NEW DELHI, 2 December — Before Mike Denness interfered with history, and my life, I did not much care whether the Indian team won or lost in its latest effort to raise money for the impoverished families of Test match cricketers, needy institutions like television companies, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, its equivalent in South Africa, the International Cricket Committee and the various organizations that control venues where Test cricket is played in South Africa (one or two with remarkable names).

My first glimpse of the India-South Africa series was on television. I quickly discovered that if this had been boxing, some honest referee would have stopped the fight.

On the one side was Shaun Pollock with a tough, no-nonsense air about him, in the company of a bowler with a multi-syllable name and genuine pace to go with his mean look. There was nothing unprofessional about that mean look, I hasten to add; he was doing his job, and doing it reasonably well, in the modern spirit.

Facing them, on that fateful morning, was Saurav Ganguly. I must have been particularly stupid that day, for there was so much that I did not understand. Why, for instance, had the selectors of the Indian cricket team sent a footballer to play in South Africa?

Ganguly was fending the rising ball off like an expert goalkeeper deflecting something he cannot hold beyond the goal posts on either side of him. Ganguly scratched the air with his bat while his head, without sufficient time to think, sought the mercy of instinct, and not very elegantly at that.

I gather, checking the scorebooks, that Ganguly did not do too badly in terms of runs scored, so there must have been occasions when he batted well, or when those mean pacers were too tired to continue their bullying.

Being a cricket junkie, I did return sporadically to the set during the series, and was well rewarded once or twice too. When young Virender Sehwag made his century, for instance: Good, mature footwork and a bat that knew when to meet the ball and when to leave it alone. I wish Sehwag had become a household name because of his batting.

Like most other fans, I had little idea that Mike Denness was the match referee for the second Test; and if I had known it I would not have cared.

Sunil Gavaskar is in the technical committee of the ICC, a fact that I learned from Geoff Boycott, who narrated it with much relish. What does this committee do? It appoints match referees, among other things.

In other words, Gavaskar did not much care either when Denness was accepted as match referee by both India and South Africa. It was only another handout to a veteran who must also get his share, however little it might be in the case of match referees, of the loot that is now synonymous with cricket.

Only an excess of money can explain the fact that there are now four umpires for every Test. One can see the point of the third umpire in the age of technology, for the third umpire is really the camera rather than a human being. A human being is hired merely to pass on to the field what the camera has told him. What is the fourth man’s job? Is the Umpire of Umpires, the majestic match referee, there to tell us that the umpires have not done their job? It is, or at least used to be, the job of the two umpires on the ground to inform players whether they were behaving or misbehaving.

Umpires on the ground have very real and effective ways of telling a bowler that he has made a nuisance of himself. The umpire should have turned down Shaun Pollock’s now famous appeal purely because it was an attempt to hector the umpire into a decision.

If we need a match referee at all, it is only to pull up the officiating umpires on the ground for being incapable of doing their job. Denness should have fined that umpire, and he would have entered the history books for a far better reason than he did.

So to the all-important question: is Mike Denness a racist? The bare facts prove beyond any reasonable, or even unreasonable, doubt that Denness was biased. You cannot ignore Shaun Pollock and find young Virender Sehwag of Haryana, who has played fewer Tests than the number of times Pollock repeated his appeal, guilty and expect any other conclusion.

You cannot besmirch six players of a side, punish the captain for being unable to control his players for behavior that is par for the course and expect any other verdict on your inclinations. Denness was not sending a signal to merely the players. He was passing a remark on the Indian national side and implicitly on India.

This is one reason why there was outrage. Indians, Mr. Denness, are not chauvinistic about cricket, however much they may love the game.

They would not have reacted in the manner they did if they were not convinced that this was acrid and unacceptable injustice. They understand cricket. They even understand what cricket used to be about, as in the phrase, "It’s not cricket".

The decision against Sachin Tendulkar is where bias came close to racism. If Sachin was technically at fault, as every press pundit who has never cleaned dirt from the seam has told us, then it was one of those faults, which requires a raised eyebrow and a quiet word, not a screaming headline. Denness did what he did deliberately, without provocation, with every intention of creating a controversy that he thought would affect Indian morale. He gave himself away when he admitted, in London, that at best it was only a technical fault and not a deliberate use of unfair means.

You do not have to be match referee and an ex-England captain to appreciate what is obvious. Some commentators have been so provoked that they think Denness was setting up the Indian side before its confrontation with England in India, sort of unnerving it; but that would imply a conspiracy.

And while the English used to be good at conspiracies in the days when they sent out Viceroys to rule the natives, it is rather more difficult to organize one now. Someone is bound to tattle. Tabloids in England pay good money for such stories. Denness’ real problem might even be that he does not fully understand modern media, and how television has changed both cricket and its environment.

Those cameramen record everything, including a player picking his nose. They will replay shots of anyone picking at a ball ad infinitum if it makes a good story. And Geoff Boycott will always be around to remind them to do so.

So is Denness a racist? Or have I, like Gavaskar, who knew how to duck without a helmet, ducked this question?

A learned cricket columnist Makarand Waingankar has discussed this important issue in The Asian Age and decided that the answer is no.

He is not even prepared to call Denness anti-Indian. Why? Because during the England tour of India in 1971-72 he saw Denness reading Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography. That is by far the most interesting reason I have come across.

On the other hand, one could make a good case for the view that reading Gandhi’s autobiography would be sufficient to convert any normal, liberal, balanced Englishman into a racist. I presume this is the autobiography that Gandhi published in 1928, written during the fallow decade after the collapse of the Khilafat and non-cooperation movement. Few autobiographies are as frank as that.

It is a kind of litany of failure and guilt. This is the book where Gandhi narrates for instance that he was having sex with his wife in the next room when a parent died.

He not only punished himself with abstinence after that, but, sadistically, punished all his disciples as well. (Jawaharlal, fortunately for India, left such discipline to others. There is enough material in Gandhi’s autobiography to make a psychoanalyst sparkle (as indeed Erik Erikson did).

I can imagine a healthy liberal’s reaction to the autobiography: "You mean, we lost the British empire to this man! We lost out to a combination of abstinence and non-violence! This is crazy! This man must have cheated!! All Indians are cheats!!!"

Our columnist friend adds that Denness also picked up the autobiographies of other Indian leaders. Frankly, if I were made to read the lives of some of our Indian politicians, I would become anti-Indian too.