As Narendra Modi bent down in a humble pranam on the steps of Parliament, my thoughts irresistibly turned to the impending football World Cup, due to begin on June 12. Like Mr Modi, the undisputed champion of this Lok Sabha election, many star footballers make it a point to touch the pitch and mutter a brief prayer or genuflect on the touchline before running on for a match.
Overt religiosity is but a superficial similarity between the rambunctious world of football and the new dispensation on Raisina Hill. But in another fundamental way, the business of football is as good an analogy of the social limits of the "free market" ideology that Indian and foreign business find so attractive about the impending regime in New Delhi.
First, an explanation. Many businesspeople and members of the intelligentsia profess to support the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party's economic agenda but not its social policies. There is some merit in this duality in the sense that we know all boats, irrespective of caste and religion, can float on the buoyancy of faster economic growth that Mr Modi is expected to deliver. Beyond that, however, it is difficult to see how economic and social policies can be compartmentalised, and football is a handy example to show why they can't.
Over the 20 years, European football, the hub of this most global of sports, has emerged as the ultimate free market for talent. Driven by relatively light ownership stipulations, scads of money, the origins of which are rarely questioned, and the broadcasting mega-deals, the brash European football business has generated the kind of "bottom of the pyramid" social transformation that C K Prahalad should have written about. In Europe, football had always been a profession for working-class lads. By the mid-nineties, the sport had become a viable career option. Instead of toiling in factories, shipyards or queuing for social security, even moderately successful footballers have become the arriviste class, investing in mansions, sports cars and all the luxury goods that they can possibly buy.
Inevitably, the exponential expansion of the business created a market for talent beyond Europe's borders. South Americans, Asians and Africans, escaping miserable living standards in their own countries, started tumbling into this new El Dorado. They brought a sumptuous new dimension to the sport, which continued to expand at a dizzying pace on the back of private global money.
The virtues of this exciting new multi-racial football were uniquely in evidence when France won the 1998 World Cup with a team mostly drawn from its former colonies. Nobody embodied this integration in a country notorious for its racism than the supremely gifted midfielder Zinedine Zidane, a Frenchman of Algerian extraction. He famously described his first goal for France in the final against Brazil as the best "single image of the power of integration".
Today, you only have to look at the French, Belgian, English and even German teams to understand the scale of change in the racial profiles of European football. The bulk of these multi-ethnic players play for clubs with traditions hundreds of years old and fans see no problem feting them when they help their teams win silverware.
Such multi-ethnic identities in this dynamic business should be creating a picture of enviable racial harmony, at least within the confines of the football stadiums, right? Wrong! Even when European economies were expanding before the 2008 financial crisis, race politics gathered a momentum that has its ugliest repercussions on the football pitch. In Spain and Italy, fans follow a wearyingly familiar routine of making monkey sounds and ape-like gestures and throwing bananas on the pitch whenever an African player comes on.
Now, the players fighting back. In July last year, Kevin Constant, a black player with the Italian club AC Milan, walked off the pitch during a friendly match in protest against racist taunts. He was following an example set by his teammate Kevin-Prince Boateng, a few months before. In Spain, Dani Alves of Barcelona responded to a banana thrown at him by picking it up and eating part of it in a weak attempt at humour. His actions were staunchly defended by several of his white teammates who posted pictures of themselves eating bananas as a gesture of solidarity. In 2011, Liverpool striker Luis Suarez suffered an eight-match ban and a £40,000 fine for racially abusing a black Manchester United player.
Black African players bear the brunt of racial abuse even though many of them figure among the world's best footballers today. They account for roughly 14 per cent of expat footballers in Europe and many are accorded citizenship to qualify for the nationals teams. Yet even the best of them continue to live in exclusionary social ghettos, real and implied, in their adopted countries and are often discriminated against in terms of pay and perks by their clubs. They may be the economic beneficiaries of a relatively efficient free market. But unless racial harmony - not appeasement - becomes a part of Europe's political agenda, these footballers will always remain a restless and insecure social underclass. There's the lesson for India.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
