Despite her impressive track record so far, she has been working on her serve-and-volley, and her speed, to strengthen her game and ranking. Which is just as well because India’s 27-year-old tennis star, Sania Mirza, requires these skills not only on court but off it too given the controversies that come barrelling down at her at regular intervals. She needs to employ speed and a metaphorically strong forehand to lob the outrageous accusations right back into her opponent’s court.
The accusations have ranged from her dress code on the court to inciting the youth of India to be promiscuous to secretly nursing anti-India sentiments owing to her marriage to a Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malek.
Each time such accusations have been hurled at her, Sania has been forced to whip out her badge of nationalism to fight them and stop them in their tracks. Which is a huge waste of her time and energy because, frankly, except for a small community of fringe elements — whose indoctrination and rabidity seek validation only in their condemnation of her virtues as transgressions — there is not a single Indian who wants Sania to prove her Indianness.
Fortunately for Sania, the attributes that endear her to millions — clear and bright talent, a strong and thoroughly charming persona, disarming frankness and a contemporaneity synchronised with her religious faith — get down to work for her during such times and help sift the grain from the chaff. As India watches, the progressives of India — thankfully an overwhelming majority — are separated from the blinkered babus.
In a new political climate that is getting cloudier by the day for want of rays of clarity and fair play, such exposes have a great role to play in bringing the masses out of their stupor.
When K. Laxman, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state legislator from Telangana, spoke out against Sania’s suitability as a brand ambassador of the newly formed Telangana state (carved out from the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh), he probably fancied himself as the modern-day town-crier unearthing a vile conspiracy while he itemised the grave offences she had committed in her 27 years so far — she was born in Mumbai and not in Hyderabad and she had married a Pakistani thus becoming a daughter-in-law of Pakistan. Ergo, her Indianness was suspect.
This abomination, that deserved to be thoroughly condemned by the BJP, was instead met with characteristic silence. That the BJP can see nothing wrong in one of the country’s most talented icons — who, as it happens, belongs to a minority group — being needlessly humiliated is a sign of how India’s future could well be incubated in the party’s ideological embryo that makes no bones about its rightist genes.
Barring a throwaway word or two of praise for Sania from one of its cadres in the wake of the controversy, the BJP is pretending that this issue needs no clarification. If this is how it treats one of India’s most accomplished young icons, the BJP is sending a wrong message to all aspirants from minorities who would like to bring glory and pride to their country by their accomplishments in various fields.
As a party stance, this is in blatant contradiction to the electoral promises India’s ruling party made less than a hundred days ago.
The Sania controversy, with its malicious emphasis on her being Pakistan’s daughter-in-law, also drags our attention to the dark irony residing in one of India’s most haloed portals — the world of Hindi cinema or Bollywood as it is so fondly referred to. As the anodyne of the masses since the dawn of the moving images, Hindi cinema has had an iron grip on the imagination and aspirations of millions of Indians. Riding on the wave of time and tide, it has scripted plots that appeal to the average Indian’s sense of what makes the world a better place to fantasise in. These fantasises, many a time, authorise history to retell its tale with an intent to heal rather than wound and build a bridge rather than widen a chasm. The India-Pakistan divide is one such favourite indulgence for Hindi cinema and millions of Indians, as well Pakistanis across the border, have received these cinematic slogans of love, unity, forgiveness and peace with enthusiasm, making themselves want to believe that a happy ending for both countries is merely a matter of human determination to end the hostilities and reawaken to the commonality of their heritage.
However, the treasury of such moving images it seems has no worth outside its domain. In the real world of politics, the fact of a marriage between an Indian and Pakistani national finds no redemptive — leave alone an inspirational or idealising — influence that can tone down the abrasion and antagonism between the two countries. To even suggest so would be considered delusional by many political purists. But the question to consider is whether politics insults idealism or can idealism influence politics? The India of today is clearly dismissive of the latter and evidence of it is overwhelmingly visible across its length and breadth.
Obviously then, there are two Indias — one that never tires of making movies on how love can heal every wound caused by history, which gains unequivocal acceptance from the Indian consciousness. And the other India, whose political narrative seems to consider it beneath its dignity to be touched by popular folklore of any kind. For the hapless idealist or the deluded optimist, not being able to differentiate between the two Indias mean a straight plunge down the chasm between the two, a fate avoided by the polity who prefer to amass in the India that best suits their machinations and no prizes for guessing which of the two it is.
It is of no surprise then that the story of Sania Mirza from India falling in love with Shoaib Malek from Pakistan carries with it no honeyed undertones of amity and bridge-building. Instead, it is a hard fact used as political ammunition to blast out paths that divide and discriminate.
If the reality is otherwise, the BJP needs to prove it and it can start by apologising to Sania for questioning her allegiance to her country.
