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All’s not well that ends well

The exoneration of Harbhajan Singh on a charge of racist abuse of the Australian all-rounder, Andrew Symonds, was almost inevitable. Following a report by the umpires acting on a complaint made by Australia’s captain Ricky Ponting, the match referee, Mike Proctor, found the Indian off-spinner guilty of calling Symonds a “monkey” or a “big monkey” — in a heated exchange initiated by the Australian on the third day of the second Test at Sy dney. Since this was a level 3.3 offence under the International Cricket Council’s Code of Conduct, Harbhajan was banned from three Tests. An appeal was filed immediately and he was allowed to play on in the series. In a diplomatic move that helped defuse the crisis, the two boards persuaded the ICC-appointed Appeals Commissioner to delay the hearing date until after the fourth Test. By this time, it became evident that there was no strong (YouTubable or podcastable) evidence, such as a stump mike recording, of what Harbhajan had said to Symonds. It was always highly probable that a trained judge who would look rigorously and objectively at the facts and the evidence, apply a higher standard of proof than the civil standard of the balance of probabilities, and see the behaviour in context would overturn the judgment of a lay match referee who, to his credit, first doubted his own competence to conduct the hearing and then rushed to inept judgment.

In the event, Appeals Commissioner John Hansen, a High Court judge and former cricketer from New Zealand, did a beautiful job of framing the rules, sifting and weighing the evidence, and elucidating the legal and also spirit of cricket issues. His 8000-word judgment (accessible at www.thehindu.com), a model of fair play, must be made required reading for all ICC-appointed match referees, appeals commissioners, captains, umpires, and board officials. His clarification of the context is that Harbhajan “innocently and in the tradition of the game acknowledged the quality of …[Brett] Lee’s bowling” and that Symonds, who had “nothing to do” with that interchange, “determined to get involved and as a result was abusive” towards the Indian cricketer. In Justice Hansen’s view, even if Harbhajan had used the words alleged, an “ordinary person” standing in the shoes of Symonds “who had launched an unprovoked and unnecessary invective-laden attack would not be offended or insulted or humiliated in terms of 3.3.” Nevertheless, Harbhajan — a four-time offender against the Code of Conduct prior to Sydney — can count himself lucky in getting away with a conviction under 2.8 and the trifling penalty of half his match fee (partly because the judge was not informed in time by the ICC of three of the four previous infractions). Racism is a grave offence in sport and the poignant fact is that Symonds, a black cricketer who was at the receiving end of some ugly ‘monkey gestures’ from the stands during Australia’s last tour of India, believed that Harbhajan had for the second time called him a “monkey.” Indian cricket may pat itself on the back for winning this final encounter following a four-Test series in which it played splendid cricket to challenge the hegemony of cricket’s superpower, Australia. What was indefensible, from the standpoint of the spirit of cricket, was the BCCI’s unsporting tactics to pre-empt due process and the threats or implied threats to call off the tour. By behaving very much like cricket’s bullying financial superpower, it has lost goodwill round the cricket world.

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