Dawn Images

Pakistani cricketers are on a roll when it comes to saying the absolute wrong thing and showcasing the worst of themselves. Ramiz Raja, the cricketer and former PCB chair, is under fire for laughing at a racist joke about legendary West Indies cricketer Sir Viv Richards and Indian actor Neena Gupta.

His harshest critic is their daughter, Indian designer Masaba Gupta, who slammed the former cricketer on Twitter and Instagram.

Masaba said he had no grace. “Sickening to see you laugh on national TV in Pakistan at something the world stopped laughing at about 30 years back. Step into the future. All three of us are here with our chin up,” she wrote.

In a story on Instagram, Masaba said, “No matter who you are, I will call you out on racism and shaming my mother on television. Won’t have it. That is still my fight.”

The controversy was stirred after a September 12 episode of Cricket Mastiyan on Suno News HD. The show, purportedly a comedy — though we see nothing comedic in its ridiculous content — featured actors dressed up as caricatures of columnist Hassan Nisar and actor Bushra Ansari, alongside two hosts and Raja.

During the clip of the video posted on YouTube, the hosts spoke primarily to ‘Ansari’ and ‘Nisar’ and asked them about cricket. “Do you watch cricket matches?” one host asked ‘Ansari’.

“I’ll watch them but once my heart broke when that Vivian Richards took off with Neena Gupta. I wrote a poem at the time. I had written ‘jo larkiyan khud ko kehti hain Malika-e-Aalya, us ko phir milta hai Mr Kaliya [the women who think of themselves as the queens of beauty end up with Mr Black]’,” responded the dummy. Throughout this thoughtless, racist ‘joke’, Raja sits laughing.

Richards and Gupta were first romantically linked together in the 1980s and had their daughter, Masaba, in 1989. They never married, as Richards was married himself at the time of their relationship. Gupta raised their daughter in India as a single mother.

This racist controversy closely follows former cricketer Abdul Razzaq’s inappropriate analogy featuring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. His subsequent apology was quite lacking. Raja hasn’t addressed the situation, nor has he publicly responded to Masaba.