DNA Special: Will ICC ban Afghanistan cricket?

The Taliban has completely banned women's sports in Afghanistan. Ahmadullah Wasik, deputy head of Afghanistan's Department of Culture, says that according to Islam, it is mandatory for women to cover their head, face and body but women players do not do this in cricket or other sports. So now, women will not be allowed to play any sport in Afghanistan. This decision of the Taliban is a bad joke on every woman in the world who thinks that she too can play for her country.

After this decision of the Taliban, the Australian Cricket Board has refused to play with the Afghanistan men's cricket team. Later this year, the Afghanistan men's cricket team was to tour Australia for a Test match series but now this tour may be cancelled. Australia has said that it cannot think of playing cricket with Afghanistan until women are allowed to play there. Now, it is the turn of all the cricket playing countries of the world including India to boycott Afghanistan.

While this decision should have been taken by the International Cricket Council, surprisingly, till now, it has been able to express only concern on this issue. This is even after only 3 players of Afghanistan women's cricket have managed to escape to Canada. The rest of the female players are still in Afghanistan and the Taliban can punish them for playing cricket at any time.

Recently, when thousands of Afghan citizens gathered at Kabul Airport, an international organization of professional footballers rescued 77 female footballers from Afghanistan and took them to Australia. But the ICC did nothing to save the women cricketers of Afghanistan.

This stand of the ICC is also when the rules of the ICC say that if a country does not have its women's cricket team, then that country will not be considered as a full-time member of the ICC. 

When ICC made Afghanistan its full-time member in the year 2017, there was no women's cricket team there. At that time, the ICC had given the Afghanistan Cricket Board a place in the list of permanent countries, taking this decision as an exception.

And maybe this time as well, ICC will take the Afghanistan crisis as an exception and won't impose any restrictions on Afghanistan Cricket Board. We are also saying this because the men's T20 World Cup is going to start from October 17 next month. And the update till 9 pm tonight is that the Afghanistan team is playing in it. The ICC is also silent on this and the Cricket Boards of other countries have also not objected.

The game of cricket is played between only 12 countries. But the people who watch cricket are in 190 countries of the world. Because of this power, cricket has proved to be a great tool of protest on many occasions. For example, India has repeatedly refused to play cricket with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism. The last bilateral series between the two countries took place in 2012-2013. The situation is like this even though the most-watched match in the 2019 Cricket World Cup was between India and Pakistan. It was watched by about 33 crore people on different mediums in the world.

In terms of profit, this match was a superhit for the Cricket Boards of India and Pakistan along with the ICC. But despite this, India opposes playing a cricket series with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism, keeping this profit aside. Like cricket, films are also a soft power, so Pakistani artists are opposed to working in India. Today if ICC wants, it can learn from India and ban Afghanistan.

Apart from this, if ICC wanted, it could have banned Afghanistan like it banned South Africa's cricket team from 1970 to 1991. In 1968, the then Prime Minister of South Africa stopped the England cricket team from visiting his country because a player in the England team was black. At that time, apartheid was at its peak in South Africa and black players were not allowed into the team. After this incident, one by one, all the big cricket boards of the world boycotted South Africa and this boycott remained until Nelson Mandela was released from jail in the year 1990.

That's why today, we demand from the ICC that like it had banned South Africa, Afghanistan Cricket Board should also be banned. When the big countries of the world and their leaders do not want to compete with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Cricket Boards around the world can initiate it themselves by boycotting Afghanistan if they want.