Mike Procter (Getty Images)

JOHANNESBURG: Hours after India’s badminton supergirl PV Sindhu won a silver at the Rio Olympics in 2016, Google Trends showed that her caste became the most searched word on the engine. So much so that the google prompter began showing ‘PV Sindhu caste’ before anything else, forget the historic silver.

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The absurdity of that search notwithstanding, it once again brought to the fore how deep caste bias is in a country like India. Here in South Africa, they have an idea what it could be all about. Racism , colour notwithstanding, is still very much South Africa’s bane, a rampant disease that hasn’t been wiped out.

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Mike Procter, the former ICC match referee and a former allrounder who could have rubbed shoulders with the best, if not for South Africa’s suspension during the Apartheid era, underlined this way back in 1971, when as member of the Rest of South Africa team against Transvaal, he staged a walkout along with the likes of Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards to protest South African cricket association’s interference in selection policies. Looking back, he says now, “At school-level cricket in South Africa, two bowlers of the same colour cannot open an attack. Be it two whites or two blacks, it won’t work. There’s got to be a bowler of different colour from each end.”

That a kid, at an age when he or she is expected to have fun and play sport, has to understand the importance of colour cannot be fair, Procter says. Just the way it was unfair that Sindhu’s caste became a matter of interest, merely because her parents got married after ignoring caste differences.

Procter says racism in South Africa is alive and kicking. “What’s the definition of racism? It is certainly not about whites against blacks. Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior is racism,” he says.

As an example, he touches upon the subject of quota in the South African team, which is a directive to be followed. “There have to be six non-white cricketers, regardless of who should fit in by way of performance,” he says. Apartheid, he likes to believe, was merely an offshoot of racism, of course not forgetting the ugly and immoral doctrine that offshoot turned into.

Monkeygate

Procter says his biggest low as a professional, other than South Africa’s suspension from international cricket, was the Monkeygate affair. “I was told I believed in a white man’s story and not a brown man’s story. It was shattering. The first big disappointment was the total non-acceptance that Indians can be racist,” he says.

Procter’s autobiography ‘Caught in the Middle’ is out, in which he’s touched upon the subjects that he’s never spoken about in a long career.

He’s not convinced yet with the testimony that Sachin Tendulkar gave during the ‘Monkeygate’ and writes in much detail.

Yet, he’s in awe of the man and says ‘that’ Indian team – one that played between 2001 and 2008 – was as good as any team in the history of the game. “I do share warm relations. I’ve known them (Sachin, Sourav, Rahul) for a long time. But as a match-referee, what could have I done?” he says.

Procter says he remembers India with a lot of warmth but is sad about how it all ended up.

