WHERE MONEY TALKS
Ganguly tells Udit Misra that he decided to be aggressive as a captain to back his teammates and provide them an atmosphere to freely express themselves
Sheikh Hasina’s intriguing comment the other day that India should make an effort to keep neighbours happy raises a number of possibilities that it would be unwise of Narendra Modi to ignore. Since she was speaking to Indian journalists, the warning was obviously meant to be conveyed to New Delhi where the Prime Minister alone matters in our one-man government. The obvious first inference is that the Bangladesh Prime Minister wants Mr Modi to know bilateral relations are not quite as hunky-dory as Indians believe. But there are bound to be wider implications.
So tell me, did you like the book (Sourav Ganguly’s A century is not enough)?” asks one of the people facilitating the interview. “Frankly, no,” I say as I wait for my turn in the lobby of Vivanta by Taj in New Delhi to meet someone I believe is the best captain Indian cricket ever had — yes, that’s inclusive of MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli; I can’t really comment on Tiger Pataudi though.
“But why?” she asks. I argue that it neither had the granular details of the key events — say the decision to bowl first in the 2003 World Cup final — nor was it as insightful as one imagined. For the most part, Ganguly came across just as resentful and anxious as any one of us probably are in our careers. Unless, of course, that was the insight. In which case, the book competently brings out how even a Ganguly — the man who is credited to have discovered the spine of the Indian cricket team — was a nervous wreck all along. Once, he claims, he shouted at his mother (who was insisting on feeding him breakfast before a match) remonstrating with her on how he would face Wasim (Akram) and Waqar (Younis) if she fed him luchis and rosogollas. The book representative retorts, “You see, he is like the Salman Khan of Indian cricket.” My brain suffers a minor convulsion at the comparison but I refrain from saying anything; I’d rather compose my thoughts because it was already my turn to interview Dada.
It is a hurried setting, exactly opposite to what is required for such an interview. Ganguly is meeting one journalist after another at pre-specified time slots and he has made it clear that he will not answer questions outside the book. We meet just outside the room where the interview is supposed to happen. As we shake hands, he immediately asks, “You look familiar?” I am surprised. But I fall back on self-deprecating humour, as most Lucknowites do, and blame it on my very average face. “No, no, I have seen you somewhere,” he insists. By now I am feeling like Steve Waugh
Bhutan’s Dawa Tsering, once the world’s longest-serving foreign minister, claimed that many South Asian leaders had welcomed Pakistan’s nuclear capability. Without necessarily being pro-Pakistani or anti-Indian, they felt there should be some check on India’s authority. With one crucial difference, India’s relationship with the other seven members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation is not unlike the equation between the United States and the 40 other North American countries and colonies. The US is far too rich and powerful for any question of parity with any of them. Cuba was the only odd man out but it, too, has moved closer to the US sphere of influence.
In contrast, every South Asian country, led by Pakistan, sees itself as India’s equal, and is encouraged to do so by the US and China which have their own agendas in the region. Geography often aggravates the effects of this imbalance. A landlocked country like Nepal additionally suffers from disadvantages that a victim complex magnifies. Disparity in size doesn’t prevent defiance as in the Maldives. There are complications over sharing natural resources (Indus water with Pakistan), defending a land border (IndiaBangladesh) or upper and lower riparian rights (China, Nepal and Bangladesh). India’s security walking out with Ganguly for the toss. I again assure him we have not met. Then, just as he settles down on the sofa, he announces his final verdict, “You remind me of that crime reporter on Aaj Tak”. I cringe a bit as images of a bearded man sensationalising crime news on TV cross my mind. I am confused, who is he comparing me to? And although we laugh — his media manager, too, is in the room — I make a mental note: He was the right person to unleash on those smug Aussies! The man seems to have an innate talent to sledge.
I start by asking him why he chose to focus on the anxiety of his playing days so much. He says because people only see the adulation, the hundreds, the fame — no one sees the other side. That besides the times when you are down and out, and trying your best to get back in the groove, even when you are on top there is a lot of effort required to stay that way and even that involves constantly fighting doubts.
I move to a related question. Since Ganguly had been part of the same dressing room in the early 90s that featured the likes of Dilip Vengsarkar and K Srikkanth — Indian teams that often wilted under the pressure put by dominating sides like the West Indies with fast bowlers such as Malcolm Marshall and Patrick Patterson — I wonder whether Ganguly thinks his generation of players were qualitatively different from all the rest in the past.
He refuses to compare, saying they were different generations but also says that he was “fortunate to captain a great generation of players”. “Look at it this way,” he says, “Viru (Sehwag), (Rahul) Dravid, Sachin (Tendulkar), Ganguly, (VVS) Laxman, (Anil) Kumble, Harbhajan (Singh) all ended up playing 100 tests; Zaheer Khan played almost 100… this speaks volumes for the impact this generation had on the Indian sport.” That’s true, I agree, but was it only the quality of the people, I ask; surely we had very capable batsmen and bowlers in the past. Or was there something else that sometimes demands extending its military presence into neighbouring sovereignty as during the Dokhlam stalemate with China. Sri Lanka’s ethno-cultural affinity is a source of both strength and weakness.
As a result, relations are less than harmonious. The world heard of what were presented as Indian blockades of Bhutan and Nepal. The Indian peacekeeping force in Sri Lanka (1987-90) was an utter and embittering failure. Both India and Pakistan accuse the other of covert operations in each other’s territory. If independent Bangladesh was a signal victory from the humanitarian, Bangladeshi nationalistic and Indian points of view, it also reminded the neighbourhood that India has the will and capability to act as the US did when it helped to break up Colombia and create a sovereign Panama whose canal it controlled. The extreme case was India’s 1975 annexation of the protected Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim for which, too, a parallel was available in the US absorption of the kingdom of Hawaii some 77 years earlier.
India must forge a viable partnership with the other SAARC members against this historical background and given these geopolitical drawbacks. It was Inder Kumar Gujral who said as prime minister that although India could made Ganguly’s team click. Because, I continue arguing, it is not too hard to imagine Dravid losing out on the oneday game — actually, he almost did — and, in fact, Laxman never played a World Cup despite his talents. Similarly, it is also not very difficult to imagine Sehwag missing out on a Test career or for a Harbhajan remaining a lifelong discard for his so-called attitude problems in the early years. So what changed under Ganguly?
“Times had changed, captains had become more patient and players were given the right atmosphere,” he asserts. Ganguly says his own struggles early on in his career were the key to his captaining mantra. Dealing with those niggling doubts, in a systematic way, was the key to making his team qualitatively different from those before him. Sehwag was a good case in point. “As a leader, you had to take care of the fear, the insecurity.” I recall what Ganguly writes in his book about the Indian team that exited the 2007 World Cup in the very first round — “it was a classy team but a scared outfit” — because under coach Greg Chappell no one felt secure. “That’s true because players were not given the freedom to express themselves; there was always the fear that you may not play the next game”. Ganguly sits back assured that the Greg Chappell period was just a blip and the current Indian team carries on that transformation which he initiated. “Look at the freedom with which Kohli or Rohit play or, even more so, Pandya,” he says with a sense of accomplishment. “Even as a country we have changed; we were very conservative earlier… I became aggressive as a captain because I realised the players needed that backing... We in India are brought up to be docile, goody-goody but that needed to change on the field.”
In the middle of this discussion, we have been served black coffee. Ganguly, who for the most part sat slumped in the sofa, nonchalantly looking into his mobile phone screen as he talked, now comes to the edge of not shrink in size to oblige its neighbours, it could create a climate of confidence to dissolve fears. That was exactly the advice Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew had given Rajiv Gandhi, citing the case of Suharto’s Indonesia setting fear and suspicion at rest among smaller members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Again, there’s a vital difference. Unlike India, Indonesia surrendered territory for TimorLeste to emerge as a sovereign republic in 2002. In contrast, the legitimate and agreed transfer of a speck of West Bengal territory to Bangladesh was delayed for decades.
Returning to Sheikh Hasina’s comment, she probably had in mind the aborted agreement between West Bengal and Bangladesh on sharing the Teesta river’s waters. In June last year, the two countries swapped tiny islands in the Bay of Bengal ending a dispute that had kept thousands of people in stateless limbo for nearly 70 years. The Teesta dispute should similarly be settled amicably. But it must also be stressed that no stable relationship can be based on the bigger partner forever giving. An old incident involving a Bangladeshi landowner and fringe politician, Morshed Ali Khan Panni, illustrates the attitude of some of India’s neighbours, not, of course, the outright hostile ones. When gas was discovered in Bangladesh, Panni suggested to H M Ershad, then Bangladeshi president, that it should be sold to India which desperately needed energy. “Then we can turn it off if India is disobliging!”
Blackmail on one side and bullying on the other doesn’t make for a constructive partnership. Both sides must concede and compromise. the seat to pour milk and sugar in his cup. “But aren’t we overdoing it now?” I ask, referring to Kohli’s frantic gesticulations. He immediately starts chuckling and says, “I’ll ask him when I meet him next time: Who do you look at when you make those fists? Which dressing room do you look at? I laugh and laugh over it; he does it every ball.”
Is that a good development? I mean, despite being unquestioned champions, the Aussies were hated precisely because of this; sharply in contrast to how West Indies cricket in the 70s and 80s was celebrated. “Is cricket no longer a gentleman’s game?” I ask. “That’s off the field; not on the field anymore,” he replies as a matter of fact.
I try probing him on some of the issues he has quite clearly avoided in the book. For instance, it remains a mystery how, almost all of a sudden, a man handpicked by Ganguly — Greg Chappell — decided to turn against him and managed to upstage the undisputed leader of Indian cricket to the extent that even Ganguly’s father asked him to retire. But clearly, he is not interested in replying.
So I think I better get the question about his decision to bowl in 2003 out of the way. “It had rained overnight. The game started late because there were wet spots on the pitch and I thought we could get Australia 100 for 5… but we just didn’t bowl well enough,” he says without betraying any scars.
“100 for 5? Do you always go about visualising this way?” Yes, he says, “As a captain, you always have to think ahead.” So what is your next act, I ask. His last answer confounded me more than his initial query: “I don’t know. We’ll see, I don’t think too far ahead”. As I take his leave, I can’t help wondering how he might fare if he were to enter Indian politics.