Do Successful Cricketers Make Successful Politicians?

In India, there is a history of sporting icons, especially cricketers, trying their luck in politics. Mainstream political parties very often see value in their sporting persona and field them to exploit their popularity for political gains. Nowadays, cricketers too, for varying reasons, seek a share in power and don’t hesitate to reach out to parties for tickets. In the 2024 general elections, the sensational and stellar political debut of former Indian all-rounder Yusuf Pathan from the Berhampur constituency of West Bengal, has again brought an old but still relevant question to the fore: do successful cricketers make successful politicians?

Pathan has defeated five-time Congress parliamentarian Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary on a Trinamool Congress ticket and this is an ideal political debut for him by any standard. In a state where the political prestige of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was at stake and her party was facing an anti-incumbency wave, Pathan’s victory looks even more promising given the challenge he had to face from one of Congress’ heavyweights. While he was believed to have been picked by Mamata Banerjee to contest from Berhampur for being a key face of the Kolkata Knight Riders, an IPL franchise based in Kolkata, he had to still face allegations of being an outsider from the Opposition camp during the campaigning.

But, like in cricket, an ideal debut in politics too does not necessarily make you a successful player in the long run. In fact, the history of Indian cricketers making their way into politics confirms that the transition has never been smooth and has even failed in some cases.

The case of former Indian captain Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi is well remembered as a classic case in this regard.

During the 1971 parliamentary election, after being famously ousted from the captaincy of the Indian Cricket Team, Pataudi fought on the ticket of the Vishal Haryana Party from Gurgaon constituency against Indira Gandhi’s Congress party and registered a huge defeat and even lost his deposit. His flamboyant cricketing personality did not win him even a respectable defeat, let alone victory.

Interestingly, in the year 2014, former Indian cricketer Mohammad Kaif joined the Congress party, contested from Phulpur constituency in Allahabad, but came fourth. This ended up spoiling his political career. If Pataudi was routed in the countrywide wave of Indira Gandhi in 1971, Kaif met a similar fate at the hands of Narendra Modi-led BJP in 2014 and returned to his cricketing universe.

The story of the cricketers who clinched comforting victories in their very first political inning has not been very different.

While some of them like Mohammad Azharuddin successfully managed to sustain themselves in the ecosystem of mainstream politics, others have found it very difficult to handle the intricacies of the political field and have eventually chosen to go back to the sporting field. Former Indian batter Gautam Gambhir’s decision to withdraw from active politics (on behalf of the BJP) just before the 2024 general election is a reminder of how politics proved to be too difficult for the left-handed batsman to handle.

Sports Give You a Second Chance, Politics May or May Not

The first reason why a successful cricketer fails to leave his mark on the political field can be attributed to the essential difference between sport and politics as two distinct arenas of public life. The sportsperson wins popular public support primarily on account of his performance. It’s his performance and style of play which earns him a mass following, converting him into a charismatic figure at times.

The nature of this mass following is very distinct and doesn’t necessarily translate into political success as the rules of the game in politics are entirely different. The latter requires a specific kind of social and political engagement with the masses which most cricketers fail to do when they decide to try their fortune in politics.

The social attitude of treating cricketers only as ‘good’ at the game and calling them ‘unsuitable’ for politics also contributes to this failure. With that, it is also important to remember that all forms of modern sports, including cricket, generally gives us a second chance to prove our worth despite being incredibly competitive.

Politics, on the contrary, does not treat you like that. It might or might not give you a second chance. This has been typically the case with cricketers who lost the game of politics in their very first attempts.       

But even if cricketers somehow succeed in translating their cricketing popularity into political success with the help of the organisational machinery of their party, surviving in the world of politics continues to remain a puzzling task. In fact, that is where politics becomes a hard nut to crack for most of these cricketers-turned-politicians.

The rules of survival in politics are altogether different than those of the sport. To be able to survive and sustain in politics, one needs to carefully learn the art of navigating within a complex and competing world of ideologies and political and social interests.

Politics demands an acute awareness of this world and the contradictions involving it. A sportsperson, especially a cricketer, seldom has a sense of this and often doesn’t realise that merely winning an election doesn’t secure a place in politics for them. While the game of cricket too demands a constant reinvention of the style of play and cricketing persona for sustenance, in politics, such reinventions often force us to take extraordinarily risky decisions.

The political trajectory of cricketer-turned-politician Kirti Azad is a case in point in this regard. The former right-handed batsman and off-spinner made his political debut with BJP in the 1990s, switched to the Congress party in 2015, and finally fought on the ticket of Trinamool Congress to register a resounding victory from the Bardhaman-Durgapur constituency of West Bengal in 2024. In all these years, Azad has been a seeker, a figure who has reevaluated his political prospects shrewdly from time to time and has switched to different camps keeping in mind the equations of his political survival.

Conventional political wisdom would call him an opportunist, but that’s the harsh reality of modern-day Indian politics. It is mostly about surviving and one has to take risky calls to stay relevant.   

But being a son of former parliamentarian Bhagwat Jha Azad, Kirti Azad perhaps had some prior experience of dealing with the intricacies of the political world, unlike other cricketers who often come to join politics as a first-timer in the true sense of the word.

Their ability to reinvent themselves and take risky calls for varying reasons thus remains severely limited. The end result is that they mostly surrender to the pragmatic realities of the political world and return to their cricketing universe. Sadly, that has been the story of most cricketers-turned-politicians in India.

(Abhinava Srivastava is a fifth-year PhD scholar in the Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar University. His research project is centred on locating postcolonial subjectivities through an ethnographic encounter with India’s rapidly changing ‘Cricket Culture’.)