Bhogle ouster small part of larger problem
Harsha Bhogle being left out of the IPL commentary team at the very last minute throws up several uncomfortable questions
ESPNcricinfo staff
13-Apr-2016
Keshava Guha, writing for scroll.in, says that if "loyal professionals" like Harsha Bhogle are treated the way he was by the BCCI, then no one is safe. And that the change in BCCI's leadership has not brought any change in its style of working.
[Anurag] Thakur has openly emphasised his belief that commentators should stick to describing the action on the field, a policy put into place by the previous regime. And far from being the saviour of Indian cricket, Shashank Manohar, as Board president, is complicit in all that took place between 2008 and 2011, from the antics of Lalit Modi to the rise of unchecked conflict of interest. No one doubts his personal probity, but we don't doubt Manmohan Singh either. In a precedent for Bhogle's sacking, the previous regime allegedly engineered Sanjay Manjrekar's last-minute removal from the commentary team for a home series against Australia. At least you could say of Manjrekar that he has often pushed the lines as far as he can in an attempt to express himself honestly. Bhogle is not even guilty of that.
In his column for NDTV.com, novelist and senior cricket writer, Mukul Kesavan makes a compelling point that this jingoism expected from Indian commentators is just a small part in a larger problem.
The men who commentate for the BCCI today made their Faustian compacts with their eyes open; they learnt to suppress inconvenient opinions, to tweak their cricketing souls for commentary contracts. They didn't see it like that, naturally. They saw themselves as pros contracted to do a job of work - and if that job came with rules, well, all jobs did and they were professionals.
The trouble with this line of argument is that the only currency that commentators deal in is credibility. If Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton stopped asking hard questions of English captains in post-match conversations because the ECB told them to, they would lose theirs. A good commentator offers insight born out of experience and conviction. Great ones, like John Arlott or Richie Benaud, combine insight with presence. A commentator who agrees to censor himself becomes a corporate proxy, his master's voice, and dispensability is built into that job description.
Writing for rediff.com, Prem Panicker argues that in an ecosystem - bred by the BCCI - that is allergic to criticism, if certain "senior players" in the India team weren't happy with Bhogle's commentary, the outcome was inevitable. And this reflects our society, in a way, he says.
The BCCI is not so much an institution as it is a hall of mirrors. What it shows us is not its arrogant, intolerant, authoritarian face but our own - a face distorted by our jingoism, our hatred of the 'other', our intolerance of contrary viewpoints, our thin-skinned inability to take the merest hint of criticism. Perhaps that is why we hate the BCCI - because it is too uncomfortably like us.