Defeat allows for necessary changes in India’s T20 culture

The World T20 has been as much about the cricket as about gestures made and not made.

Sport cannot exist in a vacuum, divorced from what is happening in the world around. Gestures made on the field of play focus strongly on gestures not made. If the Indian cricket team took a knee in support of Black Lives Matter — a noble gesture — they were simultaneously telling us about the lives that don’t matter back home.

The World T20 has been as much about the cricket as about gestures made and not made. In India, we must remind ourselves of DLM (Dalit Lives Matter), and MLM (Muslim Lives Matter), but players hide behind the cliche: sport and politics ought not to mix. But they do, whether we like it or not. Decades ago George Orwell declared that all art is politics. Perhaps all sport is politics too. Cricket is often diplomacy (or war) by other means.

Black lives do matter in India where cricketers from the West Indies have often complained about racist abuse from both spectators and colleagues. Dalit lives, Muslim lives, women’s lives, tribal lives, farmers’ lives matter too.