In fact, the International Cricket Council could not have done Usman Khawaja any more favours. If Australia’s opener had been allowed to take to the field for the Perth Test wearing shoes with two bland general statements about human rights scrawled in pencil on the sidewall, a few photographs would have been published and that’s what would have happened.
Instead, they banned the move and his later request to decorate his bat with the peace symbol of a dove holding an olive branch. That means the story has remained in the news ever since, amid millions of views of Khawaja’s social media posts on the subject. Its aim is to publicly protest the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
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You might ask why he should wear a symbol now when, in fact, off-field events are getting more attention. But it was always about the principle of using the stage his talent afforded and publicly normalizing a gesture of support. Khawaja understands that doing nothing is as much a decision as doing something. Keeping silent and talking is a choice. Passivity is an action. A single person’s speech rarely creates change, but a collective surge of speech over time can. The intertwined history of Palestine, Israel, and Gaza is terribly complex, but this only makes the principle of peace more urgent.
Khawaja, as a cricketer, wants the right to promote this principle in his own place. His dove is a podium contender in innocuous iconography. Marnus Labuschagne has long worn a religious eagle sticker on his stick; This is fine by the ICC as it represents personal belief. They may want to point out that Christian morality includes the primacy of human life and mercy. It seems that in the abstract this is a good thing; But when we apply such beliefs very specifically, such as the idea that cities should not be bombed with military munitions for months at a time, beliefs become political.
Cricketers wear black armbands or pay tribute to the victims of the tragedy. They play fundraising games after natural disasters. What about intentional human violence ordered and carried out by states? This is clearly stated policy. People made these decisions, they implemented them and they had a logic. The easiest thing for the ICC, which is essentially a escrow company set up to transfer funds between boards of directors and publishers, is to ignore all of this.
At the heart of this hatred lies the particular contradiction of an inherently politicized organizer of an inherently politicized sport – it seems trivial to call it irony, but it is hypocrisy, if not irony in action. National teams playing against national teams is, by definition, political. As a membership body, the ICC is dominated by the disproportionate power of the Indian board, which directs the votes of smaller boards. India’s board is now an unofficial arm of the national government; It is packed with Bharatiya Janata party members and hosted the last World Cup final in a stadium named after the sitting prime minister.
India and Pakistan will not tour each other due to political hostility. Sri Lanka Cricket is governed as often from parliament as from committee rooms. South Africa’s sports minister recently sacked its corrupt cricket board. Bangladesh captain Shakib al-Hasan is contesting for a parliamentary seat. The ICC’s main sponsor is Aramco, the royal family oil company that drives Saudi Arabia’s economic power and protects it from the consequences of plunder.
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Afghanistan’s women’s cricket team dreams of being unaffected by politics by escaping the country where women’s sports and education are banned. Meanwhile, the Taliban-backed board announced that it would freeze some of its top men’s players in all foreign T20 leagues and give them no income as punishment for wanting flexibility in representing the national team on much lower salaries. Zimbabwean cricket has had the despotic fingerprints of Robert Mugabe’s men for years; Henry Olonga and Andy Flower are still praised for their black armband protest against Mugabe at the 2003 World Cup. The current ICC will rule that this protest is illegal.
After all, all of this can be traced back to international cricket’s proudest legacy: the planned blockade of the apartheid regime in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, which helped correct that regime’s pariah status until change came. If the situation were repeated today, we would have much less confidence that cricket would take such a comprehensive approach.
BCCI may argue that there is no value in denying a potential revenue stream and losing a quality member. ICC chief executive Geoff Allardice can say, as he did in Afghanistan, that “as a cricket board they operate within the laws of their own country” and it is not his job to influence the spending of millions given away. It comes out every year. And if Khawaja decided to express his dissent through a silent, symbolic act of protest, he would be told: “Sorry, champ. None of this was allowed. Get out there and hit it.”