The Indian liberal establishment has found a new hero in Kumar Sangakkara. For his now-famous Cowdrey lecture at the MCC on the ‘Spirit of Cricket’ is not just about remedying corruption and decay in cricket (and by extension, in modern sports), but also crucially a rumination on pluralism and integration in postcolonial societies like Sri Lanka. In his speech he had referred to the1983 July riots, the JVP-led insurgency, LTTE terrorism and the heavy price paid by the military to defeat the LTTE. The Sri Lankan Defence Secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, had a word of praise for Sangakkara for solidly backing the country’s successful war effort against the LTTE, at a time when a section of the international community is seeking accountability from the Sri Lankan military establishment for its questionable practices during the last few decades.

The speech has also stirred the reformer-liberals of New India, who are not only enthralled by Sangakkara’s refined, rhetorical eloquence but also by his civic, character-building arguments. Mukul Kesavan calls Sangakkara’s first-person-narrative at once a cricketer’s prescription and a citizen’s creed. V. Anantha Nageswaran finds in the speech the unfolding of a triad of competence, integrity and conscience, a ‘lesson’ for our political-reformers. Others rave about how his outstanding legal mind subtly seeks administrative transparency and good governance.

Indeed, Sangakkara’s speech has suddenly become a model by which to introspect and press for a certain variant of reformed India. What constitutes a fit between liberal institutions and the social, cultural and political diversity of modern postcolonial states? Postcolonial societies like India are characterized by ideals of complex mutual coexistence, aspiring to rise above hostility or studied indifference. But universal remedies almost never work. The idea is to skilfully strategize between, say, indigenist pressures and ideas of centralized governance, cultural group rights and integrative multiculturalism, political values like justice and substantive values of freedom, equality and well-being. But what is the variant of liberalism that our public intellectuals are peddling, given such large dilemmas within modern liberal societies?

Often the baseline has been an idea of reconciliation through public reason. Consider two slim and succinct manifestoes placed squarely within contemporary debates on Indian liberalism: Mukul Kesavan’s Secular Common Sense (2001) and Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s The Burden of Democracy (2003). Kesavan’s olde worlde nationalist stab argues that the defining ingredients of Indian secularism are not civil liberty or human rights, but a fundamental commitment to, and management of, pluralism. So, Kesavan deals at length with the extinction of Parsis, for instance – a strong defence of minority religious communities as opposed to the nationalization of religious practice – against the backdrop of the consolidation of the Sangh Parivar in Indian politics. Though as a historian he is well aware of the portability and flimsiness of liberal ideas in India, he chooses to hold aloft an imprint of a metropolitan and tasteful nationalist political philosophy exemplified through Isaiah Berlin’s famous allegorical distinction between the hedgehog and the fox. Unlike the single-track Left or the hegemonic BJP (all hedgehogs to Kesavan), the nationalist Congress is akin to the fox, “promiscuously plural, rhetorically socialist, piously non-aligned, spottily secular.”

The very edifice of Kesavan’s idea of India stands on integrationist liberal values. This is a nostalgic throwback, as he could well sense the shift: that either the cultural nationalists or the market buccaneers were taking charge, in ‘managing’ the nation and the game of cricket alike. It’s no surprise that someone like Sangakkara – suave and articulate, believing in national integration as well as in old-school character-building – strikes a chord with Kesavan.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s sharp thesis (advanced early in the last decade), upon which he has been building his formidable policy-initiatives for a while now, espouses that in order to love democracy well one has to love it moderately: a classic liberal tenet often marshalled against ideas of deep or direct democracy. The intensification of democratic struggles and the politics of empowerment also mean a crisis in governmentality: the good, liberal Mehta is morally bound and burdened to resolve this lack. The horse-trading, opportunism and feverishness of the million mutinies within Indian democracy since 1951 cannot be allowed to stray, unbridled. For, as he quotes Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is a well-chosen quote, contrasting intensity with conviction: the force of conviction always seeks moral anchorage, as opposed to the joyous effervescence of the democratic-and-creative spirit. Mehta, much like Kesavan and the séance-loving Yeats, distrusts the intensity of the ‘worst’, is despondent about the ‘best’ and perhaps censorious of the ‘middle’.

It is the rise of the aspiring ‘middle’ that characterises New India, as we know well. Questions of human dignity and civic standing are irrelevant to the class that the lawyerly Kapil Sibal symbolizes, or the ‘venal tastelessness’ that regional satraps like Mayavati or Mamata Banerjee flaunt. Moderate mainstream liberals are aghast at such crassness and vernacularization. Besides, the government is not taking kindly to civil society interferences in political issues anymore.

Instead of meeting the market or local, cultural challenges headlong and honestly, the moderate liberal panacea is amazingly escapist, rational and moral. It is abstract, woolly. It is in this context that the eminent elite lawyer of Colombo, who speaks a different legal language with razor-sharp finesse, is being feted. And it certainly helps that the young Sri Lankan with his captivating speech can also play some classy cricket. It is his ‘conviction of character’ that makes Sangakkara a hero amongst Chatham House liberals – here and there. That the post-colonial cricket which he portrays has its own brand of peril, menace and investment in an ‘intensity’ that is poise-and-reconciliation-averse – refusing to play safe – presumably eludes the liberal moralists.

Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty teach in the Department of English at the University of Delhi.

brindabose@gmail.com, mrsceptic@gmail.com