Mostafa Kamal MajumderThe punishment of Mohammad Ashraful the star cricketer of Bangladesh of suspension from all forms of cricket by the Bangladesh Cricket Board has not surprised anybody who is in his right senses, but has attracted sympathies as the cricketer truthfully confessed the guilt and begged for apology from the nation that has been hurt by his misconduct. He has proven different from the rest of us who would commit crimes after crimes, be caught red handed and yet defiantly deny the acts of commission that are proven by unmistakably true evidences.The former Bangladesh cricket captain Mohammad Ashraful admitted match-fixing to International Cricket Coulcil’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (CSU) and apologised. He told the Independent TV channel, “I should have not done this injustice to the nation. I feel guilty.” “I would only say ‘Please all forgive me, my conduct was improper’,” he said.
“I felt that I have done an injustice, so I have told them (the ACSU team) the truth at the first chance. I tried to help the ICC as much as I could for the welfare of our cricket,” Ashraful said. “You all know me, I have been playing international cricket for 12 years. I did not tell them a single lie,” he added.
Reactions to Ashraful’s confession and apology may differ from persons to person, some being very harsh to see that he is severely dealt with not only for the sake of punishment of the man but also to show to all others what commission of such misconduct in the sport does mean.
The 28-year-old Ashraful now knows what ill-repute he has brought to his own nation which has been successful on the international stage only in the cricket. In others sports and games, except shooting and wrestling, the nation stands miles behind international standards. Cricket has made the nation more known than before thanks to live telecast of international cricket matches by the sports channels.
Before the country won the ICC Asia Cup in the second half of the nineties of the last century, after years of trainings, the former chairman of the Bangladesh Cricket Board Mustafizur Rahman did foresee this potential and told journalists ‘you talk about football, but it is only in cricket that the nation can rise to international fame at the shortest possible time.’
The team that was developed under his guidance by the cricket board got the laurel when he was no more in the BCB and was in the afterworld. His successor Saber Hossain Chowdhury carried the ICC trophy home with pride. Since then Bangladesh Cricket never looked back. Definitely Ashraful was one of the star performers in the glorious era of rise of Bangladesh as a cricketing nation in the last one decade.
Our heart breaks as Ashraful gets the punishment he deserves. One may draw a parallel to a much bigger event in the seventies when US President Richard M Nixon had to abdicate the presidency to skip impeachment proceedings at the Senate, the upper house of the US legislature, which adopted a decision to proceed with the same sending a number of senators to weep in the open.
Many people in our country said the Watergate scandal for which President Nixon had resigned would have meant nothing in our society. He had bugged the office of democrats to know their election strategies, but lied to the nation about the episode.
The widely respected US former president Bill Clinton narrowly escaped Senate’s impeachment proceedings for his affairs with Monica Lewinsky, a White House staff member. Bill Clinton however was truthful and courageous enough to confess the improper affair and earned broad sympathies from fellow Americans. It would have been a different case had Bill Clinton lied.
Cricketer Ashraful Islam is not so powerful a person as Bill Clinton or the late Richard Nixon. He is from the arena of sports. And he hails from Bangladesh where words like crime and criminals do not convey their universal connotations. Here something is called crime only when police or other law enforcers interpret an activity as crime, and somebody is a criminal when law enforcers say so. Those who commit crimes but are powerful enough to escape the reach of the law enforcers and the arm of law are no criminals but privileged members of the society.
Media have reported that Ashraful was allegedly paid about one million taka ($12,800) to lose a match of Dhaka Gladiators in the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL). Ashraful was the country’s youngest Test centurion in 2001 at the age of 17 and captained Bangladesh between 2007 and 2009. Did this youngman not understand what damage he was causing to himself, to cricket and the nation? Fact is he has done the damages. He has been accused, convicted and given tentative punishment, meaning more rigorous punishment is coming.
It would be stepping into the jurisdiction of BCB and the ICC to plead anything for Ashraful who has confessed and apologised. For us the more important thing is that the BCB, ICC and Ashraful have together reset a standard of detection of crime and its punishment. It’s implications are significant to a society where share market scammers can collect such courage as to threaten a renowned banker for making truthful report of an inquiry into the said scam, and people welding power cannot touch them; where ready evidence of carrying sack-full of money can be dismissed as no evidence, the Sonali Bank scam involving 3,700 crore Taka can be termed as nothing that big, or the World Bank can be denounced for complaining of a conspiracy to commit corruption. Long live Ashraful! Let all of us relearn the lesson to call a crime a crime, and a criminal a criminal. Let’s reassert our rationality to distinguish between truth and falsehood, day and night, light and darkness, honesty and dishonesty; and identify and punish the wrong-doers without paying heed to their family lineages, political affiliations and social influence. Let’s call a spade a spade, a shovel a shovel, and give every man his due. We need to have more heroes like Ashraful for this society fo grow great and march ahead instead of dragging backwards.
Related Posts
