Godi, Modi, cricket and coal: Australia is caught in India’s growing authoritarianism

As India slides deeper into populist authoritarianism, Australia’s political leaders and traditional media have embraced a look-the-other-way insouciance. But that’s not an option: we as a nation are too deeply involved in what’s going on to pretend we can’t see it.

Australia has stumbled into the centre of two of the big lurches in the country’s Hindu nationalist project this year: the ruling party’s doubling down on defence of the Adani Group (including its controversial Queensland mining interests), and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s co-option of the country’s largest sport — cricket — into his cult of the personality, with a guest appearance from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Yet when the right-wing government shook the country last month with the extraordinary expulsion from Parliament of Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi after he was convicted of criminal defamation, Australia’s traditional media (ABC excepted) largely ignored it, preferring to talk — if it talked about India at all — about trade, defence and migration. 

It was the sports pages that saw pushback: “Why are we tolerating the intolerant?” demanded The Australian’s Gideon Haigh in an eviscerating article that quickly spread almost samizdat-style around India’s increasingly beleaguered independent media.  

“If you like your cricket with a side serve of fascistic ostentation, the climax of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Ahmedabad will be right up your alley,” he wrote.

Nine’s Malcolm Conn sought redemption in Australia’s opening batsman Usman Khawaja who, born Muslim in Pakistan, was initially denied a visa to tour.

“It was,” Conn wrote, “Khawaja … who dominated the cricket after Modi was choreographically feted …The stage-managed political fluff was exposed … in the last over of the day’s play when he flicked a Mohammed Shami delivery through the leg side and danced with real, unbridled joy, celebrating his first century in India and first against India.”

Australia’s cricket gallery has always batted deep, assimilating some of the game’s great antiestablishmentarians to the writing craft — Jack Fingleton, Bill O’Reilly, Richie Benaud. It’s entrenched into the way cricket is covered here their love and understanding of the game and their head-shaking scepticism about the institutions that run it. 

Much of the rest of the world continues to struggle with CLR James’ question in the best book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary: ”What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?”

In India, it was left to India’s leading historian Ramachandra Guha to criticise the Board for Control of Cricket in India for politicising the event — and India’s media for rewarding it. (Guha also wrote cricket’s second-best book, A Corner of a Foreign Field.) 

Guha defended Albanese, saying he would have been “squirming and embarrassed”. It was, by Modi, the sort of classic dominance play that he uses domestically and in foreign policy — as, for photos, he positions himself on the left, forcing other leaders into the supplicatory reach across handshake, looking over the shoulder at the camera.

Don’t expect Albanese to risk similarly politicising next summer’s home Tests. But like successive prime ministers before him, he may well figure it’s worth being patronised for trade, defence and the votes of Australia’s growing Indian diaspora.

Meanwhile, Australia’s media has been slow to explore the implications of the Hindenburg report into Adani’s financial dealings, which included a look at the shuffling of money around its controversial Queensland mine. 

When the report splashed in January, sending Adani shares crashing (and depriving Gautam Adani of his “country’s richest” tag), the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) said it would review the report. Adani has denied all allegations. When in India last week, Trade Minister Don Farrell described Adani as “good corporate citizens”.

Most of Australia’s media has moved on. It’s been left to The Australian Financial Review to keep digging into just what the Hindenburg report means for Adani’s Australian operations. 

In India, on the other hand, the report has transformed politics. Adani — a Gujarati, as is Modi — has long been close to Modi. The opposition has seized on the disclosures to challenge the domination of politics by the Hindu nationalist BJP, linking Gandhi’s expulsion from Parliament to him continuing to raise the Adani-Modi connection.

India’s traditional media has become increasingly co-opted by the government — tagged by critics with Hinglish rhyming slang as Godi (literally lap-sitting) media with a mix of government advertising (now being cut), buyouts of hostile media (such as Adani group’s purchase of independent news channel NDTV last year) and police complaints against critical reporting, leading most notoriously to banning a BBC documentary on Modi. 

For independent media, it’s all schtick. The Wire’s Pamela Philipose hit the low points last week: jailing journalists (the latest, Kashmiri journalist Irfan Mehraj); world record numbers of internet shutdowns; tax “surveys” of independent media houses.

Australian media has its own lap-sitting tradition: deference when governments prioritise trade and defence over democracy and human rights. In reporting India, it’s time for Australia’s media to get off the lap.