It has been close to week since Pakistan won the ICC cricket championship and the cricket has been taken out of the game. It is no longer an India Vs Pakistan cricket match, it is just India Vs Pakistan.

On 18th April 2017, the Indian cricket team played a cricket match against Pakistan at the Oval Stadium in London. India lost to Pakistan with a 182 runs. Close to a week later, the match still continues albeit different one.

After the Oval defeat, New Delhi media went berserk. Some media outlets conducted an ‘in-depth’ analysis on the match that was played. One of the reports of a national news channel concluded that the AC in India team’s rooms wasn’t functioning well and so the team couldn’t play as expected. Another news channel said that India lost because of a ‘cursed’ Pakistani sports anchor who had gone on a selfie spree with Indian players including skipper Kohli.

A day after the match, a reporter of a national news channel tracked down Hardick Pandya and Yuvraj Singh in Britain and questioned them on why the Indian team didn’t wear black armbands, like the Indian hockey team did. The armbands were said to represent the team’s solidarity with soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir. If this was the case, why didn’t any reporter track down our politicians and ask them why they didn’t spend their Sunday evening in blue, team India shirts to show their solidarity for our cricketers? Or why didn’t the news anchors of prime time news sit in the team India shirts and host their shows that day?

Would the journalists have asked these questions if the team had won against Pakistan? What does it even mean to ask such questions? Were the journalists trying to cling on to some form of twisted sense of patriotism? The kind of patriotism restricted and defined by the outcome of a game? The kind of patriotism that they felt had slipped away when a team of 11 men lost a cricket match against 11 other men from Pakistan?

We have now arrived at a time when a militant can be confused with a ‘terrorist’, a separatist can be called a ‘venomous snake’, an innocent’s death can be justified by a ‘stray bullet’ and a people cheering a team that one is ‘not supposed to’ can be slapped with charge of sedition.

On June 16, a national television began its 10 ‘O’ Clock news update with the ‘India Vs. Pakistan match in focus’. The discussion on the match lasted only about 5 seconds. What ensued was a discussion on who is an Indian and what it means to support Pakistan in the match. Images of a well-known Kashmiri separatist leader cheering for Pakistan were splashed across the screen. The anchor concluded that the separatist leader was bursting ‘Chinese crackers bought with the money he got from Pakistan’. The panelists plunged into a noisy ‘debate’ about the right of a man to cheer for a team that he wishes to cheer for, of course this led to an argument about where the loyalties of the panelists lie. Clearly, the debate was no longer a debate on cricket.

It is a well-known fact that majority of the people in Kashmir cheered for Pakistan. We could also agree upon the fact that this support for Pakistan wasn’t solely because Kashmiris thought Pakistan played cricket better than India. The reason why Kashmiris chose to support Pakistan can be dragged out of history. It was probably a choice made during a regular Friday protest, it could also have been a choice made each time a Kashmiri was frisked by a security personnel. Whether this form of protest is effective or rational can most definitely be questioned but maybe we could extend a benefit of doubt to someone with the lived experience of being a Kashmiri. Nevertheless, the point here is that, the blame of taking the cricket out of the match doesn’t lie only with the media. It also lies with every single person who cheered for a border rather than a wicket.

That being said, it is also true that the media carries an extra burden. The burden of virtually penetrating private spaces and entering someone’s living room. It takes a person immense amount of trust to let someone into their home, their private intimate space. Now whether that someone trusts the media sitting in his/her living room or not, the media does bear the weight of that responsibility.

It somehow seems like journalists live slightly above the thin line of sedition. And the journalists who lean toward a certain type of ideology live a little further above that line. Today, it is okay for a journalist to say someone with red-cheeks is paid by Pakistan, it is also okay for a journalist on national television to say, “Kashmiris like you are celebrating the fact that Pakistanis took a gun and mutilated the faces of your fellow Kashmiris. You shameless man”. It is also okay for the same journalist to question the Kashmiri panelist on how much money he has taken from Pakistan to cheer for them.

It somehow seems like journalists live slightly above the thin line of sedition. And the journalists who lean toward a certain type of ideology live a little further above that line. Today, it is okay for a journalist to say someone with red-cheeks is paid by Pakistan, it is also okay for a journalist on national television to say, “Kashmiris like you are celebrating the fact that Pakistanis took a gun and mutilated the faces of your fellow Kashmiris. You shameless man”. It is also okay for the same journalist to question the Kashmiri panelist on how much money he has taken from Pakistan to cheer for them.

Sitting on a chair and appearing on national television, a news reader, a reporter, an anchor is no longer just that. He is also a people’s representative, a judge, a lawyer, a teacher, a temperamental child and much more. Most of us are witness to such debates on a daily basis. For many of us, the debates turns to noise and the noise becomes part of the daily humdrum. While many these debates itself have started revolving around the alarming levels of intolerance in this country, maybe it is time we take a moment. A moment, to just pause and start worrying about the simultaneous increase in the levels of tolerance. The tolerance to wake up and read about the gang rape of a woman and then go back to breakfast, to eat dinner watching a man get lynched for eating beef, to spending time with one’s family watching a TV anchor on national television yell at a Kashmiri and say “If you’re not okay with the word terrorist, you are a deshdrohi”.

Apart from all the discussion that revolves around media indulging in propaganda, agnotology and how the media is making major contributions to helping the world slip into a post-truth, post-fact era, what the media is also doing is changing the way we wake up and the way we go to sleep. Maybe it’s time to think about these moments that have so easily become the new normal, the new everyday. As worrisome as intolerance is, maybe it is time to think about things we’re slowly but steadily becoming tolerant to.

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