Saturday, December 1, 2001 I am desperately disappointed with Jagmohan Dalmiya. Over the last few days circumstances have provided him with an excellent opportunity to address the issue of biased refereeing that most Indian fans (and presumably players) feel so strongly about. He has done nothing of the sort.

India have frequently been at the receiving end of apparently harsh decisions by match referees while their opponents have sometimes seemed to get away with rather more. In the last three years players from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have been punished by ICC referees on 34 occasions, more than all the other nations put together.

Rather than go into the details here I would direct the interested reader to some of the e-mails coming from Indian fans - if you ignore the hyperbole many of them contain good examples of refereeing inconsistencies which have gone against India. Racism? Cultural differences? Perhaps a bit of both. But the facts are hard to ignore.

It is the strength of this claim and the strong political position India holds in the world game which makes Dalmiya's anarchic response so disappointing. He has been playing the underdog card over and again, as though India were still a colony and he some sort of freedom fighter, a cricketing terrorist to the west but a folk-hero at home.

Oppressed people do sometimes have to resort to anarchic measures when dealing with an overwhelmingly powerful opponent - a phenomenon both India and South Africa have experienced. But modern India is a free country with (as it happens) a great deal of clout in this particular area. So here is the crux of the matter: despite the unfair treatment India has sometimes received it is certainly not colonialism all over again so the solution need not be so desperate. The ICC is not an empire, and it is simply not the case that only the west has a say in its functioning. There are no real barriers to India expressing its views on cricket Laws at all.

India should have gone ahead with the third Test and tried to level the series. The next step would have been to look into the issue of unfair treatment in some detail, assembling evidence, garnering support from sympathetic countries and so on. At the next ICC meeting the results of all this work could have been presented as a fait accompli - confronted with reasonable amendments to the rules, forceful advocates and a good number of TV-revenue-rich countries already in favour, the ICC would have found it difficult to side-step the issue.

India's political leaders and diplomats let the country down all the time, but at least they have the excuse of being relatively unimportant players on the world stage. Dalmiya's actions actions are far worse: with all the power of cricket's biggest market behind him he has chosen to put his personal ambitions before the needs of Indian cricket.

Sach Mukherjee is a postgraduate student studying Engineering at Churchill College, Cambridge. He grew up in England and India and admits to having rather a mixed view of most cricketing controversies.

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