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Middle India and the cricket Raj On the afternoon of 1 December 1981, just after 2.30, Bob Willis, the perennial England number 11, plodded forward in his characteristic fashion to a delivery from Kapil Dev. It was the fourth afternoon of the first Test between India and England being played at the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai. England left 241 for victory, were 102 for 9. In fact, when Willis had come out to bat, England’s position was much worse – 75 for 9 – and Willis and Bob Taylor were involved in a stubborn little stand. But as Willis pushed forward to the second ball of Kapil Dev’s thirteenth over, the umpire upheld the Indian’s appeal for a catch behind, and almost immediately the emotion and the euphoria that had been building up all day, burst. For the English it was an unnerving, unreal moment. Keith Fletcher, the losing England cricket Captain, looked beleaguered and hunted. When I interviewed him for the post-match comment, he could barely articulate: ‘I have not come here to lose. But there are only sixteen of us against . . . ’ He didn’t have time to complete his sentence as another giant firecracker exploded a few feet away. I was keeping a diary of the tour and I noted some reactions as the firecrackers exploded: ‘I know how the Christians felt’, says one awed English man, though I doubt if, even at the height of Nero’s rule, there were quite so many firecrackers going off, some even from the Pavilion. One disgusted Indian remarks, ‘This sort of thing would never happen at the Brabourne stadium [only a mile away and a much more upper crust Indian place]. Too many nouveaux riches and smugglers have become members of the Wankhede stadium.’ At that stage, we rightly concentrated on the cricketing aspects of the defeat, which was to shape the entire series, and put paid to Fletcher’s captaincy. But that little snippet about the clash between the Brabourne and the Wankhede is more illustrative of the cricket Raj which rules India. For it summarised what has been happening in India and the new power barons that control the game in India. Throughout that Test, and a couple of earlier ones I had covered at Wankhede, old Indian friends had bemoaned the loss of decorum and dignity as a result of the move from
