The recent announcement of the final list of players for the South Zone Junior tennis ball cricket tournament from Kerala has become an object of controversy because of the fact that it has only Muslims. Notably, the team coach and the manager are also Muslims.
This was shared by BJP leader Sandeep Vachaspati with a satirical caption that said that this was not an ‘All-Muslim’ team but a team from ‘secular Kerala’. He went on to say that this secularism was surprisingly one-sided, as though Hindus and Christians were unqualified to play cricket. This tweet received a lot of support and a lot of members from the Twitterati came out saying that they had faced a lot of discrimination whilst studying in Muslim majority institutions and Muslim run colleges.
The following are the list of members on the team: N Muhammad Yasin (Captain), A.K Muhammad Sajad (Vice-Captain), Ahammad Finash, K.P Adnan, C. Shamil, Muhammad Rabeeh, Damsas Muhammad, C.P Abdulla, K. Abdulla Omar, T. Salih, P. Mishaal, Ashmil Sahan. Coach- M.K Munir. Manager: Majeed Bava.
A lot of members also shared an incident where a similar incident had happened with a club that had attempted to conduct an ‘all-Hindu’ tournament and that they had to cancel it after police intervention. One user posted a copy of the flyer shown by Asianet News, the Malayalam TV channel, featuring the sentence: “Only Hindu players should play this game.” This added fuel to the existing issue.
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