It is no coincidence that the ongoing media campaign against Shahid Afridi started right after the nation had found in him someone to embrace and celebrate. There would have been no such campaign if he had performed badly. Nobody would have bothered to dig up and publicize an off-the-cuff comment he made in an interview last year to spur a fuss around it. To my mind, there is more to this campaign than the demonization of a cricketing hero.
The agenda-setting metropolitan elite is very upset with Afridi for suggesting, when asked about women’s cricket in the interview, that women are better off cooking. So upset, in fact, that it has branded him as the cricketing reincarnation of a TTP extremist, someone who should be shunned for his ‘barbaric’ views on gender rather than cheered for his electrifying match-winning performances on the field. This is absurd.
Just take a backseat and consider. Why would anyone wish to take away a sportsman’s glory for holding a politically incorrect view? After all, Afridi is not the prime minister of Pakistan. He is not the minister for sports or an official whose ideas could influence national policy. If the self-appointed guardians of our ‘modern’ consciousness had their way, it seems they’d make it mandatory for sportsmen playing for Pakistan to swear their allegiance to the Millennium Development Goals.
Actually, the case of this danda-bardar ‘enlightened’ brigade against a sportsman runs into problems on many counts. Its stance is fascistic and not even modern in the true sense of the word. Feminism in the 21st century is decidedly steering away from the concept of equality that expects from women to prove themselves as good as men on their turf. Many emancipated women would rather celebrate being women. They find nothing inferior about being feminine and different from men. They recognize that what makes them different also makes them special—and stronger in many unmanly ways. In fact, what would be more disrespectful to women than to treat raising children and keeping house as inferior forms of work, to consider a woman’s labor worthy only when it is translated into man-hours in the market? What, after all, is so wrong with cooking?
Within a liberal framework that justifies everything and anything, from insulting prophets to pornography, what about Shahid Afridi’s freedom of expression? The self-appointed custodians of our ‘modern’ consciousness are worried that he is a role model for his fans and his words would influence impressionable minds. They’d like to think that the task of influencing impressionable minds is exclusively theirs. To them, the only model that should be allowed to be projected is the one handed down to them in imperialist bibles of social development.
The problem with our oh-so-metropolitan liberal fundamentalists is not only their outdated gung-ho arrogance but also the glaring contradictions that their excuse of a narrative refuses to address. As in so many other ways, they mirror the religious extremists on these counts too. Both not only think that theirs is the best way but also that every other way is evil, something that must be castigated and eventually eliminated if not co-opted.
So Shahid Afridi, for thinking that women are better off cooking in the kitchen rather than hitting sixes in a cricket stadium, must be trashed and pushed off from the pedestal of a national cricket hero, that he otherwise undoubtedly deserves. Criticizing him for that particular comment is not good enough. He must be made to fit somewhere in the imperial narrative, demonized and destroyed.
But can we mention this Afridi-bashing in the same breath as the demonization of Chavez’ legacy or Castro’s Cuba? Obviously, neither does he challenge the imperial plans like these leaders did, nor has he improved the life of least privileged Pakistanis the way the two leaders did for their people; crimes for which they, and many other anti-imperialist leaders, were demonized by the empire and its lapdog media.
Castro and Chavez were among the few who survived the imperial onslaught and went on to inspire people across continents. They demonstrated that, beyond the exploitative tyranny of market fundamentalism, another world is possible. Even after their death, their countries are demons for the empire to be exorcised and brought in line. What, you may ask, has Shahid Afridi done to be counted among such august company?
To begin with, the imperial tools of liberal fundamentalism and market fundamentalism are like Siamese twins; acting in tandem, sharing most traits and joined at the hip. There is no room for dissent or diversity. All must conform or get ready to be demonized as a knee-jerk reflex. They are totalitarian frameworks out to convert the whole world, through coercion if necessary; humanitarian interventions for freedom and democracy a mere mask for advancing the interests of the empire and its so-called free market.
Afridi’s challenge to the imperial narrative might not be deliberate or significant but he’s like a thorn in the side of all those chanting its mantras like a holy scripture. On the face of it, he is being targeted for a comment that has unruffled the gender-sensitive feathers of our metropolitan elite, but is that all there is to it? Why would a comment by a sportsman incense our liberal warriors to such a degree that they’d choose to give the matter more importance than pressing issues of social justice that really matter, national issues that actually impact the lives of a hundred million Pakistani women and another hundred million Pakistani men.
To my mind, Afridi’s crime is not that he made a politically incorrect comment last year. His crime is that he wins matches for Pakistan. The seriousness of his crime is compounded by the fact that he wins them with the flourish of a hero, inspiring millions of Pakistani fans across sectarian, ethnic and class divides. Nations are not saved by glory in sports but he stirs up an alternative to the failed-state narrative regarding Pakistan every time he wins a match for his team, and is therefore a hurdle, even if a small one, in the path the empire has planned for us. The narrative of the empire has no place for a Pakistani national hero—even a cricketing one.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Email:hazirjalees@hotmail.com