As cricket grounds in India become staging posts for displays of collective stupidity and viciousness, it is easy to wish the Indian cricket fan away. To wish that Bertolt Brecht's immortal suggestion-"Abolish the people and elect a new one"-could, for once, actually work.

Crowd disruptions in the first three one-dayers of the India-West Indies series have been met with horror and outrage. As if any of this was new. It has happened before at grounds far more distinguished than Jamshedpur, Nagpur or Rajkot and has been ignored season after season.

The West Indians were subject to racist abuse in Mumbai; when India slid to defeat in the 1996 World Cup semi-final, the Eden Gardens crowd set the stands on fire; three years later the same ground was emptied of people to allow an India-Pakistan Test to finish after a controversial umpiring decision; fans leaving the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore smashed the windows of Imran Khan's car after India beat Pakistan in the 1996 World Cup; in Ahmedabad trouble regularly starts from the stand above the pavilion, the home of the world's worst-behaved club-house audience.

The minor irritation has turned into a full-blown virus because the symptoms were attended to briefly, never the disease.

Sporadic, scattered irritation has turned into a full-blown virus that now travels across the country because the symptoms were attended to briefly, never the disease. The ICC wants to administer the bitter medicine of banning venues and imposing stiff financial penalties and the BCCI wants to instal closed-circuit cameras and ban people from carrying in anything other than their tickets. While it's impossible to invent an ignorance-or-intolerance-detector, the thug-proof cricket ground can be built: like they have in Mohali where a moat prevents pitch invasions or in Bangalore where a net is now flung over the audience. If fans want to behave like animals, then it's time to strengthen the cages. It is not dignified, but the alternative is to risk a full-blown riot-if 2,000-3,000 policemen cannot spot and stop a few potential bottle throwers in a stadium, then they would hardly be able to quell a genuine disturbance. BCCI's harassed Secretary S.K. Nair says, "A public culture for appreciation of cricket has to be developed." Hopefully, this will first begin with the board's officials respecting a ticketholder's right to his own numbered seat and access to clean food, water and toilets. At the moment, this is as certain as Ajit Agarkar's line and length on any given day.

When trouble flared, pundits on television condemned the "idiocy of the idiots" but this mess is their baby too. The late Mark Mascarenhas once explained the formula behind covering cricket matches: "In India we spend much more time on the crowd because they are so animated, so colourful. If you try this Indian type of coverage in England, it won't go down very well." But does TV focus on the crowd because it is colourful and animated or is the crowd colourful and animated because cameras spend so much time focusing on it? Does the dog wag the tail or the tail wag the dog? The spectator is no longer just a witness-he has, thanks to "Indian-type" coverage, been turned into an element of the spectacle himself. Series are routinely promoted on TV as "Qayamat" (Doomsday), "Sarfarosh" (Willing Martyr) and "Badla" (Revenge); so when India begins to lose, any wonder then that the man spoonfed on that uneducated hype believes "qayamat" has arrived early and maybe he had better try his own hand at "badla"?

Television has enriched cricket, enriched the cricket-watcher's life but its tone is now too strident, its sense of proportion replaced by grandmothers batting with sticks of rhubarb and one-legged men in bum-kicking competitions. Television has virtually taught the game to millions of Indians; now it is time to teach them some of its graces too.

Finally, it is down to the individual fan at every cricket ground who watches silently as the yob goes to work. Indian cricket is the sponsor's golden goose, television's favourite year-round entertainment show and the jingoist's "national sentiment". It can't be totally free of these masters, but it must not be completely enslaved by them. It's still only a game. It's still our game. It's still ours to reclaim.