KEY POINTS:
For anyone who isn't Australian, last week's escape by Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh from charges of racial vilification was both a good laugh and a grim warning.
A good laugh because the Australians - the team who took sledging to new heights and who remain the unofficial world
champions - were hoist by their own petard; always fun for neutrals.
But the laughs died in our throats a bit when the full implications - and the lengths the Indians were prepared to go to - were fully understood. The laughter was completely throttled when we realised that New Zealand judge John Hansen had been dealt less than a full hand of knowledge by the ICC - who conveniently overlooked previous transgressions of Singh's which might have led to a harsher penalty than that handed out and which was regarded by many Australians as the equivalent of being beaten with a soggy ant.
For some months now, cricket writers, including Dylan Cleaver of this paper, have been warning of the consequences of the money flowing into India, the world's only truly cricket-crazy country. Fuelled by the huge population and enormous interest in the game, TV revenue has been gargantuan and the influence of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has grown until it has become a behemoth on cricket's world stage.
But even - or perhaps especially - in Australia, where cricket is a genuinely national game, the full impact of India's power may not have been realised. Until Singh was fined only for abusive language and not for allegedly calling Andrew Symonds a "monkey" in that fractious test in Sydney. The Australians contended that a racial line had been crossed.
The Indians called up a charter plane, ready to take them home if Singh was not cleared.
Cricket Australia, according to media reports, was keen to see the incident played down because there was a possibility that TV giant ESPN (who carry cricket coverage from Australia) were dismayed that they stood to lose a heap of revenue if the Indians went home early and were apparently thinking of a A$60m lawsuit.
So the screaming media headlines and the howls of protest from Australian fans - some of whom had turned on their own cricketers after the excesses of Sydney - came down to the fact that the Aussies had not quite realised how strong was the grip of India on world cricket.
They could have asked just about anyone in New Zealand. Shane Bond will not be turning out against England because of India - and the BCCI insistence that anyone playing in the rebel ICL Twenty/20 league is banned from playing for their country.
Gee, ta, India. I for one do not give a big hairy rat's heinie about your poxy Twenty20 leagues and it seems totally unfair to me that your nasty cricket politics can reach right over the Indian Ocean and the Pacific and can grab our helpless little New Zealand Cricket blokes by the throat.
But I will allow India this: they stood up for themselves against the playground bully. Australia made a huge error of judgement in not dealing with the name-calling on the field - the very place where they have done so much name-calling and confidence-sapping themselves.
Calling it to the attention of the officials immediately cast them as the bullies who didn't like it when someone hit back. It's like Mike Tyson complaining to the ref when Lennox Lewis gave him a good hiding after Tyson had said he wanted to eat Lewis' children.
Singh may have escaped censure because there was no evidence of the crime - no recording of him calling anyone a monkey. Instead, the defence maintained, Singh had actually called Symonds "teri maa ki" - a Hindi term which translates to a well-known obscene Western insult involving one's mother. It also phonetically sounds like monkey.
How calling Symonds the sort of man who would do something unspeakable to his mother is better than calling him a monkey is beyond me, I'm afraid, but it's not really the point anyway.
The Aussies should have shut up. For they unleashed the full fury of the newly-powerful Indian juggernaut and it was not pretty.
The question now remains: Is this what we are to see every time India is crossed on an issue? Will the chartered plane be whistled up and the hired guns of ESPN or other TV carriers be trained on other targets?
India would do well to regard its new power with some caution.
They might even want to regard the words of a well-known Indian - Gandhi, I think his name was, who said: "Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment."
