the ICC, and one vote in ten isn’t to be sneezed at.
In the debate about the rights and wrongs of sanctioning Zimbabwe, several thoughtful commentators, including John Traicos, a white cricketer who played Test cricket for both South Africa and Zimbabwe, have argued that excluding Zimbabwean teams from international matches would be to punish sportsmen for the sins of politicians, an argument that seems to shore up the BCCI’s position. They have also argued that banning Zimbabwe is a low-cost way of feeling self-righteous, but one that will do nothing to hasten the end of Mugabe’s regime. The fact that the main critics of Zimbabwe tend to be Western politicians and cricket administrators, notable for their selectively sensitive consciences, hasn’t helped the boycott cause either.
From an Indian point of view, there are two problems with the argument for keeping politics and sports apart. The Indian government, the Indian intelligentsia and the BCCI were in the vanguard of the campaign to ostracize South Africa and South African cricket for half a century, so we can’t now start being principled about the autonomy of sport. The question we need to answer is this: is Mugabe’s thuggish and predatory regime as evil as apartheid South Africa? In ideological terms, if we compare the regimes in terms of their ruling philosophies, the short answer to this question is "No". But if we were to compare the quality of life that the two regimes made possible, the answer is less simple.
Under Mugabe, the life expectancy of Zimbabweans, male and female, has been nearly halved, from 60 to the mid-30s. Ten per cent of its population is HIV positive, 20 per cent if you look at the band of people between 15 and 49. Its agriculture has collapsed, its money is worth nothing and there is a real danger of widespread hunger and starvation in a country that was once the most efficient grain producer in Africa. The redistribution of agricultural land, disproportionately held by white farmers, has been done corruptly and arbitrarily to enrich Mugabe’s political cronies and is one of the main reasons for the economy’s collapse.
Peter Chingoka, the president of Zimbabwe Cricket, is, unsurprisingly, close to Mugabe’s regime. Zimbabwe Cricket, in the last few years, has presided over an exodus of its best players and the weakening of the national team to the point where it has less competitive credibility than Bangladesh. An audit of its finances revealed serious irregularities. Under pressure from the BCCI, the ICC has done nothing to hold Zimbabwe to account.
The BCCI has to decide whether it wishes to be the patron-in-chief of a dysfunctional, politically compromised, and, in the light of the audit, very likely corrupt, Zimbabwean board. It has to work out whether it wants the ICC to continue to financially subsidize such an organization, a subsidy that, in effect, makes the ICC and the BCCI complicit in the violence of Mugabe’s regime (of which Zimbabwe Cricket is a client). It shouldn’t be a hard decision to make.
The views of the ECB and David Morgan on this matter are unimportant: what should be decisive for Pawar and Modi as Indians is the position taken by the South African cricket board, which has suspended all cricket relations with Zimbabwe. But more than the South African cricket board, the BCCI should take its cue from Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who have both in recent days, condemned Robert Mugabe’s leadership. When the two greatest political leaders of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid are driven to disown a man who was once a comrade-in-arms in their struggle against racist tyranny, it’s time for the BCCI to take a break from ICC realpolitik and follow suit.
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