This image of a decapitated Dhoni shows how ugly it can get when you mix sports and nationalism

In the kitschy education posters of pre-liberalisation India, “take part in sports” was naturally one of the “good habits” that “an Ideal Boy” would have. Sport is one of the universally nicest, cleanest things that someone could do. Indians use posters while the English incorporate their positive feelings about sport into their very language: a “good sport” will always have “sporting spirit” and won’t ever indulge in stuff that “just isn’t cricket”.

Much the same is said for spectator sport, which is hailed firmly as a Good Thing. Mass events such as the football world cup or, in India, cricket tournaments are loved with a mass passion matched only by nationalism and religion.

For such a vehicle of goodness, how do we explain the poster digitally created by a Bangladeshi fan depicting pacer Taskin Ahmed holding the decapitated head of the Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni that is said to have gone viral? This is shocking but is only one rather small examples of the ugliness spectator sport births, especially when coupled with mass group identities such as communalism or nationalism.

Proxy for violence

In India, cricket matches with Pakistan often result in actual mass violence, the latest such incident being a communal riot in Ahmedabad in 2003. Emily Crick, a researcher at Bristol University writes:

The Cricket World Cup of 2003 is an interesting case study, because, unlike previous occasions, there was little or no public support for Pakistan from Indian Muslims. In Calcutta, a discussion was held within the police force, which decided that Muslims should be prevented from supporting Pakistan during the match. While this proposal was not carried out, it suggests that the authorities were sufficiently concerned that some Muslims would support Pakistan and that this support was against the ‘national interest.’ India went on to win the match and there were wide-scale celebrations throughout the country. Indian Muslims joined in these celebrations, but were, in some areas, actively prevented from doing so. In Ahmedabad this caused rioting. Violence had similarly occurred during the India-Pakistan encounter in the 1996 World Cup.

While it’s been a decade since India saw a communal riot over a match, the ugliness still persists. In 2014, 60 Kashmiri students in Meerut were booked for sedition against the government for allegedly cheering on the Pakistani cricket team. Smarting at being left behind, in January, Pakistani authorities arrested 22-year Umar Draz for being a fan of Indian batsman Virat Kohli.

War minus the shooting

Sport is supposed to bring people together, spread goodwill and make things all right – or at least that’s the marketing spiel that’s been put out. As these beheading posters, riots and arrests prove, however, spectator sport, especially when mixed with nationalism, is actually a rather dark thing.

In 1945, writer George Orwell wrote his now famous essay on sociology of sport, The Sporting Spirit, connecting modern spectator sport to nationalism.

Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.

Orwell was scathing about people painting sport as a force for good:

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Helping build good sheep

But then, if this is all so terrible, why is sport so popular and so passionately followed at all? The noted linguistic and commentator Noam Chomsky connects this to the “useful function” sport has to play in society in helping build a sense of chauvinism and irrational loyalty. Mass sport therefore helps create good sheep, which acquiesce quickly to authority:

But the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power, and for chauvinism. And of course, you’re looking at gladiators, you’re looking at guys who can do things you couldn’t possibly do - like, you couldn’t pole-vault seventeen feet, or do all these crazy things these people do. But it’s a model that you’re supposed to try to emulate. And they’re gladiators fighting for your cause, so you’ve got to cheer them on, and you’ve got to be happy when the opposing quarterback gets carted off the field a total wreck and so on. 

All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they’re there; there’s no doubt that they’re there. But they’re emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things.

But it’s not only the heavy intellectuals, the Orwells and the Chomskys, who’ve noticed the irrational loyalties and hysteria sport builds up. This sketch by British comedy duo "Mitchell and Webb" makes fun of the fact that sports fans often presume to use the first person pronoun “we” to refer to their teams – thus creating the fiction that there were directly involved in some way in the play.

Update, March 7: Neatly competing the circle of hate for a simple game of cricket, an Indian fan created this gory image after Dhoni's team won the Asia Cup final against Bangladesh.