‘Cut Off Sri Lanka from the Sporting World’

A lawyer’s lawsuit against BCCI protesting the Compaq tour is quashed, but but his beliefs aren’t.

The Indian cricket team won the Compaq Cup. But just before it announced its departure for the tri-nation series in Sri Lanka, Joel Paul Antony, 28, a lawyer practising at the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court, filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against the BCCI, protesting the tour. The PIL was quashed. But Antony’s beliefs aren’t. Indeed, 512 advocates signed his plea.

Q Why the PIL? 

In the post-LTTE situation, hundreds of displaced Tamils from Sri Lanka have poured into Tamil Nadu. The Sri Lankan forces have carried out genocide against Tamils in Sri Lanka. And what is our response? We go on a cricket tour to Sri Lanka! How shocking and insensitive!

Q What does banning a cricket tour achieve? Or did you want publicity?

You’re wrong. It’s rude and hurtful if people of your country get wounded and are kept in open-air jails, and you go on unblinkingly on a cricket tour. Twelve lakh Tamils have been killed over the last six decades due to Sinhalese governments. And we do this. India doesn’t stand up for its citizens.

Q Are you a part of the LTTE or a sympathiser?

A No. I’m a lawyer deeply concerned about human rights.

Q If human rights is close to your heart, then the Indian cricket team should not tour Australia either. There have been racist attacks on Indian students.

A In Australia, we have had racist attacks. In Sri Lanka, there has been genocide. The world should do to Sri Lankan cricket what it did to South Africa during the apartheid era.

Q The Sri Lankan team tours India in November. Any plans then?

A I’d like to remind the Sri Lankans that the genocide is more important than a cricket tour.

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arindam