Indian cricket fan kills friend after drunken brawl over favourite cricketer

Incident brings to light violent cricket fandom in India

A 21-year-old Indian cricket fan was arrested for killing his friend in a drunken brawl about whose favourite cricketer was a better player, reports say.

The arrested man, a supporter of Indian cricketer Virat Kohli, allegedly attacked his friend, a Rohit Sharma fan, with a bottle and hit him with a cricket bat on the head.

The victim, identified as Vignesh, was supporting Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League (IPL), while the accused, Dharmaraj, was a Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) supporter, the Indian Express reported, citing police sources.

Local reports say the two had consumed alcohol and were discussing cricket in an open area near an industrial estate on Tuesday night.

Vignesh allegedly mocked RCB and Virat Kohli and compared the Bangalore team to Dharmaraj’s speech disorder.

“This infuriated Dharmaraj, who attacked Vignesh with a bottle and later hit him with a cricket bat on the head. Dharmaraj soon fled the spot,” officials said.

Vignesh’s body was found the next morning by a group of workers near the factory, and the body was sent to a government hospital for autopsy.

Dharmaraj was reportedly apprehended and taken into custody.

Vignesh, the deceased, was planning to go to Singapore and was waiting for a job visa when the incident occurred.

The incident brings to light violent cricket fandom in India.

After a face-off last year between India and Pakistan, in which the latter team won, students at an engineering college in Punjab attacked those from Kashmir, a federal territory at the heart of a decades-old dispute between India and Pakistan.

After the match, Indian Muslim cricketer Mohammed Shami was also the target of a bigoted attack on social media with the then Indian captain Mr Kohli defending his teammate.

Several Indian Twitter users had tagged Mr Shami in tweets, asking him and his family to “go to Pakistan” – a comment often made by Hindu extremists against Indian Muslims, accusing them of disloyalty.

In August, a cricket match between India and Pakistan also triggered clashes between Hindus and Muslim groups in Leicester – a scale of communal violence described as “unprecedented” in the UK.