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Business News/ Opinion / Anushka, the good Indians won!
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Anushka, the good Indians won!

This is cause of joy that the people who attacked Anushka Sharma for India's defeat were themselves defeated

What happened to Anushka Sharma for a few hours on Thursday was nothing short of a medieval and despicable witch hunt. Photo: PTIPremium
What happened to Anushka Sharma for a few hours on Thursday was nothing short of a medieval and despicable witch hunt. Photo: PTI

The 20 hours or so after India was defeated in the ICC World Cup semifinal by Australia have been a sort of mirror to our society and our values and attitudes. It gives me immense pleasure that everything indicates that the good Indians won, and the regressive and rabble-rousing Indians lost.

I am part of a WhatsApp group of classmates from my business school. All of them are senior executives, respected academics or wealthy entrepreneurs. When India started its chase of 329 runs, I forwarded a message that I had received from a friend to this group: “Indians are very good at chasing targets in the last week of March." Someone on the group replied: “Good one! But only 11 Indians are working today!" Half an hour later, Virat Kohli was out, scoring just one run off 13 deliveries, and the TV camera was focusing on the dismayed face of his girl friend, actor Anushka Sharma, sitting in the stadium.

Then it began. Instantly, someone, a highly successful IT industry manager, posted on the WhatsApp group, in response to the earlier post: “Only 10, not 11. Not Mr Anushka." By evening, as every Livemint reader would know, Anushka Sharma was the most publicly vilified Indian of the day. Twitter went berserk. Nasty jokes about her and abuses aimed at her proliferated. An idiotic attention-seeking small-time actor even called for people to chuck stones at Anushka’s house.

Film director Ram Gopal Varma tweeted: “I personally like Anushka Sharma’s performance much much More (sic) than the performance of whoever and whatever her boyfriend is?" What does that even mean or imply, in addition to the obvious fact that the man is crazed?

Emotionally unstable men were calling up FM radio stations complaining that Anushka was panauti for India, a Hindi word for something that brings bad luck. The logic: India won all seven of their earlier games, and the first game that Sharma comes to watch, India lose.

Sexual innuendos flourished. After all, Anushka and Virat are not married, so she must be a loose woman, right, and fair game for any vulgar calumny? I am certainly not going to quote these messages and jokes. Some people somewhere even burnt some posters of her, after of course making sure that there were TV cameras around. At night, one particular English TV news channel went ballistic about India’s loss, saying the team did not have the will to win, it was an abject surrender, and that these 11 men had let down 1.25 billion people, even going to the extent of saying that A.B. de Villiers, the South African captain, wept at the post-match press conference after he lost the semifinal, and Indian skipper M.S. Dhoni appeared composed. This, apparently, proved something. What that something is, I cannot fathom.

About the Anushka episode first. It simply revealed the worst-kept secret about India. That we are still, to a large extent, a regressive, misogynistic, irrational and superstitious society. This attitude is not restricted to uneducated people. It’s there at every level of the pyramid. The messages on my WhatsApp group of professionals proves that. I am part of another WhatsApp group of my hostelmates from engineering college, and there too, Anushka jokes were being forwarded and shared with glee. Perhaps these people did not even realize what they were doing meant in a broader social context, and if that is true, this blind insensitivity is even more disturbing.

We descend into a mob mentality at the slightest provocation. When we can find a woman to blame, it’s a bonanza. What happened to Anushka for a few hours on Thursday was nothing short of a medieval and despicable witch hunt.

As for the huge outpouring of rage at India’s defeat, as embodied by that English TV news channel, this has become a regular feature when it comes to the performance of the Indian cricket team. A lot of Indians believe that the Indian team has signed a sacred covenant with the nation that it will never ever lose. This, they think, is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution. They cannot understand that other teams can be just better, or that our team can just have a bad day. When the team wins, we treat the players as demigods, and when it loses, suddenly, overnight, they are the scum of the earth, and, of all things, unpatriotic.

This is immaturity of the lowest level.

By late last night, the tide had turned. Sane, rational and civilized India fought back and shut the scum up. Social media was flooded with messages of rage, and this time, correctly directed rage, at the people who had attacked Anushka and the Indian team. It was civilized India’s response that became the world’s most trending Twitter hashtag, and regressive India was silenced. That is definitely cause for joy.

The good people have won, just as the better team did in Sydney.

Quite wonderfully, the best comment I have read so far on the attack on Anushka is a blogpost by Pakistani writer Zahra Peer. Here’s a brief extract: “Some may suggest that the Twitterati firestorm against Anushka Sharma is sexist. I, for one totally disagree. I feel as though the people behind the onslaught are paying Anushka a very high compliment in suggesting that she can so control one of the best bastmen the world has ever seen. To be able to manage such a feat would imply that one is a very powerful and capable woman indeed, so more power to women and way to go Anushka. Pakistan—and it appears Australia—needs many, many more women like you; women who have the remarkable ability to make India lose a game. If India won’t have you, we will gladly accept you with open arms. Hop along the border and accept the role of Pakistan’s Mauka Mauka because if it isn’t you, it can’t be anything or anyone else. Duh."

You made my day, Peer. We Indians managed to prove we are good people. As for the Indian team, you did a great job in the World Cup. We never expected you to do so well. You had a bad day in office in Sydney. It happens to all of us. Move on.

Anyway, when the Indian Premier League begins next month, all these losers who are abusing you right now will have forgotten everything and cheering for each of you. That’s the nature of this nation’s engagement with cricket.

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Published: 27 Mar 2015, 01:46 PM IST
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