Cheerleaders, quite unwittingly, could make the strangest bedfellows. The Left is Left and the Right is Right, but in India, often the twain do meet. The Bharatiya Janata Party leadership in Maharashtra seems to be gaining ground in its drive to ban the female cheerleaders from being the icing on the Twenty20 cake. And the man who has started making similar noises is Subhas Chakraborty, the Left Front’s minister for sports and transport in Bengal. The moral discomfort with bared, white, female midriffs, legs and other bits of the body has spread to Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party too. It is usually impossible to come to a consensus on any issue of public import in India, but morality is not one of these. All political parties, including the Congress, in power or from the Opposition, have taken up potentially bigoted positions on what constitutes the purity of Indian culture. And women’s bodies, together with men’s eyes, most readily provide the focus for this passion for purity.

On the whole, this is crude stuff, impossible to engage with at any elevated, rational level. But in this case, with the women in question being foreigners and given the link with cricket, there are some interesting nuances to the usual arguments. The Left establishment’s implicit distancing of itself from the latest cricket extravaganza is couched as a righteous sense of apartness from crassly commercialized, bourgeois vulgarity. This is not Proust, Kafka or Tagore, nor is it Art Cinema or the Book Fair. This is simply cricket being brought down to the lowest functioning of the free market. The communist luminaries of Bengal, even of the ‘New’ Bengal, are not going to allow themselves to sink to such a level of depravity. This is puritanism, but not of the unabashed Hindutva kind. Cheerleaders, by this leftist ‘logic’, embody a decadence that cannot be confined to just obscenity. They stand for something larger, and hence the objections are also more exalted. But it takes someone like Mr Chakraborty to reduce the relative complexity of such a position to its lowest common denominator, and thus expose the crudeness at its core. The BJP and Samajwadi objections to cheerleaders are more unabashedly moral. There could be no objections there to the commercial excesses of the IPL or the trivialization of classical cricket. The Right’s arguments are touchingly simple (though no less dangerous), and have been made before with regard to bar girls or sex education in school. In India, women cannot be seen in public in a certain way — and if they do expose themselves, then the State has the right to stop them from doing so. If these women happen to belong to another country, then every kind of legal or bureaucratic obstacle will be put in their path to stop them from dirtying Indian minds.

Mr Chakraborty has shown, in recent times, a brazen inability to save Indian lungs and lives. So sensible Indians should think very hard before entrusting him with their moralities.