There have been instances when a burning matchstick, casually dropped, has set a palace on fire. And its flames have taken a very long time to be doused. Somewhat similar is the state of the very extravagant Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket these days following allegations of mismanagement. The flames are leaping.
Feeling some extreme heat is the Indian cricket establishment, the IPL’s mix of business and Bollywood franchisees, and yet-to-be-identified intermediaries who may have bankrolled some of the teams. Heads have rolled, and on the evidence thus far, the summer of 2010 has thrown up yet one more crisis of enormous proportions in Indian cricket, much like what match-fixing precipitated exactly 10 years ago. Unlike last time, it is not the cricketers who have let us down.
At the centre of this hard-to-let-go-of-the-front-pages crisis story have been two unlikely warriors—a sophisticated politician and a canny businessman both of whom have been delivered knock out blows by the establishment. It remains to be seen whether by the time the flames are doused, and the allegations investigated, Indian cricket changes for the better.
Diplomat, author and politician Shashi Tharoor’s considerable intellectual talents have never been in doubt. Neither has been his impeccable articulation of global issues. He is a first-rate thinker whose world views have drawn appreciation from intelligentsia. Once disillusioned by the declaration of emergency in India in the mid 1970s, he chose to give the civil services examinations a pass, and leave. He opted for higher education in the U.K. and the U.S.A. and finally settled down in the United Nations, an institution he served for nearly three decades with aplomb. His recent entry into Indian politics was not without fanfare. He won the Lok Sabha seat on his very first attempt and not surprisingly was rewarded with a junior minister’s berth in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. May be he did not have enough on his plate (apart from a full time cabinet minister, there is another junior minister at the ministry), somehow, therefore, finding the time to pursue his fondness for the game of cricket—which he has periodically described as a sport he plays “very badly”—by cobbling together a team at the ministry. It is to some of these ministerial cricket matches that he invited a lady friend, Sunanda Pushkar, who in days to come would find herself in the eye of a serious IPL storm.
THE IPL GOVERNING COUNCIL SANS MODI |
Shashank Manohar
President, BCCI |
Chirayu Amin
BCCI Vice-President and now interim Chairman
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N Srinivasan
BCCI Secretary |
MP Pandove
Treasurer, BCCI |
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Niranjan Shah
IPL Vice-Chairman |
Inderjit Singh Bindra
President, Punjab Cricket Association |
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Arun Jaitley
BCCI Vice-President & President DDCA |
Rajeev Shukla
Chairman, Media & Finance Committee, BCCI |
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Sanjay Jagdale
BCCI Joint-Secretary |
Farooq Abdullah
President, J&K Cricket Association |
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Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi
Former India Captain |
Ravi Shastri
Former India All-Rounder |
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Sunil Gavaskar
Former India Captain |
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Sometimes when sports and politics are mixed, a Molotov cocktail-like ending is in the offing. Using his ministerial position and his unquestionable fondness for his home state, Tharoor took upon himself the task of mentoring the Kochi franchisee that was added to the IPL in 2010. There was nothing wrong in a minister taking interest in the IPL, after all politicians and maharajahs have patronized cricket since the inception of the game. But it was his hand-holding of Pushkar and getting her to be a part of the franchisee that needled his detractors. Pushkar’s surprising induction into the Kochi franchise as a sweat equity-holder (worth some Rs 70 crore) could not remain a closely guarded secret. At the IPL the stakes, after all, are very high. It is now the world’s third richest sporting league, after the English Premier League and the national American basketball league. Minister Tharoor’s indirect but persuasive involvement, his mentoring, and his helping out of close friend Pushkar was a bit like putting one’s gloveless hands inside a beehive. The stings were instant, sharp, and painful.
Lalit Kumar Modi, scion of the Modi family from Modinagar, was at the forefront of the campaign to oust Jagmohan Dalmiya, once upon a time a powerful president of the International Cricket Council and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). During the Dalmiya era when cricket was run like out of a fief, Modi had spoken shrilly about cleansing Indian cricket of its ills, especially from the mess it had found itself in during the match-fixing saga of the year 2000. Moneyed and young, Modi had since bided his time. Somehow he got his chance to shine under the overarching spotlights of Indian cricket in 2008 when he thought up the IPL. Initially it came as a counter to the Zee Group’s ICL. But swiftly Modi found a way to start a Twenty20 cricketing league which for sheer grandeur and attraction (imagine, Bollywood film directors do not release movies during IPL season) would surpass anything before it in India, and many parts of the world. The IPL which he chaired was an overnight success, a symbol of India’s growing economic clout and also an unabashed show of the cockiness of Indian youth, power and glitz. Bollywood badshahs and pretty heroines, and top business honchos competed to get a slice of the IPL pie. Modi had thought this through so brilliantly that nothing would keep them out.
BRANDING IPL |
Deepika Padukone
Royal Challengers Bangalore |
Akshay Kumar
Delhi Daredevils |
Katrina Kaif
Royal Challengers Bangalore |
Arjun Rampal
Kolkata Knight Riders |
Unthinkable amounts of money were committed by the franchises to Indian cricket to buy eight teams in 2008, and two more in 2010. The TV rights were sold for a billion dollars. Whether or not the revenue streams would support generous returns on investment for franchises, one thing became clear: the IPL was the place to be. Investors knew that for at least two months each year they would become India’s best known faces, sitting alongside the bold and the beautiful, the powerful and the ambitious. TV cameras would seek them out, and each byte would hype up the brands they promoted. Modi once known to have got into trouble over cocaine during his not-so-heady student days in the USA, was selling cricket like a dream. There is no doubt that the IPL became a raging success, even when it was moved quickly to South Africa for the second edition, because of Modi’s outrageously glib and breezy business style, raw energy and child-like enthusiasm to stay in the game.
GAME CHANGERS |
MS Dhoni
Chennai Super Kings |
Sachin Tendulkar
Mumbai Indians |
Sourav Ganguly
Kolkata Knight Riders |
Jacques Kallis
Royal Challengers Bangalore |
But great shows do not run on energy and enthusiasm alone. You need to play as a team, and remain transparent as a captain. This is where Indian cricket’s poster boy got it all wrong. Long term solidity was given the go by. Transparency was thrown out of the windows of the Four Seasons hotel in Mumbai’s Worli, Modi’s IPL office. Tried and tested practices of accounting were given a miss. You cannot have so many flaws and still survive. Modi allowed some investors to jump into the IPL bandwagon without proper verifications of antecedents. Multiple companies were set up offshore, and money channeled in to the IPL, and thereby into the BCCI from which it was born. Foreign-origin money pumped into the IPL took those routes that have always remained a cause of worry for the Indian Government. Records of billion dollar deals are supposed to be inked and kept in proper files under lock and key, somehow the IPL boss failed to do so and they went missing. Facilitation fees were paid without seeking the consensus of the members of the IPL council and the BCCI. The mute governing council of the IPL that should have asked questions of Modi, allowed him to walk all over them for three long years. The only one who made some noise was former India cricket captain Tiger Pataudi, a member of the council. Pataudi said, “Modi should have consulted others more often during the decision making process.” Some in Indian cricket’s establishment, including noted commentators, remained too much in awe of Modi. Others, more like fence-sitters, may have been reluctant to nudge him for Modi can be impolite and brusque at the best of times. Caught up in the frenzy and the madness of IPL, the method was easily forgotten. For a man who’s a likely inheritor to a huge empire and one with business in his blood, Modi’s inability to keep the paperwork in place is confounding. Surely he knew that at some stage questions would be asked. And so like Tharoor, Modi too paid a price. But it was he who had chosen to deliver the first punch in a battle that would bring him down.
It all began with a tweet on the Twitter. On April 11 he wrote, “I was told by him not to get into who owns Rendezvous. Specially Sunanda Pushkar. Why? The same has been minuted in my records…”—a direct attack on the unsuspecting Tharoor, then a minister. Soon, in an email to BCCI president Shashank Manohar, copied to members of the IPL council, Modi said that the Kochi franchisee had “a lot to hide and as such have lied about who is the actual owner of the shares....when I questioned who the shareholders were...they had no answer. In fact, they said we will revert back. Within minutes of me asking the same...I got a call from Shashi Tharoor asking me not to ask about who these shareholders are.” The contents of the emails were selectively leaked to the Media.
Clearly, Modi had an agenda is exposing Kochi, considering that for three years he had chosen to remain silent about the shareholding pattern of other franchisees. Someone was prodding him to leak Pushkar’s details, and embarrass Tharoor. Usually when such a selective leak of confidential business information takes place, it is an unsuccessful rival who is behind the plans. Even the wily Modi unwittingly may have walked into the trap through the Twitter, a trap laid out by someone who wanted to own a franchise but was ousted by the better bid of Kochi. Political circles in Delhi were speculating names, and that of at least one chief minister who may have wanted a franchise in his state capital kept cropping up. May be the investigations that are now underway will reveal some things that are yet not clear.
Under pressure from his own colleagues in the Congress party, and unable to pretend that Pushkar was not so close after all, the gentlemanly Tharoor had no option but to put in his papers which he did on April 18. He met with Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister a few times before doing so. It was sad, because Tharoor had been like a breath of fresh air in the Government, an outsider who could now bring in new perspective to India’s dynamic march forward. But for now it was not to be.
Having sacrificed one of its own, the Government now trained its guns on Modi. ICC president-elect and cabinet minister Sharad Pawar was told in no uncertain terms that the IPL boss had to go, in many quarters Modi was seen as Pawar’s man. In the meanwhile, a barrage of survey operations—a euphemism for raids and searches—were ordered countrywide at the behest of the Finance Ministry. Hordes of officers from the income tax department and directorate of enforcement swooped on the offices of Modi, the franchisees, and some influential office bearers of the IPL. No one was spared, a no-holds-barred attack was being taken to the cricketing establishment by a Government that was clearly embittered by the Twitter. As the flames of allegations of kickbacks leapt high, sponsors and rights holders felt the heat, and those that had managed cheer leaders and other entertainers were questioned. Very significantly, all investments were being back-tracked, and soon it began to appear that some intermediaries could be fronting in the IPL franchises and other related agencies on behalf of more significant and powerful individuals. Some of them could even be stakeholders in the Government. Of doubtless concern is the channelling of huge amounts of money from destinations like the British Virgin Islands and Mauritius, and the setting up of numerous offshore companies to layer the transactions. Could some of the money pumped into the world’s third richest sporting league, valued at USD 4.2 billion, be not so clean?
It is unlikely that Modi will be restored again to his IPL job. Not at least when the current dispensation is in place at the Centre. An interim chairman of the IPL—Chirayu Amin—is now mandated to douse the flames. There will be no more late night parties in IPL IV, we are told. That would indeed be a very small price to pay for all the questions that now confront Indian cricket. In this age of fast-changing, one-line communication, may be a tweet is not so insignificant after all.
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