Might is right. So is white

Faisal Shariff

India has a ministry for information and broadcasting.

It also has a Jaywant Lele, who is forever broadcasting his own brand of information. As in his latest salvo: 'Dotcom is not media !'

This is what the honorary secretary of the BCCI thundered at me in Pune earlier this week, on the day prior to the second one-day international in the ongoing series.

I had asked him how come rediff.com was not given a pass for the game. The above was his reply.

There was more. “The working committee of the BCCI has refused to acknowledge dot-coms as media and has directed the various associations to refuse entry to dot-com journalists."

'Is there an official resolution passed by the Working Committee to this effect?' I asked.

"There is no need for a resolution. Right now this is the decision. When we decide later about allowing dot-coms, it will only be cricket websites who will be allowed," said Lele.

Funny man, this. One thing though, you have to give him credit for the cunning of a Kasparov -- if you check out his statement, given above, carefully, you realise that he is already making provision for an official protest by Rediff, and preparing a fall back position. In other words, if say, the government mandates that dotcoms should be treated as media, then Lele and his "working committee" can always fall back on the position that accreditation will be given only to those dotcoms that are exclusively devoted to cricket -- or more to the point, that it need NOT be given to Rediff.

Of course, "working committee decision" notwithstanding, the likes of a cricket portal get two passes per game, while other journalists attached to other dotcoms are also given free access.

It is also getting to be quite amusing, really -- the board is apparently hell bent on keeping Rediff out of cricket stadia, but typically, does not have the guts to stand up and say so. The easier -- if more ridiculous -- way out is to rewrite the English language, and redefine the meaning of the word 'media'.

“There are dot-coms in every nook and corner of the streets in India today," continued Lele, at his very best. "We can't allow every dot-com inside the stadium."

'We are India's premier portal,' I shot back.

"That we will decide when the issue comes up again in the working committee meeting," was the answer I got, as Lele walked out of the Le Meredien hotel and into his car.

Alright guys, say it -- there we go again, crying about not being allowed into cricketing stadia. To be very frank, it has come to a stage where it makes absolutely no difference -- we still cover cricket matches. And we -- without accreditation, without media passes -- continue to get the interviews no one else does, we continue to get cricketers to come on chat (Harbhajan Singh and V V S Laxman being just two for instance, and there are a couple of very interesting names in the offing as well). Apparently, the cricketers have another meaning for the word media, than the one in vogue among Lele's working committee.

So no, we ain't crying. Merely, wondering. Wondering, for instance, how come if that is the case and the BCCI does in fact has a policy -- written or no -- then I was given official accreditation for the Madras Test. I was, you know -- I even have my pass, duly signed and stamped, to prove it.

"It is up to the individual associations," says Lele, by way of reply. "If they want to accomodate you, that is fine with us."

Typical, wouldn't you say? Here is the honorary secretary of the BCCI, telling us that yes, we have a policy; no, we haven't bothered to set it down on paper; yes, it is official; no, it doesn't have to be followed by the associations who are our members.

If you can make sense out of all that, then hey, pray tell!

Pune, meanwhile, was a madhouse. We were greeted by one Mr Karve, the board's media liaison officer, who seemed to be having himself a ball, ordering journalists around.

Karve, like Lele, suffers from selective dotcom allergy. At my request, he promptly gave me a written letter to the effect that we would not be given passes, in accordance with the BCCI's resolution. The 'resolution', it needs remembering, that the BCCI has not bothered to put onto paper.

Never mind us -- what of the other journalists, the lucky ones who belonged either to various print publications, or to dotcoms that do not raise allergic reactions in cricket officials? A Indian photojournalist attached to Reuters -- one of the most prestigious of news services -- was one of the lucky ones, having to wait a mere four hours for the pass to be duly signed and stamped. Others waited even longer. Not because it takes that long to stamp a pass, merely that Mr Karve appeared to have decided to prove to the journalists just what a big man he is.

And then came the clincher. Malcolm Conn, an Australian journalist covering the ongoing tour, came along, seeking his own pass. He had with him six or seven other applications, in the names of other Australian journalists.

Karve and his team of officials, so very indolent till then, jumped to attention in a trice. 'Yes sir,' Conn was assured, 'we will have your passes for you sir, no problem sir, no sir, no need for all that formalities, sir, you just leave your photographs here and we will have the passes sent to your hotel rooms; sir, please give us your room numbers; sir, thank you so much sir; good day, sir; pleasure, sir...'

To say we were disgusted, would be to understate the story.

We say, in our columns, that our team needs to stand up for itself, it needs to develop a sense of self-worth and self-respect, it needs to learn not to fold at the sight of foreign players.

But why, and how, do we expect our team, our players, to show that sense of self-worth, self-esteem, when the board that governs them, controls them, does not have an iota of those commodities?

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh