Should you be bothered about Wasim Jaffer?

Cricket is a new career option for adventurous Indian boys and Wasim Jaffar, who comes from an ordinary family, is a success story. After beginning his cricketing career for Mumbai at the age of 15, he scored 314 in his second Ranji match. Later, he moved to Vidarbha and helped them win the Ranji Trophy in 2018.

Between 2000 and 2008, Jaffar played 31 test matches for India with an average of 34.1, which is decent for an opening batsman. (Chetan Chouhan’s average was 31.6 and Krishnamachari Srikanth’s, 29.9.) He also holds the record of scoring most runs in Ranji Trophy, having played over 150 matches. In his playing days, Wasim Jaffer was considered one of the vanishing breed of “gentlemen cricketers”. He didn’t get involved in any controversy as far as I can recall.

Jaffar, who joined as the head coach for the Uttarakhand cricket team for 20-21, resigned on 09 February 2021. In his resignation letter, Jaffer had said the Cricket Association of Uttarakhand (CAU) officials had been pushing undeserving players.

After Jaffer’s resignation, CAU secretary, Mahim Verma said he had been informed by players that Jaffer had “communalised” the dressing room environment and “favoured” Muslim players. He also accused Jaffer of inviting a maulvi to the ground and thus violating the COVID-induced bio-bubble too, besides changing the team chant that hails Hanuman. So, essentially, the complaints against Jaffer are communal and unrelated to cricket. A senior national sportsman was slapped with charges after his resignation without the semblance of an enquiry and without giving him an opportunity to defend himself. This cannot be done even to an ordinary employee in the organised sector. 

After his appointment as coach, Jaffer had hand-picked three professional players – Jay Bista, Iqbal Abdullah and Samad Fallah — from outside the state to play for Uttarakhand. The state association apparently had no problem then.

Subsequent to the allegations following his resignation, Jaffer said in a virtual press conference: ‘They said I called a maulvi and offered namaaz on the ground. First of all, I didn’t call a maulvi; it was Iqbal Abdullah who called him. On Friday, we needed a maulvi to offer namaaz. Iqbal asked me, and I said yes. The practice was over and we offered namaaz inside the dressing room. This happened only twice or thrice, that too before the bio-bubble was put in place.’

He added, ‘There are allegations of me not allowing players to chant ‘Jai Hanuman Jai’. First of all, no players chanted any slogan. We have a few players who are from the Sikh community, and they used to say ‘Rani Mata Sache Darbar ki Jai’. So, I once suggested that we should have something like “Go Uttarakhand” or “Come on, Uttarakhand” instead. Like, when I used to be with Vidarbha, the team had “Come on, Vidarbha” as its slogan. And it wasn’t me who chose the slogan, it was left to the players.’

Jaffer also categorically denied that he had pushed for Muslim players.

Indian cricketing establishments have had many blemishes, but never ever was there a controversy in communal lines between an association and its coach. But then, a lot of new things have been happening in New India, like the Supreme Court granting a disputed site to those who had committed an "egregious violation of the rule of law" at the same site, or the PM laying the foundation stone of a temple, or the President of the Republic contributing to a temple construction fund.

The Hidutwa persuasion of our rulers was bound to intrude into sports sooner or later and it has happened. Uttarakhand is a BJP ruled state and for the party, everything ultimately boils down to protecting Hindus form imaginary threats from “others” like Wasim Jaffer.

Four fellow cricketers of Jaffer, Anil Kumble, Irfan Pathan, Dodda Ganesh, and Manoj Tiwari have come out openly in support of Wasim Jaffer. They too believe Jaffer is a decent man who has been wronged. Of them, only Anil Kumble is a name to reckon with, but his tweet was as anodyne as it could have been. One wonders what former cricketing greats like Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Dravid, Laxman, Ganguli, Srinath, Harbhajan, or Zaheer would like to say on the topic. Or Virendra Shwag, who was Jaffer’s opening partner in several tests. It would be reasonable to believe they understand the unfairness against Jaffer. However, it is unavoidable to infer that being a dashing athlete is no guarantee that one has a spine.

Sachin Tendulkar, the greatest Indian cricketer, exhibited the spinelessness, besides the social awareness of a jellyfish, when he tweeted an inane message – possibly under instructions from political masters he doesn’t really need – against international celebrities who asked legitimate questions about the brutal way the Indian government has been treating agitating farmers.

Let’s face two harsh truths: if you are a Muslim, Christian, or Dalit in India today, whether you are a celebrity or a nonentity, you are liable to be targeted by the saffron party and their henchmen at every turn of the road. Secondly, not many Hindus – who aren’t branded antinational by default – speak out in these toxic days despite the fact that we live in a time that can be described in Rabindranath Tagore’s words, when “justice cries alone, silently, because of crimes committed by irremediable power.”

If like me, thanks to the accident of your birth, you are not an automatic target of the bigoted and poisonous Hindutwa brigade, and yet you don’t speak out against crimes committed by irremediable power, please think: Are you a blind follower of the saffron brigade, are you a creep like Tendulkar, or are you plain scared? 

Whatever you are, Dear Reader, you are a part of the problem!

12 February 2021