Column

After Effects

Way back in 2005, Greg Chappell showed his middle finger to a nation of cricket junkies and was caught with his leg before a sticky wicket. Last week, an entire nation showed him its middle finger and misinterpreted his appeal for ‘collective accountability’ into collectively holding him accountable for India’s exit from the World Cup. And at this point in time the Down Under Dundee is wondering how much a coach should be held responsible for the failure of a team with arguably the maximum number of World Cup veterans. “Not fair,” he grumbles aloud. “Sachin Tendulkar scores a zero and gets offered captaincy. And they ask for my resignation!” But Chappell should look at the brighter side of life— he has the choice to fly straight to Australia unlike his team, which has to face an irate mob back home.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni had an entire nation blow dry his hair until a month ago. Now they want to blow up his under-construction house in Ranchi. A huge mob attacked the construction site the day after India lost to Bangladesh. But Dhoni can’t help but wonder if the same mob would have helped him build the house had he hit a century and helped India win! As for his captain, Rahul Dravid, the security has been tightened at his house so that a similar mob doesn’t decide to rearrange the furniture.

Sadly, Chappell’s idea of ‘collective accountability’ has a different connotation in a country whose people have collectively decided to turn the world’s largest democracy into a mobocrazy. In internet parlance, this could be another form of ‘dictatorship of the idiots’.

What Chappell doesn’t know is that collective accountability of a different kind has existed for years in this country where people collectively flood the streets and attack a movie hall in Mumbai, lynch a cop in Karnataka or beat up a professor in Madhya Pradesh. They pelt stones, set public transport on fire and bring a suburb or a city to a standstill—simply because collective accountability makes it easier for them to get away with it and impossible for the law to act against this army of faceless thousands.
But nobody understands the concept of collective accountability better than politicians who instigate a mob and then justify the bloody outcome as a ‘spontaneous reaction’ or ‘emotional outburst’.

Strangely enough, there’s no mob out there demanding better roads or better living conditions that justify steep taxation.