RAJKOT: With return of prize, India’s literary stars protest rising intolerance, seeking an investigation into the beating death of a Muslim man. On the other hand, lives of South African cricket players are at stake as cricket ground have been threatened to become arena for different outfits to flex their muscle.
Saurashtra Cricket Association (SCA) Stadium in Khandheri, the venue for the third ODI between India and South Africa, has become a political platform.
After Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) chief Hardik Patel’s threat to disrupt Sunday’s match, it has now been alleged that members of the BJP have procured close to 20,000 tickets to negate Patel’s imminent threat. The stadium has an official seating capacity of 28,000. The BJP members, according to sources, will enter the stadium wearing T-shirts that will have Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image imprinted on them.
Though Saurashtra Cricket Association secretary Niranjan Shah dismissed all such talk as mere speculation, he failed to give an exact figure of how many tickets were sold or made available to the public.
There was trouble reported on Friday morning when an angry mob ransacked the barricades and burnt banners after they found all ticket windows shut at Race Course Ground. This, after sources at the SCA said that they had sold close to 4,500 tickets till Thursday evening.
Hardik, making his intention clear, accused the BJP of playing politics over a cricket match. He sent a WhatsApp message from his personal number, asking SCA to ‘clarify on why they declared that all tickets are sold in spite of the fact that many tickets yet remain unsold.’
He threatened, ‘PAAS will block the way of both the teams to the stadium and we will also cordon the entire stadium.
Hardik, who is agitating to get reservation for Patel community under Other backward Class (OBC) quota, said, ‘The (BJP) government was saying till now that the match should not be turned into an agitation venue, but now this government is itself playing politics over the match,’ he said.
Unprecedented security arrangements have been made for the match day. In all, 2,100 policemen will be positioned at the SCA Stadium, which is double the numbers usually deployed in ODI security.
For the moment, all eyes here are on the political games being played out, with the arrival of the teams a day earlier going almost unnoticed. The five-match series is tied 1-1 after India won the second game.
On the other hand, the novelist Nayantara Sahgal said she was returning India’s highest literary honor to express sympathy for all dissenters who now live in fear and uncertainty. G S Bhullar, a short-story author, said he was giving back the same award to protest the violent retrogressive forces dictating terms in the field of literature and culture. Mandakranta Sen, a Bengali poet, said she was sending her award back to protest ‘attacks on rationalists.’
In the last month, 35 leading Indian authors and poets have returned coveted awards from the National Academy of Letters in a collective revolt against what Salman Rushdie this week called the thuggish violence creeping into Indian life under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The writers’ revolt, which began in September after a 76-year-old was gunned down in his home, rapidly gained strength this month when Modi failed to promptly condemn the killing of a Muslim man, Mohammed Ikhlaq, by a Hindu mob because they suspected he had killed a cow and eaten its meat.
