Elite Bench

Why diversity and inclusion in cricket remain elusive

- Pragya Singh

IN Indian cricket, talent is celebrated, but silence is institutional. In a sport where mythology is built around personal excellence and rags-toriches narratives, the conversation about caste remains almost completely absent. It's not that caste isn't present in cricket—it's that it is carefully and strategically ignored. Vinod Kambli, a Dalit cricketer, once came close to opening up the conversation, but retreated—his silence wasn't personal, but systemic. He did not fall silent on comparisons with Sachin Tendulkar, but on the question of caste altogether.

Compare this to what happened to Vandana Katariya, who scored a historic hat-trick in women's hockey at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. She was the first Indian woman to do so. But shortly after, elite-caste men in her locality burst firecrackers when India lost, (allegedly) taunting her family for "too many Dalit players" on the team. Vandana later said the regret of not winning an Olympic medal that year would stay with her. So, perhaps, would the abuse her family endured.

Caste, then, is spoken of in sport only when it erupts in violence. In cricket, it's even worse—because here, silence is a mechanism to exclude. Of the nearly 315 players now in Indian test cricket, only four are Dalits. In the first 85 years of Indian test cricket, from 1932 to 2017, there were 289 players, and still only four were Dalits. This reflects persistent structural barriers, point out Gaurav Bhawnani and Shubham Jain in a 2018 article, "Does India Need a Caste-based Quota in Cricket", published in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW).