New Delhi, Jan 12: If Railway Minister Lalu Prasad had his way, he would have called back Team India from Australia that is grappling with the charge of racist slur and some shoddy umpiring. ''Had I been in charge of the BCCI, I would have ordered the cricket team to come back from Australia.

If the game is important, the country's pride is paramount,'' he told reporters on the sidelines of a railway event here. Mr Prasad, who is President of the Bihar Cricket Association -- a position yet to be recognised by the BCCI -- said the country had been subjected to indignity and its pride hurt.

''Cricket has to be played in the right spirit and anything that hurts the country's pride is just unacceptable,'' he said.

Asked whether the BCCI's approach to the entire issue had been ''ambivalent and ineffective'', Mr Prasad refused to comment, but said it would have been appropriate to summon the team back to India.

On the decision of the Nitish Kumar Government in Bihar to remove his biography from the school curriculum in the state, he said he never impressed upon anyone to include his life and achievements in textbooks.

''But I assure you that if I come back to power in Bihar, I will ensure that Nitish Kumar's biography is included in textbooks,'' he said in a lighter vein.

''I know Nitish very well and we were politically close for some 15 years. For his political ambitions, he has courted the RSS and the BJP. His political life has really been 'mobile' and it now finds him hopping on the RSS bandwagon,'' he said, lacing his comment with sarcasm.

UNI