Amonth of women’s power has perhaps done more to end mansplaining about cricket and increase the respect for the women’s game than anything else in recent years. At one point in the tournament, when India’s campaign was faltering, the knives were out – the team was accused of wasting the BCCI’s money and not doing justice to the facilities that the Board had provided the cricketers. The World Cup triumph will taste much sweeter for all the criticism the players had to brush aside on their way to the podium. It is, of course, nobody’s case that the women’s team should not be criticised, but the criticism should be about how the women in blue conduct themselves on the field of play — it should not take the form of gender-related barbs or accusations of money being mispent on women’s cricket. With their victory on Sunday, Harmanpreet Kaur and her teammates have future-proofed the women’s game against criticism that often carries a distinct patriarchal overtone.
In 2011, on his first day as BCCI president, N Srinivasan mocked a former India captain who had gone to congratulate him. His remarks — “If I had my way, I wouldn’t allow your women’s team to play cricket” — are now well-known. The shocked cricketer told this newspaper that even as she tried to engage the BCCI head, she was rebuffed. “I’m not interested; we have no choice but to run it, so we are running it for the sake of running,” Srinivasan told her. A young Harmanpreet was also snubbed when she applied for a police job. A lot has changed in a decade, and that has been largely accomplished by women who have had to shrug off ridicule — with help from the current establishment. Much of the rise is also due to the democratisation of the game, to young women who fell in love with the game and their parents who kept neighbours’ taunts at bay and gave wings to their children’s dreams. On Sunday, more than 50,000 spectators packed Navi Mumbai’s DY Patil stadium, which resounded with slogans of Vande Mataram, and fireworks went off in several parts of the country at the midnight hour once the final South African wicket fell. If there were any doubts over women’s cricket, it is now time to lay them to rest.
Sunday’s triumph is understandably being seen as the 1983 moment for women’s cricket. The men’s World Cup triumph that year by Kapil’s Devils had opened the floodgates for the commercialisation of the game. However, the men’s team took nearly three more decades to win another World Cup. Harmanpreet Kaur’s teammates and others who don the India colours in the coming years will hopefully not make the nation wait that long.
