Why BCCI should be ashamed for bailing on West Indies

Some things are now clear. You do not mess with the BCCI. You do not even proceed with the expectation that the Board of Control for Cricket India, the national body that controls the International Cricket Council, will bend to the interests of the game. You do not take recourse to precedent. You cannot even allow yourself the hope that the sport will heed its history to recover from a bad situation for the greatest common good. If you stop humming to the BCCI’s calendar, don’t be surprised if reprisal comes swift and hard, never mind if cricket itself is taken to a new brink.

Even if you are the West Indies, cricket’s most special team.

After the West Indies called off their remaining matches of this autumn’s India tour, the air had been thick with anticipation that the BCCI would take the sternest view of what it called an “act of indiscretion”. After a failure to resolve a pay dispute with their board, West Indies cricketers took the extreme – and controversial – decision to abandon the remaining one-day international, a Twenty20 match and three tests.

It is, of course, an affront to cricket to have scheduled matches called off. Abrupt suspension of a series does break a compact between sportspersons and spectators. But with the BCCI now announcing that it is suspending all bilateral tours to the Caribbean, two larger questions remain.

What does it say about the BCCI that it plays fast and loose with cricket’s calendar, and yet bristles when an unforeseen crisis consumes another board?

And what does it say about the state of cricket when it so heartlessly fails territories that have given the sport a historical context and nobility that elevates it beyond its current transactional formats?

Because, be sure that the BCCI could have done enough to resolve the pay dispute between the West Indies board and players. It would have just taken a large heart to create the space and funds to increase the pie. It bears emphasis that the BCCI itself has been enriching itself, through the Indian Premier League, unmindful of the damage done to the West Indies’ schedule. It has encouraged what came to be called the “freelancers” in cricket, men like Chris Gayle who privileged their place in the IPL above any international fixture.

It did this by refusing to accommodate IPL into the ICC Future Tours Programme, whose violation by the West Indies it is now so outraged about. In fact, bilateral series were forced into rearranging themselves around the IPL – for example, two years ago, Sri Lanka and West Indies dropped scheduled Tests, so that players could meet their IPL commitments. To brandish its exceptionalism, the IPL, BCCI’s treasure, compensates cricket boards with a percentage of player fees.

Don’t you think it’s odd that the BCCI is now hitting such an unyielding posture?

In any case, now as cricket splinters into different formats and leagues, without a thought on how it now assesses a player’s or a team’s excellence, the crisis assailing West Indies cricket indicts the entire sport.

The West Indies experience affords cricket a higher claim to being about more than a contest between bat and ball. Cricket’s role (“humanising”, as a historian put it) in the Caribbean’s anti-colonial struggle apart, even amidst the former colonies of Britain, West Indies is cricket’s unique territorial achievement. It is an entity which does not exist politically; for a while – for four years from 1958 to 1962 – there was a West Indies Federation, and even then there was a little bit of an imperial overhang.

Not in cricket – cricket was the way for the people of the Caribbean, getting out of slavery, indentured status and colonial subject, to assert themselves, to express their individuality, to shine, to be.

Cricket would have been poorer without the West Indian contribution, and not only because of the action on the field of play. The West Indies experience gives cricket everywhere self-belief.

For years now, the crisis of financial sustainability in West Indian cricket has been obvious. For the BCCI to compound its failure to assist, by way of being the dominant board globally, with a potentially debilitating embargo on bilateral tours is a shockingly brutal course of action.

I, at least, refuse to be believe that the BCCI could not have stopped things from coming to this pass.