It was a big game at the time. Since then it has only grown in significance. India entered the 1983 World Cup as 66–1 outsiders, having won only one game in two previous tournaments, and that against East Africa. One-day cricket had yet to take root in India; the previous year, the BCCI’s chairman of selectors, Raj Singh Dungarpur, had scorned it as ‘artificial’ and ‘irrelevant’. But in the Lord’s final, India overthrew the West Indies, hitherto undefeated in the competition. The result was extraordinary, the ramifications even more so. ‘My slogan is India can do it’, read the telegram from their prime minister, Indira Gandhi. ‘Thank you for living up to it.’ BCCI president NKP Salve, a member of Gandhi’s Congress Party, decided that the next step would be for India to stage cricket’s quadrennial one-day jamboree. It was a drive with a personal edge: Salve’s request for extra tickets to the 1983 final, legend has it, had been brusquely turned down by the Marylebone Cricket Club.
The BCCI was at the time the dowdiest and dustiest of bureaucracies. Created under the Societies Registration Act of 1940, its secretariat was located in drab quarters at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium, while its logo was a derivation of the Order of the Star of India, India’s highest order of chivalry during the days of the Raj. Administrative expertise was at a premium, cricket competence almost non-existent. As Dilip Doshi wrote in his memoir Spin Punch (1991):
What is the background of the gentlemen who run cricket in India? It is a sad fact of life that not even a small percentage of them are cricketers of any stature. In fact, I would like to go to the other extreme and say that some of them have not even played cricket at school level. There is a sort of closed shop at the top, perpetuated by a system of self-preservation, where it is not possible for outsiders to crash into the establishment … There are thirty-odd members who vote for each other and elect the president, the secretary, the treasurer and the other minor functionaries. On many an occasion, such elections are known to have slipped totally out of control and been scenes for shameless horse trading to ensure continuance in power.
The BCCI was also almost permanently poor, its exchequer at the time of the World Cup containing barely Rs200 000. The night of India’s triumph at Lord’s, team members dined in a Wimpy Bar in Piccadilly. To reward Kapil Dev’s triumphant eleven, Salve had to ask Lata Mangeshkar, legendary singer of Bollywood themes, to stage a benefit concert at Delhi’s Indraprastha Stadium. But that storied day at Lord’s turned the BCCI into a bigger one-day cricket fan than Kerry Packer. In April 1984, India won the Rothmans Asia Cup against Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the inaugural tournament staged at the Sharjah Cricket Association Stadium in the United Arab Emirates. Over the next twenty years, this brainchild of a cricket-crazy construction magnate, Abdulrahman Bukhatir, would host more than 200 one-day internationals before audiences chiefly composed of expatriate Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan remittance workers.
One-day cricket’s eastward shift was confirmed in July 1984 at a meeting of the ICC when a handsome bid from PILCOM, a consortium representing India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and bankrolled mainly by Dhirajlal Ambani’s textile giant, Reliance Industries, wrested from England the right to hold the World Cup. In financial terms, this was not a Herculean effort: the inaugural World Cup had reaped just £100 000 in toto from media rights, sponsorship and ticket sales. But as a geopolitical shift, it was profound. Although Salve received much of the credit, rising shortly to become Gandhi’s minister for power, the bid’s real mastermind was his companion Jagmohan Dalmiya, secretary of the Cricket Association of Bengal. A Marwari from Calcutta who had taken over his family’s construction business at the age of nineteen, he was a disciple of the free market in a country still mired in Gandhian socialism, protectionism and the so-called ‘Licence Raj’; Bengal’s chief minister, Jyoti Basu, was then an unreconstructed communist. Dalmiya was no less scornful of the ICC, as he later told Nalin Mehta: ‘They were a corrupt kind of a set-up … basically it was England, Australia and New Zealand. India and Pakistan were just two members. South Africa was in exile at that time. It was more a colony or more a small kind of a club, and we felt it was necessary to change all that’.
TV or Not TV
The Cup was a triumph, played out in September 1987 before capacity crowds. One-day cricket’s conquest of India was complete. When the world-champion West Indies commenced a five-Test series in India soon after, the BCCI unilaterally reduced the series to four, in order to add two further one-day internationals to a previously arranged five: India has not staged a five-Test series since.
Yet the real money—television money—remained out of reach. For India’s airwaves were ruled by the national broadcaster, Doordarshan, which did not merely pay nothing for its antiquated coverage of international cricket but actually charged for its services under antique legislation: the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, granting India’s government ‘the exclusive privilege of establishing, maintaining and working telegraphs’.
As had players in other countries in the late 1970s, precipitating Kerry Packer’s insurgency, Indian players were growing restless. Kapil Dev’s team had worn the logos of their own sponsors during the World Cup, rather than that of Reliance; five wore the logo of the tobacco giant Wills, while others advertised soft drink companies and television manufacturers. The embarrassed BCCI cracked down on logos after the tournament ended, then in August 1989 tried imposing a year’s suspension on the country’s six best players—Kapil Dev, Dilip Vengsarkar, Ravi Shastri, Mohammed Azharuddin, Arun Lal and Kiran More—for the misdemeanour of playing some exhibition matches in North America while returning from a Caribbean tour. Like the boards of England and Australia faced by Packer, the BCCI could not make the ban stick, and a public relations fiasco ensued: the draconian punishment was successfully challenged in the Supreme Court, having already failed in the court of public opinion.
Worst of all, the country was in financial turmoil. As 1990 unfolded, India’s fixed exchange-rate regime, high taxes and high tariffs precipitated a balance of payments blow-out. After intervention by the International Monetary Fund, the chastened Congress Party government of PV Narasimha Rao mandated a technocrat, Manmohan Singh, to liberalise aspects of the economy, simplifying foreign direct investment, privatising state-owned enterprises and generally ensuring against repetition of the humiliation. Dalmiya, now the BCCI’s secretary, with support from allies like Inderjit Singh Bindra from the Punjab Cricket Association and Niranjan Shah of the Saurashtra Cricket Association, won a parallel mandate from BCCI president Madhavrao Scindia: to break Doordarshan’s feudal control over cricket broadcasting.
First, taking advantage of the new foreign investment dispensations, the BCCI sold television rights to the 1992–93 England tour of India to a foreigner: Trans World International, a subsidiary of IMG. To fulfil its charter, Doordarshan actually had to pay TWI US$1 million. Given the telephone number figures now commonplace in Indian cricket, the US$600 000 benefit to the BCCI seems tiny, but Dalmiya used it as a springboard for another Subcontinental bid for the World Cup, with revenue forecasts predicated on a substantial sum from television. After a thirteen-hour battle royale at Lord’s, the ICC consented, England giving way. India, in fact, achieved even more than it bargained for, because Dalmiya’s campaign for change at the ICC was likewise promoted: it was as a result of this showdown that the body was provided with its first full-time secretariat, specifically chairman Sir Clyde Walcott of the West Indies and chief executive David Richards of Australia.
The role of television in this second evincing of Eastern power made it more significant than the first. Western journalists began writing for the first time of an ‘Asian bloc’ involving India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and later Bangladesh—they formed a force within a force, the Asian Cricket Council. But the results for television would be as far-reaching as they were for cricket.
Initially it was thought that TWI would be PILCOM’s television partner. Symbolically, however, the successful bidder was a Connecticut-based Indian expatriate, Mark Mascarenhas, who had left Bangalore in 1976 to study, but whose patriotism had been wakened by the signs of economic reform in his homeland. His production company, WorldTel, offered a knockout US$10 million in August 1993, planning to offset the costs by breaking the rights up and onselling them to other offshore broadcasters. He had obtained a bargain, almost making his money back with his first two sales, to TVNZ and British cable consortium CPP-I. But Mascarenhas still had a gauntlet to run.
In November 1993, Dalmiya’s Cricket Association of Bengal was to celebrate its diamond jubilee by hosting a one-day tournament involving India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa called the Hero Cup. Emulating the BCCI, it had sold the rights to TWI, which agreed to provide coverage for Rupert Murdoch’s newly acquired Hong Kong–based Star TV. Suddenly, Doordarshan’s director-general, Rathikant Basu, barged into Calcutta’s Supreme Court brandishing the 109-year-old Telegraph Act. Basu, with the backing of the information and broadcasting minister, KP Singh Deo, argued that the uplink of a video signal to a foreign organisation jeopardised national security, apprehensions having been inflamed by an angry phase in India’s perennial wranglings with Pakistan over Kashmir: Indian troops were at the time laying bloody siege to Hazratbal, the disputed territory’s holiest Muslim shrine.
It was a clash between Indias old and new. Old India used methods crude but effective. Doordarshan imposed a radio and television blackout on the Hero Cup; customs officials impounded TWI’s equipment on arrival. New India placed the burden on government to walk its talk. CR Irani of the Statesman commented acidly: ‘The next time Mr Narasimha Rao and Mr Jyoti Basu go round the world seeking investments and much else besides, they must expect to be asked some searching questions’. Actually, it didn’t take that long. Some of the most insistent inquiries came from the South Africans, recently rehabilitated in international cricket but now deprived of watching their team on television, and wondering aloud whether they had been mistaken to support the BCCI’s World Cup bid: even Nelson Mandela took an interest. In a letter, Mascarenhas advised board president Bindra of the stakes: ‘In my opinion irreversible damage has already been done. We look to the Board to take all steps necessary to rectify the situation before it jeopardises the 1996 World Cup and the investments of all involved, and does lasting harm to India as a sponsor of major sporting events’. Bindra acknowledged: ‘If there is no worldwide television coverage [of the World Cup] … the BCCI will go bankrupt’.
Indian cricket has a flair for both labyrinthine controversies and supple solutions. Satisfying both the economic rationalists and the economic nationalists, Mascarenhas did a deal with Doordarshan’s Basu. Reassured, networks all round the globe signed up to WorldTel’s feed: Pakistan’s PTV, South Africa’s SABC, Bangladesh’s BTV, Murdoch’s Star TV through Hong Kong and Packer’s newly reacquired Nine Network in Australia. Yet the battle was only half-won, for Bindra shortly further incurred Doordarshan’s ire by negotiating a US$30 million, five-year deal for the rights to broadcast Indian cricket with TWI and a new player, ESPN, the sports cable arm of Capital Cities/ABC of the United States—another controversial foreign incursion.
‘Who created Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev?’ Basu fumed. ‘Doordarshan has been in the forefront of telecasting cricket Tests and one-day internationals.’ So BCCI’s TWI/ESPN deal also ended up in the Supreme Court, with momentous results in February 1995 when Justices Sawant, Mohan and Reddy established three landmark principles: that India’s airwaves were public property; that the right to impart and receive information was a species of freedom of expression guaranteed by the constitution; and that the government should set up an independent public authority to control Indian broadcasting: what became Prasar Bharti, or the Broadcasting Corporation of India, created in November 1997. Doordarshan responded petulantly, so uncooperative as a partner during the World Cup that it was also sued by WorldTel in the Delhi High Court. But long before an out-of-court settlement was reached a week before the World Cup’s first match, it was clear that Doordarshan had sustained an innings defeat, as Basu himself recognised a few months later when he joined Star TV.
In the second half of the 1990s, satellite television swept India, the landscape stomped by overlapping footprints of the likes of ESPN, Star TV, Subhash Chandra Goel’s Zee Television, Abdulrahman Bukhatir’s Ten Sports and Harish Thiwani’s Nimbus Communications. It was a combination of high technology and low: the satellite far above, and below, the foot-slogging local cable operator who set up a dish and distributed the satellite signals for a fee. Television audiences, of course, grew massively, if never precisely, because the ramshackle terrestrial arrangements militated against exact ratings figures.
It was a revolution—and it was cricket’s doing. What the government had failed to bring about, despite all its reformist rhetoric, the game had helped accomplish. As Boria Majumdar notes in Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom (2004), liberalisation of the Indian broadcast media ‘will forever remain a gift of Indian cricket to the Indian nation’—a gift, moreover, that keeps on giving, for India now has 125 24-hour television news services and more than 1100 TV channels, not to mention a staggering 68 000 newspapers.
All the same, it could hardly be described as an openhanded gift, being, as it increasingly was, a gift of itself. One-day internationals in India, massively popular, reaching audiences of up to 400 million, and hugely profitable, with the capacity to expose a corporate name up to 350 times, went forth and multiplied. In 1980s America, Bruce Springsteen sang famously of ‘57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)’; in 1990s India, this was varied to ‘57 Channels and Nothin’ On but Cricket’.
The BCCI-led PILCOM faced one more challenge in hosting the 1996 World Cup. During the summer of 1995–96, Australia had received Cup co-host Sri Lanka and played them in an ill-tempered series, ending with the visitors publicly refusing to congratulate members of the home side. Days later, Tamil Tiger guerrillas drove a truck filled with explosives through the entrance of the Central Bank building in downtown Colombo, killing eighty-one and injuring 1000—a block from the Taj Sumadra Hotel, where the Australian team were due to stay during the opening match of the tournament. The players, who had already received threats from irate Sri Lankans, agreed with the Australian Cricket Board that security assurances were insufficient and forfeited the game. Former board chairman Malcolm Gray was sent to an ICC meeting at Calcutta’s Taj Bengal Hotel to defend the decision, a move with profound implications.
Anyway they [Dalmiya and Bindra] just shouted at us all morning. Called us cowards, called us racists. Threatened us with everything they could think of. We broke for lunch and hadn’t moved an inch. After lunch they started again. Bindra had this incredibly loud voice and he just yelled. I finally said: ‘Bindra. I’m sick of you yelling. I can yell too and I’m going to yell now’. So I did.
The tournament was a turning point in cricket’s economics. For one thing, it was a huge financial success: the naming rights alone, sold to tobacco giant Wills, were worth US$12 million. For another, it was organised and won by the Subcontinent: in the final at Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium, the Australians slumped to an apparently karmic defeat against their recent nemesis Sri Lanka. Cricket’s geopolitics were also further changed, for Dalmiya emerged with a sense of manifest destiny. He soon made clear his aspirations to succeed Walcott as chairman of the ICC, in opposition to the candidate favoured by England, Australia and New Zealand: Malcolm Gray.
The patrician Gray, long groomed for high cricket office, arrived in London with colleagues Denis Rogers and Graham Halbish in July 1996 to find his candidacy in unexpected turmoil, the ICC’s then nine full and twenty-two associate members exquisitely split. The vote was thrown into further disarray by the sudden candidature of South Africa’s Krish Mackerdhuj, and again when he withdrew by the imprecision of the ICC’s constitution and the enigmatic personality of Mackerdhuj’s countryman Ali Bacher. The scenario that unfolded is related by Bacher’s biographer Rodney Hartman.
On the basis of a simple majority, Dalmiya would have won because he had the support of the smaller associate members of the ICC. What he did not have was majority support of the Test-playing nations, many of whom were nervous of this ambitious and dogmatic man heading up world cricket at a time when east-west relations were clearly strained. Amazingly, the rules of the ICC were unclear on the actual voting process but Dalmiya, who had enlisted a team of lawyers to assist him in his bid, insisted that a simple majority was the only requirement. Walcott, however, had the final say when he ruled that a two-thirds majority of the nine Test-playing nations was needed …
When Mackerdhuj withdrew from the ballot, Gray was confident that South Africa’s vote would gain him the presidency [sic]. He needed six votes and he was already assured of four from West Indies, England, New Zealand and Australia. He believed that South Africa … would go with him and take Zimbabwe with them. Dalmiya had the votes of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India so, even if South Africa and Zimbabwe sided with him, he still would not have the required six votes. He simply could not win. Ali recalls the tense meeting: ‘The mood in world cricket at that time just wasn’t right to have a winner. There were concerns about an east-west split in the game.’
South Africa abstained, deadlocking the vote. To undo this Gordian knot, Sir John Anderson of New Zealand Cricket was commissioned to devise a new constitution involving a three-year presidency assigned to a member country on a rotating basis, with policy and direction vested in an executive board including representatives of all nine Test nations and three associates. Denis Rogers sealed the deal at the ICC’s special meeting in Kuala Lumpur in March 1997 with a tactful concession, agreeing that Dalmiya could take first turn at the presidency if Gray was guaranteed the second, ‘because we were never going to get Gray through the first time’.
Bringing to the ICC his successful BCCI formula, Dalmiya did indeed bring about a financial revolution, taking over as president of an entity with barely US$30 000 in the bank, and plenishing its coffers with US$20 million from a knockout tournament, the Wills International Cup, staged in Dhaka in October 1998.
Attending the event, Wisden editor Matthew Engel noted the tightening knit of cricket and celebrity on the Subcontinent: ‘Sachin Tendulkar seemed ubiquitous: on the field he played the innings of the week … and purveyed his mixed-up offies and leggies with growing confidence; off the field, he seemed to be smiling winsomely in every TV advert’. That was the work of Dalmiya’s confederate at WorldTel—burly, bearded Mascarenhas. Glimpsing Tendulkar first during the Hero Cup, he had induced Indian cricket’s wunderkind to become his client in a five-year deal worth about US$6 million. When Tendulkar appeared in Pepsi commercials alongside Bollywood luminaries like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachhan, it confirmed what was becoming a commonplace sentiment: that cricket knew no Indian rival as a star vehicle.
Dalmiya’s big-money plans now fructified. In June 1999, the BCCI signed a five-year deal with Doordarshan worth almost US$60 million. A year later, the ICC voted to appoint World Sport Group as vendor of commercial rights to its next two World Cups, three other international one-day tournaments and sundry other events. The minimum guarantee was an extraordinary US$550 million. Even more extraordinarily, it was, for the first time, divided equitably: full members who had received about US$500 000 for playing the 1996 World Cup would each receive about US$10 million for playing the 2007 World Cup.
Dalmiya, however, also brought to the ICC a BCCI modus operandi, more politics than diplomacy, more deal-doing than actual administration, inevitably riling conservative peers from England and Australia by seeming preoccupied with the bottom line. Then there were the rumours around Dalmiya himself, and his relationship with Mascarenhas: the deal between the BCCI, WorldTel and Doordarshan on the Wills International Cup was subjected to one of Prasar Bharti’s first investigations.
Worst of all, Dalmiya was slow to grasp the enormity of match-fixing, demanding that journalists cease efforts to ‘malign the name of Indian cricket for the sake of a juicy story’, perhaps loath to admit that the surfeit of one-day cricket for which he was partly responsible had been a precondition of corruption. The BCCI had received a steady stream of intelligence about match-fixing during Dalmiya’s secretaryship. Suspicion fell in particular on India’s captain, Mohammed Azharuddin, who had embraced cricket celebrity by leaving his wife for Bollywood star Sangeeta Bijlani, and chased the lifestyle to go with it: in the course of two years, it transpired, he had been paid almost US$300 000 by bookmaker Mukesh Gupta for various services rendered.
Bindra’s persistent questioning about match-fixing enraged Dalmiya, and annoyed his colleagues also—they withheld grants to the Punjab Cricket Association in retaliation for his outspokenness. In the celebrated secret tapes compiled by Tehelka, the antagonists were captured in full spate. Dalmiya complained of no respect:
I have served cricket at the cost of my family. At the cost of my business. Let anybody in this world come out and say, ‘Bloody, you are a culprit!’ God has given me enough. After sacrificing so much for the game, what return am I getting? … When the elections happened [at the ICC], I had to fight to be elected. Now the entire ICC is giving me respect. But I don’t get any support here in my country.
Bindra complained of no action: ‘We just have to take them on … I am going the whole hog. I am not going to spare them … Obviously Dalmiya is mixed up because he never brought it to my notice at all’.
In April 2000, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation stumbled on a telephone conversation between South African captain Hansie Cronje and bookmaker Sanjay Chawla. The lid was off. When the CBI presented its report, it was scathing about the BCCI:
The BCCI has been the single biggest beneficiary of the enormous commercial success of the sport. It is a matter of record that the BCCI earns substantial sums from media exposure of the game—which media exposure is in fact responsible for the qualitative change that has come about in the entire scenario. It would be the elementary duty of anyone purporting to be the apex regulatory body of the sport, to keep a close watch on the performance of the team and to thoroughly investigate into the slightest gossip, leave alone suspicion, of any malpractice.
For the ICC’s erstwhile president, however, the consequences were minimal. The BCCI haughtily dismissed the CBI’s report as reflecting ‘their disregard for the glorious history of the board and its excellent work over the years’. In September 2001, Dalmiya smoothly displaced the locum he had left in charge of the BCCI, Chennai-based industrialist AC Muthiah, with the help of a new ally, Ranbir Singh Mahendra of the Haryana Cricket Association, thereby also sidelining his former friend Bindra. He then set about applying the BCCI’s growing financial heft for political advantage, a strategy gilded by India’s on-field successes under captain Sourav Ganguly and coach John Wright. It was a future into which the BCCI marched briskly backwards.
Pawar without Glory
Wright’s Indian Summers (2006) is an invaluable glimpse of the BCCI at work, in the cramped quarters at Wankhede Stadium that then lurked behind an antique tin sign.
The BCCI is an extraordinary organization. It’s run by a handful of people who often make bewildering decisions and don’t give a hoot what the outside world thinks of them. The staff are delightful and amazingly loyal—one of them told a local paper he hadn’t had a raise for 35 years. Although the BCCI generates a major proportion of cricket’s total revenues, its office in Mumbai has concrete floors and a toilet that requires key access. I reckon those ramshackle surroundings are the greatest feat of camouflage since a wolf put on sheep’s clothing.
At the time Wright took over, the BCCI’s inventory of team gear featured three baseball mitts, thirty cones and three crooked blue plastic stumps. He had no bowling coach, no fitness trainer and at first not even a team manager: Wright was expected to do that job, to handle travel arrangements and organise team appearances, himself. The selection process was hopelessly politicised. There were five selectors, each representing a geographic zone, each doing his best to serve that zone’s interest. ‘If their boys weren’t picked,’ Wright noted, ‘they tended to cross their arms, clam up and take no further part in the meeting’. The scheduling followed a strict rotation process among nine test and twenty-four one-day international venues, so that travel arrangements were chaotic. The BCCI functionaries appointed to accompany the team on the Buggins’ Turn principle were, according to Wright, time servers and worse.
The worst was the bloke who had a misguided confidence in his understanding of the game and was itching to get involved in the coaching. There was Colonel Sharma, who waved his handkerchief every time we got a wicket and considered himself a yoga expert, so much that we once had to let him take the warm-up. There was a gentleman who handed out the meal allowance in the dark so that it was hard to count, and another who nicked the players’ official shirts. There was the manager who unilaterally changed the departure time for what would be a full day’s traveling, with the upshot that half the team was on the bus and the rest were still in bed … and at the end of the series he made me return all the white practice balls. One guy used to slip a sheet listing the scores of players from his region under my door and another managed to lose the entire party’s meal allowance money for the last two days of a tour. Just as well aircraft meals are free.
Dalmiya was also a micro-manager, happy to dish out advice based on a minimum of cricket knowledge. He essentially ran the BCCI from the office of his construction company in Calcutta with the help of two personal assistants, without reference to board secretary Niranjan Shah. Fortunately for Wright, Dalmiya was more concerned with India’s rivals off the field than on, acting to strengthen the BCCI’s bilateral ties and weaken its multilateral ones. Cricket relations were restored with Pakistan five years after the Kargil War, while Dalmiya also conceived the Afro-Asia Cup, a three-stage competition between an Asian XI (chosen from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and an African XI (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya), as a means of spreading Indian television largesse, the rights to the event being bought by another new player, Nimbus Communications. At the same time, he baited the ICC’s new chief executive, Malcolm Speed from Australia, at every opportunity, whether in response to referee Mike Denness’ disciplinarianism in South Africa, or commercial restrictions placed on Indian players at the 2002 Champions Trophy and 2003 World Cup.
In the eyes of England and Australia especially, Dalmiya had become a veritable hobgoblin of mischief: Wright heard another administrator describe him as ‘a cricket terrorist’. In fact, he had also been using up the residue of goodwill towards him in India, and the death of Mascarenhas in a car accident in January 2002 cost him a close friend and important ally. As Tendulkar’s agent, Mascarenhas had provided Dalmiya with a link to India’s greatest player, and richest media property. Now there loomed formidable new political presences in the 2001 elections of two former chief ministers of their states: Lalu Prasad Yadav at the Bihar Cricket Association and Sharad Pawar at the Mumbai Cricket Association.
Pawar, formerly defence minister to Narasimha Rao, was especially formidable. The so-called ‘King of Maharashtra’ was no respecter of persons, having been expelled from the Congress Party for disputing the succession to leadership of Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian-born widow Sonia, and having usurped widely respected former Test captain Ajit Wadekar to take cricket power in Mumbai. Four months after his so-called Nationalist Congress Party was welcomed into Manmohan Singh’s coalition administration, the so-called United Progressive Alliance, he forged a cricket alliance with Bindra. Dalmiya was seeking the role of the BCCI’s patron-in-chief and to install Mahendra as president; against Pawar, their ticket barely survived. Pawar’s Maharashtra loyalists exacted revenge by having a pitch prepared in Nagpur to favour the visiting Australian seamers, who took sixteen wickets in routing the home side.
Indian cricket’s headline story in 2005 was the feud between captain Ganguly and new coach Greg Chappell; it was echoed by the leadership struggle between Dalmiya and Pawar, who couched his bid for the presidency in terms of India’s new Right to Information Act. While Chappell v Ganguly had a couple of years to run, Dalmiya v Pawar was resolved more quickly. Despite Mahendra’s best efforts to defer the BCCI elections, Pawar won them comfortably, promising a new broom at the BCCI in a ‘vision statement’:
Never, perhaps, in the history of the Indian cricket board an election has aroused so much interest and expectation from the vast majority of the game’s fans in the country as the recent one has. Some of the happenings during the last few years have grievously dented the board’s image. Our first priority should be to restore its pristine glory by creating confidence among the followers of the game that the board is indeed a sincere custodian of Indian cricket. Frankly the question being asked is, as the richest body in world cricket, has it fulfilled its obligations towards the players and paying public? For that we all need to introspect and touch our hearts before saying ‘yes, we have’.
As a premier national sports body, the board had been a model for all others sports organizations, but of late it has invited scorn from the public. In a fast paced world driven by market forces, we have to gear up to meet the ever increasing challenges and aspirations of a cricket-crazy nation. When the country is getting excited about the Right to Information Act, the Board is being ridiculed for its lack of transparency. Unless we believe in the free flow of information, particularly when millions and millions of rupees are involved, we are bound to be misunderstood. There can’t be a better start to the new-look board than resolve that everything we do from hereon will be transparent and in the game’s and public interest, be it election or allotting television rights or the team selection. The buzz word should be ‘Transparency’.
A buzzword is exactly what ‘transparency’ proved merely to be.
Twenty20 Hindsight
The BCCI devoted so much time to internecine blood-letting in the first five years of the new century that it nearly missed two developments fundamental to its market. The first was the shift on Indian television from cricket as game to cricket as lifestyle. Big as cricket had been in India in the twentieth century, its coverage had revolved principally around the telecasting of matches. You’d seen cricketers playing; you’d seen them in advertisements; you’d seen the odd one on the movie screen. This changed in 2000 with the coming of Sony Entertainment, which sought to leverage Indian rights it had acquired from WSG by basing a series of programmes on its new cricket-only SET Max channel around ‘brand ambassador’ Kapil Dev, who became in retirement even more ubiquitous than he had been on the cricket field. To host their coverage of the 2003 World Cup, Sony then hired Mandira Bedi, sudsiest of soap stars. The short-term result was a surge in female viewership: by the second week of the tournament, women accounted for 46 per cent of the audience. The long-term result was many more job opportunities for India’s soap stars.
By mid-decade, every news channel had at least one show devoted entirely to cricket, most of them several. Star News’ biggest show, for example, was the weekly Wah Cricket (Wow Cricket), while its most controversial, shown each evening during Pakistan’s tour of India in early 2005, was Match ke Mujrim (Criminal of the Match), where a kangaroo court presided over by Bishen Bedi (for the prosecution) and Syed Kirmani (for the defence) argued out the day’s worst player. The greatest star the trend made was Navjot Sidhu, who rode his celebrity from big-hitting batsman to motor-mouth pundit all the way to India’s Lower House (Lok Sabha), where he became the Bharatiya Janata Party member for Amritsar after the July 2004 general election. Around the Indian team, the atmosphere was one of constant adulation, temptation, demand and distraction. ‘Sometimes,’ noted Wright, ‘I felt trapped in a bubble of bullshit, where media and public perception, public relations, commercial imperatives and board politics seemed to matter more than actual performance’.
The other shift was in cricket itself, and began far away, in a realm from which Indians thought they had nothing further to learn. Forty years after England had introduced its counties to one-day cricket, it sold them on an even-briefer version of the game. Where other efforts to winnow cricket away, like Super 8s in Australia and Cricket Max in New Zealand, had petered out, Twenty20 caught on within weeks of the competition’s unsuperstitious unveiling on Friday 13 June 2003: sixteen of the forty-six matches were sellouts, and counties obtained their biggest crowds at Lord’s and Old Trafford in fifty years.
The tournament was the brainchild of Stuart Robertson, the England Cricket Board’s marketing director, who had persuaded Channel 4 to bankroll £250 000 of market research on cricket crowds, which over the preceding five years had declined 17 per cent. Robertson found that cricket’s audience at domestic level had dwindled to a core of white, middle-aged males. Twenty20 was designed specifically to entice cricket ‘tolerators’, amid an atmosphere of non-stop carnival, including live bands and children’s entertainment; it struck, to quote Matthew Engel, ‘the motherlode of public affection for cricket that runs just below the surface crust of apparent indifference’.
At around the same time, an apparently munificent Texan entrepreneur, Allen Stanford, was mutually mourning Caribbean cricket with West Indian past master Michael Holding. What could they do? ‘My initial thought was just to do anything to give the West Indies a shot in the arm’, Stanford recalled. ‘But this thing was a lot more successful than we thought.’ This ‘thing’ was a domestic Twenty20 tournament in July 2006, again involving eye-catching entertainments, with an emphasis, as Tony Cozier noted, on the sponsor:
It was staged entirely in Antigua, where part of Stanford’s global financial operations is based, at the manicured, purpose-built Stanford Cricket Ground in the Stanford Complex, adjacent to the airport, amid Stanford banks, offices, restaurants and a newspaper plant. The advertising boards proclaimed only Stanford’s diverse empire, including two airlines which transported players and officials. Cheerful, flag-waving children turned out under the lights; the majority were women and children, a new fan base.
Among those who quickly intuited that the exercise was more about Stanford than cricket was Holding: ‘I am not going to be involved in a farce. He is telling people in the Caribbean that he wants to revive West Indian cricket but how is a week of Twenty20 cricket in Antigua going to do that?’ The real resistance to Twenty20 at this stage, however, was not from purists, but from the guardians of the status quo ante, chief among them BCCI president Pawar, who argued that Twenty20 ‘dilutes the importance of international cricket’; it might also, of course, dilute the money to be earned from domestic television rights, for which through 2005 and 2006 the BCCI was holding another typically unruly but potentially lucrative auction. ‘Twenty20?’ Niranjan Shah was heard to ask at an ICC executive board meeting. ‘Why not ten-ten or five-five or one-one?’
Because of the BCCI’s ambivalence, the ICC hastened slowly: the first Twenty20 international was not held until February 2005; the first in Australia not until January 2006. And rather than throw in their lot with the new format, the BCCI pressed the ICC to tinker with fifty-over cricket, introducing new rules and new gimmicks, although without shortening the game and thereby reducing its naturally occurring advertising opportunities. The ICC itself was absorbed in the effort, initiated by its Pakistani chairman Ehsan Mani, of removing itself to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates as a tax minimisation measure, a relocation that finally took place in August 2005. The BCCI’s conservatism, meanwhile, was indicative of an inner malaise.
The year 2006 began with an incident almost comical. Pawar and his new colleagues caucused in New Delhi with representatives of the boards of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to finalise their bid for the 2011 World Cup, due to be presented to the ICC in Dubai the following week. Only, there was no bid. As the Pakistan Cricket Board’s Sharayar Khan recalls in his Shadows across the Playing Field (2009):
To my horror, the BCCI had not completed its preparations for our joint bid which entailed filing detailed and copious forms that ICC had sent out to all the countries bidding for the World Cup. There was consternation in the ranks when we—Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan—pointed out that our joint bid was bound to hit the rocks because India had not remotely completed the data provided by the ICC. Sharad Pawar was naturally deeply upset to learn of this potential disaster and ordered his secretary Niranjan Shah to sit up all night with his South Asian colleagues to complete the data.
Next morning I saw a bleary-eyed Salim Altaf, my chief executive, at breakfast. I enquired from him the results of the night vigil. He said, ‘I’m afraid the task could not be completed. We sat up with Niranjan Shah until 3am but then the effort collapsed because the Indian board simply did not have the factual data. I’m afraid our bid will be found to be non-compliant in Dubai’.
So much for ‘transparency’; opacity was now the order of the day. At the ICC executive board meeting in Dubai on 20 and 21 March, Pawar filibustered for all he was worth, pleading for an extension of time to finalise the bid on grounds that the Dalmiya regime had not surrendered the requisite information. To smooth ruffled feathers, Pawar promised Ray Mali of South Africa and Peter Chingoka of Zimbabwe that the Afro-Asia Cup, which he had wanted to kill, would continue; he also offered financial assistance to the permanently impecunious West Indies Cricket Board. Cricket Australia and New Zealand Cricket made a joint presentation generally agreed to be outstanding, but the BCCI and its partners obtained their month’s grace.
The other item for discussion was a mooted Twenty20 World Championship in South Africa the following year. India, still without a domestic Twenty20 competition, was reluctant to participate; Pakistan, having just held its first, was similarly hesitant. But the tournament badly needed their television audiences; as badly, indeed, as the BCCI-led consortium craved the 2011 World Cup. In a quid pro quo the following month, India and Pakistan agreed to grapple with Twenty20, and the other ICC members to award the World Cup to the Subcontinent. In truth, the commercial logic was compelling: the disparity between the value of television rights centred on India and on anywhere else was shortly emphasised by the resolution of the protracted BCCI auction, the result a five-year deal with Nimbus Communications worth US$612 million. Cricket also began hearing for the first time of the suave but searingly ambitious BCCI vice-president, Lalit Modi.
Cricket à la Modi
Lalit Modi grew up around money, from a family tobacco business, and power, from political connections. His grandfather, Rai Bahadur Gujarmal Modi, was close to Jawaharlal Nehru; his father, Krishna Kumar Modi, was a confidante of Rajiv Gandhi. He is a Marwari, like Dalmiya, like Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel magnate who has become Britain’s richest man, and like Harshad Mehta, the ‘Big Bull’ of the Bombay bourse, jailed for suckering the Indian elite in various stock market scams in the early 1990s: one panoramically offensive ethnic jest says that a Marwari can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scot and still make a margin.
Like Mascarenhas, Modi furthered his business education in the United States, at Duke University; he also broadened his life experiences in a brush with cocaine, narrowly escaping jail for being found in possession of 400 grams. On returning to India, he worked for subsidiaries of Philip Morris and Estée Lauder, then set about building the Modi Entertainment Network by distributing channels for Disney, then its associate ESPN, then Dubai-based Ten Sports and finally Paris-based Fashion TV. The pattern to these ventures was big plans, initial success, and usually a conclusion in court. More a serial entrepreneur than an industrialist, he also dabbled in property, state lotteries … and cricket.
Modi wasn’t much of a cricketer. ‘I was a batsman’, he once explained. ‘I wasn’t very good at it.’ But he understood cricket as the passé partout to India’s circles of influence. As early as 1995, a Modi Entertainment Network associate, Home Communication Network Ltd, registered seven city-based companies using the template ‘Indian Cricket League’—ICL-Bombay, ICL-Delhi, ICL-Calcutta, ICL-Bangalore, ICL-Hyderabad, ICL-Madras and ICL-Gwalior. The BCCI was not interested in the schemes of an upstart 31 year old.
Modi might now be identified with cricket’s shortest game, but he knew how to play a long one. The way to be heard, he reasoned, was to be an insider. His first attempt failed. He won election to the cricket association of the wealthy northern state of Himachal Pradesh in 1999, but resigned after a year, apparently at the request of the local chief minister, Prem Kumar Dhumal. Lesson learned, he arrived in Jaipur in October 2004 to oust the family oligarchy in charge of the Rajasthan Cricket Association led by construction magnate Kishore Rungta.
By this stage, according to an investigation by the Indian Express, Modi Entertainment Network was in straitened circumstances. ‘Employees in various offices, including Delhi, wouldn’t get their salaries for months on end’, a former employee told journalist Archna Shukla. ‘Most offices, except for the one in Mumbai, shut down eventually.’ You would not have known it: Modi based himself in the Prince’s Suite at the opulent Rambagh Palace Hotel. For in Jaipur, Modi had an advantage: Rajasthan’s chief minister, Vasundhara Raje Scindia of the BJP, was actually an old family friend. In building a substantial portfolio of local property interests, Modi seemed to enjoy an uncommonly smooth ride with government. Raje’s most important favour to Modi, however, was to push through a new statute, the Rajasthan Sports Act, whose effect was to dilute the Rungta voting base at the RCA. Modi campaigned stealthily; according to Outlook magazine, he caught opponents napping by initially using a false name, purporting to be ‘Lalit Kumar’ of Nagpur. It paid off: with assistance from an influential member of the Indian Administrative Service, Sanjay Dixit, Modi was elected in February 2005.
Now he was on the inside, Modi sought a patron at the BCCI, and found one in Bindra, who saw this quicksilver commercial mind as strengthening his anti-Dalmiya forces. Bindra took the unusual step of introducing his new protégé to local cricket media at a press conference during India’s Mohali Test against Pakistan in March 2005. ‘Cricket in India is a $2 billion a year market’, Modi told a bemused audience. ‘We are sitting on a gold mine. Our players should be paid on par with international footballers and NBA stars, in millions of dollars and not in measly rupees.’ Modi was duly on the right side of the barricades when Pawar finally bested Dalmiya, and carved out a niche as a corporate go-getter by selling the team sponsorship and apparel rights to Subrata Roy’s Sahara Group and Nike respectively for more than US$150 million. He endeared himself further to the new regime by denigrating the old: ‘[Under Dalmiya] there was no professionalism, they were not doing enough, there was no transparency. It was always ad-hocism … He [Dalmiya] had the golden opportunity to make a difference to Indian cricket and it’s amazing that a man of his calibre didn’t do anything that we are now’. Soon after, Dalmiya went from being merely patronised to actively persecuted: determined to extirpate his influence root and branch, the BCCI egged on challengers to him in his own stronghold.
Few events, in fact, have better demonstrated the twenty-first-century politicising of Indian cricket than the elections at the Cricket Association of Bengal in July 2006, when Bengal’s communist chief minister Buddadeb Bhattacharya, backed by Pawar, supported the campaign of local police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee against Dalmiya, who attracted the support of Bhattacharya’s predecessor, former mentor now antagonist Jyoti Basu, in cahoots with Congress Party enemies of Pawar. In a fascinating commentary on the election, Nalin Mehta notes:
All channels covered the polling live through the day and, at least three commissioned exit polls with professional agencies: Times Now with A.C. Nielson, Star Anando/Anand Bazar Patrika with MODE and Kolkata TV with IMG-MARG. All this, for a regional sports management association with a grand total of 120 voters. All national channels also conducted popular opinion polls, asking viewers to vote for their preferred victors through SMS messages. It had only been two weeks since India’s biggest single terrorist attack in two decades, the Mumbai train blasts on July 11 which claimed more than 200 lives but judging by the television coverage, it seemed as if the only thing that mattered that day was the president-ship of the Cricket Association of Bengal.
Historically, India’s cricket has never been so radically politicised as Pakistan’s. But Dalmiya’s fight for survival was only the most visible manifestation of changing times, brought about by cricket’s new prestige and wealth. By decade’s end, two-thirds of state asso ciations were ruled by politicians, like BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley, who also runs the Delhi & District Cricket Association, and his colleague and friend Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, who also runs the Gujarat Cricket Association or their proxies; the secretary of the governing council of the Congress Party, Rajeev Shukla, also became the BCCI’s vice-president and chief spokesman. The reasons were not far to seek. There’s no doubt that Pawar’s popularity as a man of cricket enabled him to brazen out two cor ruption scandals in his food and agriculture portfolio—the so-called stamp paper scam and the wheat import tender controversy. Nor is he the only Indian politician who has felt himself in need of favour-able publicity. In India’s Lok Sabha after the elections of May 2009, according to the service National Election Watch, there were ‘150 newly elected MPs who had criminal cases pending against them’.
This did not always suit Modi, a man with big plans whose aims were chiefly commercial: even now he was inside the BCCI rather than outside, progress was slow. Fascinated by the franchise-based ownerships structures popular in American sport, he revived his plan for a city-based fifty-over premier league in India. Interestingly, Mascarenhas had floated such an idea five years earlier: ‘I think if cricket really has to become a professional sport then it has to go in … the direction of the Premier League and be backed up by international competitions like the European Championships and the World Cup’. Bindra acted as an advocate for the scheme, stating publicly and prophetically: ‘We should start a league like the European soccer leagues. Build it around cities or states, and a fierce local following will develop. Invite international players. With the audiences in India, it can reach the level of European soccer. It can be bigger than international cricket’. But the state associations were averse to anything that might undermine their authority, and their capacity to distribute patronage. Foreign players? Private ownership? It all seemed rather racy.
Biding his time, Modi reverted to the issue of ICC commercial rights for 2007 to 2015, due to be sold in December 2006. He proposed a revolutionary idea: the BCCI would acquire the rights. ‘We are ready to pay top dollar for it’, he boasted. ‘Our money is as good as anybody else’s.’ This time the political obstacles were global. The ICC’s other members looked askance. Would Manchester United be an acceptable owner of the English Premier League’s commercial rights? Crisis portended until the ICC tabled legal opinions suggesting an irrevocable conflict of interest and, perhaps more importantly, ESPN-Star agreed to pay just over US$1 billion.
Nevertheless, Modi’s gambit won him golden opinions in India. Earlier in the year, Lakshmi Mittal’s eponymous steel giant had bid for Europe’s premier steelmaker, Arcelor. Arcelor’s haughty French chief executive, Guy Dolle, had caused outrage by dismissing Mittal Steel as ‘a company of Indians’ paying ‘monkey money’. India’s commerce and industry minster, Kamal Nath, had written a furious protest to the European Union’s trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, complaining that investors should not be ‘judged by the colour of their skin’ in ‘an era of globalisation, cross-border investment and liberalisation’; a humiliating climbdown was necessary.
The debate about the ICC’s commercial rights contained a similar dynamic. Speed gravely offended the BCCI by casting aspersions on its record. ‘I have an old-fashioned view’, he said. ‘I judge sports organisations on the basis of three things: one, how the team performs; two, how the board looks after its stakeholders in terms of facilities on the grounds; and three, how well they use resources like population to produce great cricketers’. Modi’s retort that you might not respect us but you must respect our money was timely and popular. ‘India has been subservient for 100 years’, he stated. ‘People are used to dictating terms to us. We’re just evening the playing field. And if it’s our turn to have some glory, so much the better.’
Modi’s dormant premier league plan was also about to gain an ally as vital as it was unintended: the conglomerate Essel Group, which had rushed to take advantage of the deregulation of Indian television after the BCCI’s showdown with Doordarshan, and whose Zee Television had become the first Indian-language satellite channel. Essel’s founder, Subhash Chandra Goel, was a perennially thwarted pursuer of broadcast rights to cricket, beaten for the ICC rights by WSG in 2000 and the BCCI rights by Nimbus in 2006. Now, like Kerry Packer in 1977, he envisioned a DIY solution, a cricket circuit made for a new Zee Television sports channel. Like Packer, too, he saw the future in an underexploited variant of the game: where Packer had been the first to glimpse cricket’s one-day future, Chandra was as much a fan of Twenty20 as the BCCI was not.
Challenges to official cricket’s monopoly are rare because the barriers to entry are so high—and such was Chandra’s experience after foreshadowing his plans in March 2007. The BCCI waged a scorched earth policy at home and abroad: local players were intimidated with talk of life bans; foreign players were discouraged by overseas boards on notice that the competition was actively disapproved of by India’s powers-that-be, and only superannuants like Brian Lara, Chris Cairns and Jason Gillespie were prepared to sign on; one of its chief recruiting agents, Kapil Dev, was sacked from his post at the National Cricket Academy in August 2007.
Nonetheless, a player pool of 135 was assembled, and the city-based clubs were rolled out: the Chandigarh Lions, Chennai Superstars, Delhi Giants, Hyderabad Heroes, Kolkata Tigers and Mumbai Champs. And although these entities were not franchises, the structure bore an eerie resemblance to Modi’s own premier league brainchild. Chandra even used the same rubric: Indian Cricket League. No incentive could have been more effective in promoting Modi’s vision than the possibility of someone else implementing it.
By the time the first ICL took place in December 2007, the Indian landscape had been transformed by two other events, both deeply ironic. In the World Cup in March 2007 in the West Indies, India, led by the self-effacing veteran Rahul Dravid, lost in short order to Bangladesh and then to Sri Lanka and left early; Pakistan joined them by the wayside, Ireland their improbable conquerors. One-day cricket was suddenly discredited, at least in the eyes of those broadcasters, sponsors and advertisers on the Subcontinent who had simply assumed the teams’ passage through to the Super Eights, but whose profits now disappeared, as it were, in the Bermuda Triangle. Indians turn cricket on with glee, but are apt to turn it off in disgust. The only beneficiary of India’s failure in the Caribbean was Lalit Modi, an important advantage of whose premier league idea was now seen more clearly. How do you ensure Indian participation all the way through a tournament? Compose it of only Indian sides.
It was in July that Modi had his famous ‘chat over a cup of tea’ at Wimbledon with Andrew Wildblood, senior vice-president of IMG, about reviving his premier league idea. Within a month, IMG had produced the outline of a competition between eight city-based franchises involving fifty-nine Twenty20 matches all taking place during primetime evening viewing hours. Because the services of international players would be sought, the scheme was introduced to representatives of Cricket Australia and Cricket South Africa. In fact, Cricket Australia had had its own brainwave of brevity: a championship involving the winners of the different domestic Twenty20 tournaments, which chief executive James Sutherland and chairman Creagh O’Connor introduced to Modi, Bindra and Pawar at the home of the last in Delhi.
A tide had come in the affairs of the BCCI. On 13 September, the BCCI foreshadowed not one but two Twenty20 tournaments: an Indian Premier League scheduled for April 2008 involving eight city-based franchise teams, and an International Champions League featuring the top three teams from this IPL and the top two from domestic Twenty20 tournaments in England, Pakistan, South Africa and Australia, scheduled for October 2008. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble, Glenn McGrath and Stephen Fleming were all present for the press conference in Delhi, but they were essentially scenery. Modi was the star—and also, of course, the potential scapegoat if matters went awry. But he was about to have a stroke of luck—six strokes, to be exact. Six days later, Yuvraj Singh hit Stuart Broad for six sixes in the nineteenth over of India’s game against England in Durban in the World Twenty20. These were shots that echoed round the world: the tournament in which the BCCI had been such a reluctant participant suddenly became a national obsession. India, led now by latter-day matinee idol MS Dhoni, had a few days earlier beaten Pakistan in a bowl-out on the same ground to resolve a tie; within five days they would beat favourite Australia, then Pakistan again to take the trophy. The final at Wanderers was comparable in historical significance to the World Cup final twenty-four years earlier. Now the televisions in India stayed on, and for weeks afterwards. Fifty-over cricket was suddenly passé and twenty-over cricket hot to the point of radioactivity, as India embraced the game of which it was now the unlikely world champion.
For his part, Modi has always objected to the idea that his was a response to Subhash Chandra’s attraction: ‘This is not a knee-jerk reaction to any tournament but a project we have been working on for two years’. But if the tournaments were not about reacting to ICL, they were certainly about obliterating it. When the inaugural ICL season of fifteen games in seventeen days began in December at Tau Devi Lal Stadium, a small ground in Chandigarh leased from the government of Haryana, it lacked everything the BCCI had, including India’s new Twenty20 heroes. Certainly it was altogether overshadowed by events now threatening to rip the game apart.
Billion-Dollar Babies
When Australia hosted India at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 2 to 6 January 2008, all the preconditions existed of a serious skirmish. Anil Kumble’s Indians were strung to concert pitch, having just successfully hosted Pakistan for the first time in almost thirty years. Ricky Ponting’s Australians, irked by Indian Twenty20 triumphalism on their recent one-day tour of the country, had meted out a retaliatory thrashing in the Boxing Day Test. Poor umpiring, worse behaviour, inept refereeing and inflammatory coverage of events in both countries duly turned Bhajigate into one of the bitterest on-field controversies in recent memory.
Yet these were not the events rending cricket asunder. Rather were they two announcements passing, at least in Australia, almost without notice, as Bhajigate raged: the BCCI statement on 15 January 2008 that Sony Entertainment/WSG had acquired the rights to the IPL for more than US$1 billion, and the BCCI statement on 24 January that the winning bids for the league’s eight city franchises had raised US$723.59 million. In a sense, the success of the IPL was already guaranteed: nothing succeeding like success, naming rights were sold soon after to real-estate firm DLF Universal for US$50 million over five years, and associate sponsorships worth US$120 million were agreed with Hero Honda, Citibank and Vodafone.
The broadcasting rights and franchise sales may be Modi’s greatest coups, for the circumstances of neither were propitious. As regards the former, several key players were out of the running: ESPN-Star had bought the ICC rights, Nimbus the Indian rights, and Zee was embroiled in ICL; Sony CEO Kunal Dasgupta came through for Modi, an old friend, just when he was needed. And where the franchises were concerned, big industrial presences like Tata, Hero and the Mittal group had held aloof from the untested concept. But Modi’s search for franchisees, in cahoots with IMG and direct marketing firm Direxions Marketing Solutions, had turned up an impressive mix of blue-chip and blue-sky investors.
Five franchisees were chiefly commercial, albeit with strong sporting links. Mukesh Ambani of family-owned Reliance Industries, whose father had sponsored the 1987 World Cup, acquired the Mumbai Indians for US$111.9 million. Vijay Mallya of family-owned UB, whose Kingfisher beer empire already owned a Formula One team, football team and thoroughbred stable, acquired the Bangalore Royal Challengers for US$111.6 million. Media baron T Venkattram Reddy, who controls Deccan Chronicle Holdings, forked out US$107 million for the Deccan Chargers. Industrialist Narayanaswami Srinivasan led Indian Cements into the US$91.9 million purchase of the Chennai Super Kings. And GM Rao’s infrastructure conglomerate GMR backed the US$84 million acquisition of the Delhi Daredevils.
Then came the glamour. GMR’s bid was fronted by Bollywood star Akshay Kumar, and two other franchises laid it on even thicker. Bollywood starlet Preity Zinta fronted the US$76 million bid involving her businessman boyfriend, Ness Wadia, and investors Mohit Burman and Karan Paul, for Kings XI Punjab; Shah Rukh Khan, blockbuster maker extraordinaire, put his Red Chillies Entertainment on the line for US$75 million in buying the Kolkata Knight Riders. Perhaps most intriguing of all was Emerging Media, run from London by Manoj Badale and associated with Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan, who under the name Investors in Cricket had promoted ventures like a reality television talent search called Cricket Star with actress Shilpa Shetty. The Rajasthan Royals were acquired for a cut-down US$67 million, and recruited the only foreign captain in Shane Warne; Shetty, brand ambassador for the franchise, was later announced to have acquired a minority stake with her husband, Raj Kundra.
For the last in particular but all in general, the business proposition was disarmingly attractive. The franchises stood to receive 60 per cent of the sponsorship revenues in the first ten years, and 80 per cent of the television revenues after production costs in the first two years, scaling down slightly thereafter. The advertising benefits were less quantifiable, but arguably no less real: Royal Challengers was named for UB’s whisky brand in a country that forbids the advertisement of alcohol, the Super Kings for Indian Cements’ flagship product Coromandel Super King. It’s arguable, in fact, that the ensuing player auction on 20 February, devised by IMG in collaboration with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, was the most conspicuous but least financially significant event of the preliminaries to the league. The money was already in the pot; the players merely spiced the recipe.
Where the auction was significant was in a cricket sense. For while Modi was apt to present the IPL as involving ‘more than cricket’, insofar as it featured music, dancing and other entertainment, it also involved less than cricket, for the comprehensive skill base cricket has traditionally encouraged was in some respects almost a disadvantage for players. The auction prices players fetched were dictated by local marketability, momentary caprice and bidder’s ego. Peripheral members of the Indian team were hyped up: Ishant Sharma cost US$950 000, Irfan Pathan US$925 000 and Robin Uthappa US$800 000. Warne, meanwhile, was valued at US$450 000, Ponting at US$400 000 and Chaminda Vaas at just US$200 000. Indian youngsters Suresh Raina, Mohammad Kaif and Manoj Tiwary fetched more than US$2 million between them; Glenn McGrath and Shivnarine Chanderpaul attracted no bids at their first offer, and were bought second time around at their base prices, respectively US$350 000 and US$200 000. Not that bias was wholly parochial. Brett Lee, singer of a self-penned Bollypop hit with Asha Bhose and poster boy in India for Timex, New Balance and TVS, cost Kings XI Punjab US$900 000; Wasim Jaffer, India’s most consistent Test batsman of the previous twelve months, was a US$150 000 snip for the Bangalore Royal Challengers. ‘Obviously it hurts’, he admitted. ‘I have proved myself, and I have made runs in Test cricket, over 2000 of them.’ But he was an orthodox, unflinching opening batsman—a type for which Twenty20 had no call. The auction was about value, the market’s verdict and also values, which were not those of cricket as hitherto understood. The question unanswered to this day, how the latter will henceforward be shaped by the former, has been phrased best by another opening batsman Aakash Chopra, bought for a chump change of US$30 000 by the Kolkata Knight Riders. As he puts it in Beyond the Blues (2009):
Not so long ago, playing first-class cricket was the only reason for our existence. Everything revolved around making it to the state team, doing well to secure a berth for the next level and eventually playing for your country. You would spend hours trying to hone the skills more likely to see you through in the longer format of the game … Performing in the shorter format would take you only so far and as far as playing for the country was concerned … It was your performance in the longer format that counted.
Players now might get swayed by the rewards on offer in the Twenty20 format and hence ignore the importance of playing first-class cricket. Lasting five days on the field and performing at your peak not only needs skills but also a different level of mental and physical fitness. To maintain that level, you have to push yourself to the hilt … On the other hand, Twenty20 matches last only a few hours, the tournament is scheduled to happen once a year over a period of forty-five days, and though they require a different set of skills and physical and mental attributes, you don’t have to push yourself hard for the rest of the year … I may be sounding like a cynic, but isn’t there a potential threat to the way people approach the game?
I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have played Twenty20 cricket at the highest level and their response is similar—there is a lot of fun but no real cricket pleasure in the format. It’s ideal for viewers, but for the cricketers it’s more like a lottery … A lot of players involved in the IPL have, at some stage in their career, voiced their dislike for this format but are more than willing to take part in this mega event. No prizes for guessing what draws everyone to this billion-dollar baby of cricket.
A simplification of the game’s evolution might now run like this: Test cricket was devised for nations; one-day cricket was devised for crowds; Twenty20 was devised for television, for the activities it emphasises are those most telegenic—the hitting of fours and sixes, the catching of blinders, the launching of appeals. Television’s values had been impinging for some time on aspects of the game such as the size of playing fields, as John Wright noted:
The TV companies know the public wants to see fours and sixes, so the ropes are coming in all over the world. I had many deep and meaningful pre-game discussions with Indian groundsmen, pointing out that we had two spinners, so would they please push the ropes back? Then the TV company would demand more space for the advertising hoardings, and when we arrived at the ground on match day the ropes would have come in again and I’d get dark looks from the spinners. Money talked a lot louder than I did.
In the IPL, skills are entirely posterior to the entertainment package. The opening match of the first tournament began twenty minutes late because of Salman Khan’s prolonged advertisement for his new Sony Entertainment game show Dus Ka Dum. The most debated feature of the first couple of weeks was the team cheerleaders, including those from the Washington Redskins hired by the Bangalore Royal Challengers. An Economic Times survey after the first IPL concluded that more viewers had tuned in to watch Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta than Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly; of the top ten individuals recalled by viewers, only five were cricketers.
In the IPL, even the skill of commentary was subordinate to the goal of entertainment. In a revolutionary move, the BCCI originated the coverage itself, employing a production company and its own hand-picked commentators, including Modi’s colleagues on the IPL’s governing council, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri. Shastri epitomised the propagandistic tone when he rechristened his boss ‘Moses’, for leading cricket into its promised land. Ashok Malik argued in a pithy commentary for Cricinfo that the transition beginning with the ‘dumb belles’ who followed Mandira Bedi’s role for Sony at the 2003 World Cup was complete: the commentator was no longer a disinterested analyst of the play, but a straightforward handmaiden of commercial interests. ‘The IPL has taken this process to its logical extreme’, observed Malik. ‘When a wicket falls the television audience is more inclined to watch the cheerleaders do their number than listen to the commentator, if he has anything to say at all.’
Conflict of interest in general, in fact, was not a concept of which the IPL showed a firm grasp, in spite of the BCCI’s constitution, clause 6.2.4 of which states that ‘no administrator shall have direct or indirect commercial interests in the matches or events conducted by the Board’; to the clause was airily appended ‘excluding IPL, Champions League and Twenty20’. This enabled Srinivasan to continue run ning Chennai Super Kings despite being the BCCI’s secretary and president of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, and to employ BCCI chairman of selectors Kris Srikkanth as the Super Kings’ ‘brand ambassador’. Bangalore Royal Challengers’ owner Vijay Mallya joined the BCCI’s marketing committee, while his Kingfisher Airlines became the IPL’s official carrier and umpire partner. Rajasthan Royals’ shareholders included Suresh Chellarum, the Nigeria-based husband of Modi’s sister-in-law; likewise was Mohit Burman, investor in Kings XI Punjab, related to Modi by marriage. If anything, absence of interest was deemed more suspect. Cricinfo, a bastion of independent coverage of cricket, was shut out of the IPL because of its potential rivalry to the BCCI’s own online content, ownership of which, it turned out, was also linked to Modi.
The cricket itself had its moments. There was breathtaking hitting: Gilchrist made a hundred from 42 balls, Brendon McCullum 158 from 73 balls, and more than a quarter of the runs in the tournament accrued in sixes. There was amazing ineptitude: the Bangalore Royal Challengers sustained five ducks and three run outs against Kings XI Punjab, then were on the receiving end of Laskmipathy Balaji’s hat-trick for Chennai Super Kings. The peaks and troughs seemed to occur partly because the teams were restricted to playing only four of their internationals at a time, leading to rather many catchweight contests, although it could be argued that this made for more dramatic fluctuations in the course of games. The crowds, as great as 87 000 at Eden Gardens when the Kolkata Knight Riders saw off the Deccan Chargers, had plenty to savour. With average attendances of 58 000, the IPL was second only to the National Football League in the United States among domestic sporting attractions. Ratings soared to twice those normally experienced by conventional programming; soap and serial audiences shrank in proportion. Losers reeled: Vijay Mallya sacked his coach and chief executive. Winners prospered: the Rajasthan Royals stuck to basics, worshipped their wily captain/coach Warne, and brought glory to none other than Modi’s adopted state.
There was a non-stop cycle of issues and controversies, not least when Mumbai Indians’ captain Harbhajan Singh was suspended for slapping his Indian teammate but Kings XI Punjab opponent Shantakumaran Sreesanth. A surprising feature of the first IPL, indeed, was how easily local rivalry coexisted with international. Despite 130 years in which the nation has been the standard unit of cricket rivalry, fans rallied free-flowingly behind new favourites: the Kolkata Knight Riders, whose host of glamorous stars included Sourav Ganguly and Shoaib Akhtar, but above all whose impresario was the ubiquitous Shah Rukh Khan, were comfortably the competition’s most popular team despite being among the least successful. The IPL has ‘little cricketing logic, but sound television logic’, argue TR Vivek and Alam Srinivas in IPL: Cricket & Commerce (2009): ‘The Indian youth wants to watch big names and celebrity parties, where the camera has an obsessive focus on the cleavage. They want a Bollywood awards show with a dash of instant-result cricket’.
It amounted, nonetheless, to a celebration. For a glorious six weeks, India was not just the centre of the cricket world, but the cricket world itself. The only news emanating from the ICC in this time was of the defenestration of its CEO, Malcolm Speed, often in his tenure at loggerheads with the BCCI, but who had finally fallen out with his South African president, Ray Mali, over the issue of Zimbabwe: they had had an ‘angry and bitter exchange’ over Mali’s support, despite growing evidence of administrative corruption and government interference, for Zimbabwe’s continued Test status. The forum of Speed’s ouster had, in fact, been an informal 20 April meeting of ICC directors in Bangalore as the IPL opened at which Modi, with Niranjan Shah, had represented the BCCI, in the absence of Pawar and Bindra.
Thus were cricket’s recent realities perfectly reflected: while the BCCI staged a billion-dollar party in its own honour, the ICC disintegrated over what by comparison were footling sums in the world’s sorriest cricket state. That Speed was joining his old nemesis Dalmiya on the sidelines of this new cricket revolution was appropriate: their rivalry now seemed like the vestige of a former age. The ensuing shake-up at ICC better mirrored the emergent global order: Bindra, briefly touted as Speed’s successor, took the new position of ‘advisor’ to incoming chief executive Haroon Lorgat; Pawar took the new position of vice-president to new president David Morgan of England, leaving in his stead at the BCCI a loyal locum, lawyer Shashank Manohar. With the IPL consolidating the BCCI’s status as the de facto seat of global cricket power, the ICC effectively took on a new position too: that of an organisation to deal with whatever did not interest the BCCI.
Last Man Standing
For a year after the first IPL, cricket was altogether dwarfed by its commerce. Players played incessantly but as pointlessly as if they were batting for a declaration, so dwarfed were they by larger forces, greater agendas and a sneaking yet growing sense of unreality. For economic trends were newly bleak. In England, Northern Rock had failed, and massive write-downs were being revealed at UBS, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The last, a major benefactor of cricket through the NatWest Trophy, would shortly pledge to shrink its US$300 million sponsorship portfolio by half. Vodafone decided after twelve years not to renew its sponsorship of the national team. In Australia, ABC Learning, Allco, Opes Prime and Storm Financial were heading for the boneyard of the bourse. Even in India, the stock market was beating a headlong retreat, as foreign investors had second thoughts about the country’s runaway growth.
That air of unreality was not dispelled at Lord’s on 11 June 2008 when a helicopter in the gold-leaf livery of his financial services firm disgorged the gaudy Allen Stanford, who had agreed on terms with the ECB for five Twenty20 internationals between England and an all-star West Indian team with an unprecedented grubstake of US$100 million; Stanford had tried and failed to strike a similar deal with the ICC. Publicly, it was the ECB’s initiative to keep faith with players who had been unable to participate in the IPL because of the clash of seasons; privately, it was an attempt to establish a sphere of influence to rival the BCCI’s, using the advantages of England’s season, time zone and advanced infrastructure.
It had not been the only proposal in the mix: England’s counties had earlier rejected a discussion document prepared by two senior administrators, David Stewart of Surrey and Keith Bradshaw of the Marylebone Cricket Club, mooting a nine-team English Premier League comprising fifty-seven matches in twenty-five days. Ironically in hindsight, Stanford appealed more because it involved apparently less upheaval of the established order. But the counties in one respect were right to be wary of Twenty20’s propensity to suck all the oxygen from its surroundings. In September, Australia arrived in India to play four Tests—a scenario that had provided unforgettable cricket in 2001 and 2004. Now the stadia were deserted and forlorn, despite the hosts’ impressive form. After several variations, the biggest version of ICL yet commenced on 10 October, now lasting a month, involving thirty-six games on four grounds, and including three new teams: the Ahmedabad Rockets, Dhaka Warriors and Lahore Badshahs, the last two lending the tournament a pan-Asian impact by hailing from Bangladesh and Pakistan respectively. While the nearby Bangalore Test attracted only desultory interest, the opening game between the Badshahs and the Hyderabad Heroes drew 20 000.
Nor was the ECB alone in seeking strength through innovation. On 24 October, Cricket Australia, Cricket South Africa and New Zealand Cricket foreshadowed plans for a ten-team Southern Premier League to begin two years hence, the series rotating between the three participating countries. The only board not Twenty20 crazy was the Pakistan Cricket Board, devoured by internal politics as Musharraf fell, and with him his cricket stooge Naseem Ashraf. The PCB had spent much of Ashraf’s reign persecuting the twenty players who had signed with the ICL, including the country’s best batsman, Mohammad Yousuf—a craven effort to endear themselves to the BCCI, which events would shortly render entirely pointless.
On the eve of the Champions League, the second stage of Modi’s grand plan, disaster struck: Pakistani terrorists trained by Kashmiri liberationists Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) laid bloody siege to Mumbai for sixty hours. Their locus was the Taj Mahal Hotel, Indian cricket’s long-standing entrepot, where even then officials were forgathering to finalise the Champions League’s details. This league had been a troubled venture—unlike the IPL, Indian participation could not be guaranteed for the duration. Television rights had been sold for US$975 million to ESPN-Star at the peak of IPL hype, but naming rights had proven impossible to sell, and scheduling almost impossible to nail down: Cricket Australia had finally consented to delaying their Perth Test in order to facilitate the participation of Australian players. With the attack, the tournament was again in limbo, as were Pakistan’s relations with India, thanks to the involvement of its nationals in the bloodshed. Sports minister MS Gill ruled out an impending Indian tour of Pakistan with chilling emphasis: ‘You can’t have one team coming from Pakistan to kill people in our country, and another team going from India to play cricket there’.
No blow to Pakistani cricket could have been as grievous—and thus was the gesture intended. Because of concerns about the country’s internal security, the PCB had not been able to host a Test since October 2007, and its television tie-up with PTV, predicated on the continuity of Pakistan’s defining cricket rivalry, was unravelling: the financial losses suffered were in the order of US$40 million. Pakistan’s almost unrivalled capacity to disappoint then took on epic proportions on 3 March 2009, when a bus carrying Mahela Jayawardena’s Sri Lankans, who had filled the breach left by India, was ambushed by anonymous gunmen en route to Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium. The flimsy security disappeared; several players and officials were wounded. The PCB’s desperate protestations, which involved making an official complaint to the ICC about referee Chris Broad’s comment that ‘security vanished and left us to be sitting ducks’, then cost them much sympathy. ‘Even in the history of this wretched board,’ stated Cricinfo’s Osman Samiuddin, ‘nothing has been as shameful, not the match-fixing crisis, or any cock-up. Obviously none were sacked. Some got promoted’.
There being little around to damage, five-day cricket on the Subcontinent was hardly affected: England played Tests in Chennai and Mohali soon after. But fifty-over cricket sustained significant collateral damage: Pakistan’s roles as host of the 2009 Champions Trophy and co-host of the 2011 World Cup were effectively doomed. Twenty20, meanwhile, suffered the most significant check. It emerged that the ten players from Pakistan who had played in the first IPL would not be welcome in the second; likewise the Pakistani teams lined up for the now-deferred Champions League. The format’s headlong expansion seemed to be catching up with it: Allen Stanford’s business empire crumbled after just one instalment of his Stanford Super Series on the businessman’s picturesque ground in St John’s. The ECB officials who had jostled for proximity to Stanford eight months earlier suddenly distanced themselves from the affair, seeking and attaining PCB standards of accountability. No suitable place in the cricket calendar being found, the Southern Premier League also gradually petered out.
Worst of all, the IPL itself was threatened by the coincidence of India’s elections, whose official security needs were deemed greater even than cricket. The BCCI was actually chastised by external affairs minister Anand Sharma, who argued that catering for the IPL’s security requirements would ‘trivialise Indian democracy’, and home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, who said that ‘too clever’ Modi simply ‘did not try to understand the compulsions and concerns of the Police force’. Other boards, however, sensed an opportunity to endear themselves to a powerful ally, and Modi accepted Cricket South Africa’s offer to stage the tournament lock, stock and bail: he emerged from discussions with CSA on 24 March with a deal to preserve his venture’s vital spark.
That spark guttered in South Africa: second time round, the novelty was diminished, the straining for effect was more obvious and the efflorescence was provided mainly by money. Most excitement attended a beauty pageant, Miss IPL Bollywood, involving forty-eight South African models, six representing each franchise. Most fun was provided by a blog, Fake IPL Player, which purported to provide scurrilous intelligence from inside the Kolkata Knight Riders camp. But Modi had pulled it off: just before the IPL, the precipitate global recession had induced the ICL to abandon its season. The audacity of Modi’s scheme, creating a mini-India abroad for the sake of the country’s televised amusement, preserved his aura of infallibility—perhaps in his own mind too. For like Dalmiya before him, a man who seemed to personify Indian cricket abroad had been accumulating enemies in his own household.
Modi at Bay
Modi was by now as recognisable a face in India as any of his cricketers, a celebrity in his own right who risked a mob at his every public appearance and who maintained a constant banter on Twitter. Although he ostensibly answered to the IPL governing council appointed by the BCCI, in reality Modi made all the running, with the assistance of a hand-picked CEO, Sundar Raman, a former executive with advertising giant WPP.
As a gesture of faith in his enterprise, Modi very publicly forewent all salary from the IPL—how he funded himself, in fact, was rather a mystery, heightening his mystique. Certainly, he was surrounded by the accoutrements of power: limousines, private jets et al. The national sports editor of the Times of India, Bobilli Vijay Kumar, described a visit to his lair on the thirty-third floor of Worli’s five-star Four Seasons Hotel in terms akin to a call on Lord Copper in Scoop:
If you really need to see his power … you need to walk into his IPL headquarters in Mumbai; of course, that is easier said than done. Right at the entrance of the plush five-star hotel, there are close to 10 NSG-style commandos, all armed to their teeth. You walk through the gate at your own risk. There is an IPL help-desk, next to the reception. When you say you have an appointment with Modi, a call is quickly made; only on confirmation, the hotel staffer reveals the floor number. Another one steps forward and punches in the card that gives you access to the floor. When you step out of the lift, the corridor is eerily silent. In the far corner, you can see another bunch of armed guards; nobody is allowed here without valid IDs. One of them asks you to sit outside while a second one goes in to announce your arrival; the secretary comes out to do her bit of fact-finding. You are given an audience after another brief wait.
Although such arrangements could keep the hoi polloi at bay, they could not completely stave off reality. In Rajasthan, Modi had fallen out with an old crony, local bureaucrat Sanjay Dixit. India’s elections had then proved doubly inconvenient when Vasundhara Raje lost her job as chief minister. Throughout the campaign, Raje’s Congress Party challenger Ashok Gehlot had accused Modi of exercising ‘extra constitutional authority’, even of acting as a ‘shadow chief minister’. Voters found the charges all too credible.
Now without political cover, Modi could boss round the cricket world but not the Rajasthan Cricket Association: he was twice beaten at elections in 2009, first by Dixit, then by CB Joshi, union minister of Panchayat Raj. As many as twenty court cases involving Modi as defendant in Rajasthan, concerning allegations of financial irregularities and tax evasion, were either initiated or resumed. Although long-time patron Bindra had installed him as vice-president of the Punjab Cricket Association, Modi was now without direct influence on the BCCI. His perceived eclipse emboldened other detractors, including the ubiquitous Srinivasan, boss of Indian Cements, monarch of the Chennai Super Kings and custodian of the BCCI exchequer.
With the power vacuum following Pawar’s departure, Srinivasan had become perhaps the key string-puller at the BCCI. Shrewd enough to have unseated former board president AC Muthiah in coming to power at the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, and wealthy enough not to care whom he offended, he detested Modi, whom he saw as a self-aggrandising dandy cultivating the IPL’s independence from the BCCI. In particular, Srinivasan enlisted Manohar in a cause he believed in: IMG’s rake-off from the IPL. There had been considerable dissatisfaction about the arrangement from the beginning, an anonymous board member complaining to Mint:
Lalit (Modi) just signed that contract and then brought it to the finance committee meeting. The members felt 10% revenue share was too much. At that time he said he had consulted Mr Pawar and had signed it on his behalf. At the next meeting, Mr Pawar said he didn’t know about it. Modi, then, said he had signed it himself.
Srinivasan and Manohar issued their ultimatum to IMG executives in London in June 2009: reduce the fee or face losing it altogether.
When IMG stood firm, sent their bill for about US$7 million, and were unilaterally sacked in August, Modi swung into action, persuading the other seven franchises to bombard the BCCI with protests. This enraged Srinivasan further: the franchises owed their existence to the BCCI; the BCCI was not about to accept them influencing the policies of Indian cricket. Modi then had a stroke of luck: ahead of elections in Maharashtra, Pawar was keen to bring about an entente cordiale with the industrialist Mukesh Ambani, owner of the Mumbai Indians. Pawar’s covering note to Ambani’s letter of complaint reprimanded his old BCCI colleagues: ‘Not only will this lead to a prolonged legal battle but it will also show us in bad light in public’. Even so, when a settlement was brokered by Manohar whereby IMG agreed to reduce their fees by almost a fifth, Srinivasan could claim he had obtained a better deal for the league than had Modi.
A year after it had been scheduled, the Champions League finally unfolded, a lower-key event than the IPL, from which English teams were a last-minute withdrawal in a dispute over revenue sharing. It provided some pleasing cricket, especially from finalists New South Wales and Trinidad and Tobago, but petered out in public attention when the local teams dropped out early. ESPN’s outlay for the rights now looked decidedly extravagant. Mystery also surrounded payments of US$5 million to the IPL franchises unable to contest the cancelled league—the Rajasthan Royals, connected with Modi’s brother-in-law, and the Chennai Super Kings, Srinivasan’s plaything; no other competitor had been so compensated. Whatever the objectives of the payment, Srinivasan showed no signs of placation, continuing to machinate so tirelessly that, in December 2009, Modi barely survived what was essentially a no-confidence motion at a meeting of the BCCI: he kept his job only on the proviso that he speak every day to Manohar. Modi still managed to make trouble for himself, threatening to ban from the IPL any Australian player who put his own country’s domestic cricket before representing their franchise, and attracting a defamation action from Chris Cairns, whom he disbarred from the third IPL player auction on unsubstantiated grounds that the New Zealander had been embroiled in match-fixing during the ICL. His embarrassment might have been greater had the BCCI not at the same time faced a greater one, being forced to sack its own pitches committee after the abandonment of a one-day international in Delhi because of a surface deemed ‘unfit’ by the ICC referee. In any event, new alliances were forming. When Modi visited Eden Gardens for a routine inspection at the end of the year, he was reported to have met with Dalmiya, now restored as the pooh-bah of the Cricket Association of Bengal. The BCCI had expelled Dalmiya in December 2006 over alleged financial irregularities in the 1996 World Cup, Modi being among those who had jeered gleefully; having successfully challenged the ban in court, he was again a force to be reckoned with. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of strange bedfellows.
The Fifteen-Month Year
Calendar 2009 contained 150 one-day internationals; forty-eight Twenty20 internationals, including a world championship; and eighty-two games in the IPL and Champions League. Nobody could miss the inference: cricket was now a duopoly market in oversupply, the ICC providing international content, the BCCI its supranational competition. The ICC’s Future Tours Programme was only three years old, but, agreed to before the irresistible rise of Twenty20, now looked as obsolete as the Julian calendar.
Something had to give, and that was Test cricket, of which there were merely thirty-eight matches despite the scheduling of marquee series like the Ashes and the Frank Worrell and Wisden Trophies. Of these thirty-eight, India played only six, including just two at home, preferring a number of instantly forgettable one-day series with traditional political allies Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Nor was this because India was a poor team, but in spite of it being a good one: in December, MS Dhoni’s eleven officially achieved the number one ranking on the ICC’s World Test Championship. India’s next international engagement at the time happened to be against South Africa, whom it had displaced from its perch, yet only five one-day internationals had been scheduled. Belatedly, the BCCI condescended to two Test matches: exciting games of high-quality cricket which ended one-all. But the likelihood remained that India would play too few matches in 2010 to defend its hard-won status, and Rahul Dravid was quoted as worrying that the next generation of Indian players did not actually care: ‘There is no all-consuming desperation for them like there was for me or cricketers of my generation to do well in Tests’. The shift was on, too, at junior level, as Sunil Gavaskar noted from his vantage point as a member of the IPL’s governing council:
Parents are encouraging their children to take up cricket as a career option because of the IPL and the amount of money it provides. But the worrying factor is far too many youngsters see the IPL as the be all and end all. A lot of players miss out on domestic cricket before the IPL to avoid injuries. That is what we have to be very careful about—the IPL being seen as the be all and end all, not the India cap. The other thing to guard against is players in the age group of 19–22 going the wrong way. Younger players get carried away by fame, publicity and success.
Sorrier still was the state of Pakistan, playing so little that its skills seemed to have atrophied, and the interest of vagrant key players waned. ‘Twenty20 cricket is a virus’, warned its foremost modern batsman, Javed Miandad. ‘If the ICC doesn’t restrict matches of this format it will finish Test cricket, as leading players will no longer want to play for their country.’ Their captain, Mohammad Yousuf, whose team had nine Tests in 2009 after none at all the year before, went further, blaming his team’s batting frailties on an infatuation with Twenty20 that followed their victory in that year’s world championship:
Because of Twenty20 cricket no player knows how to stay at the wicket anymore. Batsmen are finding it very difficult. I know the format has money, players get it and boards do but if Pakistan hypes up Twenty20 too much, Test and ODI cricket will really go down … Twenty20 is easy for Pakistanis because they know how to hit, nobody knows how to defend. Until players play with discipline and play ball to ball and leave balls they are supposed to we will struggle in ODIs, let alone Tests. If you see a ball, hit it because you have to score. But if you are going to slog all the time what is the point?
That Twenty20-centrism made the news of January 2010 even harder to bear: because of apprehensions about the security environment and doubts about their availability, Pakistan’s players attracted not a single bid at the third IPL player auction. ‘The way I see it, the IPL and India have made fun of us and our country’, fumed Shahid Afridi, the star of Pakistan’s earlier triumph. ‘We are the Twenty20 world champions.’ There were high-level complaints too, Pakistan sports minister Aijaz Hussain Jakhrani remonstrating with his Indian counterpart about ‘the unjust and discriminatory treatment meted out to the Pakistani cricketers’; Geo Super, Pakistan’s only local sports channel, declined to show the IPL after the country’s cable operators threatened to boycott any channel showing it. But IPL franchises were also confirming their indifference to notions of diplomatic symbolism and sporting magnanimity. Pakistani players, Modi argued, were simply too hot to hold in a climate of global uncertainty. ‘They [the franchises] are spending money’, he said. ‘And they want to get the results.’
The existence of the IPL, and the breakdown of official cricket’s monopoly that it represented, was impacting everywhere. In the West Indies, whose captain, Chris Gayle, publicly opined that the end of Test cricket would not be a matter of regret to him, most of the leading players stood aloof from international cricket for much of the year in pursuit of a better deal from their board: the scattering of Stanford’s billions had created expectations difficult to meet. In New Zealand, Daniel Vettori, Brendon McCullum, Jacob Oram, Ross Taylor, Jesse Ryder and Kyle Mills signed national contracts in July 2009 only after ensuring that they had preserved their right to play IPL. ‘We realise that if these situations continue to come up, it will be difficult for players to continue to turn down the money’, said Vettori. ‘So we implore the powers that be to [find a solution] so we don’t have to make these decisions every year.’
A particular bugaboo was the phenomenon of the ‘freelance player’: the gifted cricketer renouncing international cricket in favour of plying his trade with the worldwide network of Twenty20 events which didn’t actually exist yet but which everyone somehow assumed soon would. This player, spared the obligation of providing the IPL with an NOC (no objection certificate) from his own board, would be attractive to franchises because of his unrestricted availability. There were prototypes, in particular two Andrews who had found cricket to be the curse of the drinking classes. Andrew Symonds, Australian cricket’s number one management challenge, wearied of official inhibitions on his behaviour, and preferred the task of earning US$1.35 million for six weeks work with the Deccan Chargers. Andrew Flintoff, England’s charismatic former captain, found that his body was no longer equipped to withstand Test cricket’s rigours, and elected to confine himself to the more lucrative and time efficient option of earning his US$1.55 million fee for the Chennai Super Kings.
Whether an imminent profusion of freelance cricketers was a likelihood is debatable. Players associations played it up; cricket boards played it down. For players in their thirties with more cricket behind them than ahead, concentrating on big-money Twenty20 was certainly an enticement, and further opportunities for freedom of lance loomed when Australia’s KFC Big Bash attracted overseas cricketers in 2009–10, including West Indians Dwayne Bravo, Chris Gayle and Dwayne Smith, and Pakistanis Shahid Afridi and Naved-ul-Hasan. But this was a greater cultural change than many grasped: the attitude of a player with a lifetime in a structured national environment does not naturally conduce to becoming a self-directed, self-organising, self-motivated, have-bat-will-travel type. The annual survey of Australian first-class players by the Australian Cricketers’ Association found that two-thirds could foresee one of their peers declining a Cricket Australia contract in order to pursue a freelance career, but 98 per cent had ‘never considered’ doing so themselves.
The possibility of freelance cricketers denuding the international game of its talent further spurred plans for the rehabilitation of Test cricket, centring on a full-fledged world championship. On assignment for CA, Boston Consulting Group worked throughout 2008 on a structure for such a scheme, addressing both the status of five-day cricket and the growing inequalities between cricket’s emergent ‘big four’—India, England, Australia and South Africa—and the rest. BCG’s package involved a conservative four-year cycle and a radical pooling of television monies, so that strong countries subsidised the weak. Predictably, the strong, particularly India and England, were having none of it.
The Marylebone Cricket Club, sticking its oar into the global game for the first time in nearly twenty years, then presented an alternative scheme. The work of the club’s three-year-old World Cricket Committee, a think tank of past and present cricket eminences including Martin Crowe, Rahul Dravid, Steve Waugh, Mike Atherton and Geoff Boycott, it was a minimalist model, involving a two-year cycle and no revenue sharing. The MCC presented the proposal, buttressed by some rather flimsy market research, to the ICC’s own cricket committee in Dubai in November 2009; the committee was to report to the executive board in February 2010 but, without an obvious champion, the proposal stood little chance of progress.
Stymied at the ICC, CA also experienced a worrying home summer, with crowds and viewing audiences sharply down. Like most forty-year-olds, one-day international cricket was looking increasingly flabby and unfashionable, especially compared to fun, footloose Twenty20. CA’s directors took heart from the growing momentum of its KFC Big Bash, already the most lucrative tournament in Australia because finalists gained admission to India’s Champions League. The tournament’s next stage was foreshadowed: six city-based teams, each controlled by the relevant state association, plus two franchises based in regional centres. For Australian administrators, this mooted experiment with private ownership amounted to revolutionary thinking. By Indian standards, of course, it was a trifle. But everyone was about to have a lesson on the side effects of private ownership.
Triple Witching Hour
In the early days of Twenty20, cricket’s gradualist governors had been loath to destabilise the game’s established commercial and cultural structures. By 2010, they had shed all inhibitions. In the ten weeks from 12 March to 20 May, more than 100 games of elite Twenty20 were scheduled: IPL, another ICC World Twenty20, plus a women’s event. A game that has traditionally walked backwards into the future was now running headlong with its eyes shut. Just as importantly, there were signs of shifting corporate priorities in India. Brand Finance, a marketing consultancy, valued the IPL at US$4.13 billion. According to media buying agency GroupM India, the league now accounted for about 40 per cent of the national advertising spent on sport. The first IPL franchise to be onsold, Kings XI Punjab, was initially rumoured to be on the market for US$275 million—four times its original cost, despite having yet to earn a profit. This staggering market strength, however, held grave portents for cricket’s other forms. As 2009 concluded, the BCCI revealed it had received not a single bid for sponsorship rights to the national team, which it had priced at about US$150 million; Srinivasan admitted that his colleagues had been poorly advised about the ‘realistic value’ of the rights. In fact, Subrata Roy’s Sahara Group, the previous sponsor, had changed focus. On 21 March, two weeks after the first attempt at an auction had been mysteriously cancelled, it emerged as one of two successful bidders for new IPL franchises: Sahara, with the political patronage of civil aviation minister Praful Patel, paid US$370 million for the franchise for Pune, which would constitute the second IPL team in Maharashtra, while a consortium calling itself Rendezvous Sports World, under the aegis of fast-moving junior foreign minister Shashi Tharoor, paid US$333 million for the franchise in Kochi, in the state of Kerala.
Adding significantly to the paper fortunes already made, the successful bidders were paying more for two franchises than the first group of investors had two years earlier paid for eight. They were buying, moreover, nothing except rights: no players, no stadium, no infrastructure, nothing except a share of a pot of television monies. Nonetheless, they were expecting bang for their buck. Rendezvous, a coalition wrangled by private investors Shailendra Gaekwad and Pooja Gulati, had an eye on the wealthy expatriate Gulf community; they had, as yet, no home ground. Rendezvous’ financiers, who included Harshad Mehta of Rosy Blue Diamond (owner of a popular jewellery brand), Mehul Shah of Anchor Switches (a real estate firm) and Mukul Patel and Vipul Shah of the Shree Ram Group (recyclers of ships), made no bones about being in it for the money. ‘I’m just a businessman and have absolutely no interest in cricket’, said Patel.
There was, it so happened, more money to share. A year earlier, Modi had terminated the IPL’s original broadcasting contract with Sony/WSG after an ugly squabble in Bombay’s High Court over Sony’s purported failure to discharge its obligations, which cost CEO Kunal Dasgupta his job. It looked suspiciously like an attempt to sell the IPL rights again, and so effectively it proved: Multi-Screen Media, a new Sony entity, and WSG agreed to pay US$1.6 billion over the nine remaining years of the contract. The broadcasting rights holders in the United Kingdom, cable channel Setanta Sports, had gone into administration in June 2009, so Modi came up with the innovative solution of going to Google, who offered to stream games live on YouTube; Modi subsequently also sold British rights to ITV. The third IPL was projected to earn about US$160 million.
In fact, it was hard to avoid the sensation while watching the third IPL when it began on 12 March that what was happening off the field was far more significant and interesting than what was happening on. The sensations on the field were so fleeting, the forces at work off it so huge and game-altering. Shaun Tait bowled an excitingly fast over—then he came off. Yusuf Pathan made a hundred for the Rajasthan Royals against the Mumbai Indians—off a mediocre attack it took 37 balls, and afterwards he could hardly make a run. The coverage itself was more staccato for the innovation of advertisements in the middle of overs, sold at premium rates outside the agreement with MSM by Pioneer Diagsys, a new company controlled by none other than Kunal Dasgupta. The accent on spectacle rather than competition was more acute for the lavish nightly bacchanals, run by Colors, a general entertainment subsidiary of Viacom: IPL parties, where weary players mingled with perky Bollywood stars, businessmen, politicians and models, were a moveable feast of whatever took your fancy, with ticket prices more than ten times the cost of attending a game. For players, like one who spoke in confidence to Heena Zuni Pandit of the Hindustan Times, the novelty was steadily wearing off:
So you tell yourself, ‘I’ll go down for an hour’, only, it’s never an hour. Before you know it, it’s 4am and you’re heading back to your room, hurrying to pack up and head to another city, another game, another sponsor’s commitment (which are endless), another shoot possibly and yes, another party. The problem is that you can never switch off mentally. Not on the field, not during the hours spent in airports when fans and the airport staff want an autograph, photograph or just a chat and not in the parties, where you’ll be introduced to important people who will listen to you and perhaps, be important contacts who will make money for you. It’s a choice and it’s tiring but it’s also business. You have to be switched on. It takes a toll, when you play a game, party till 4am, pack and grab an hour’s sleep before heading for the airport and spend six to 12 hours travelling. Places like Jaipur and Chandigarh don’t have direct connections to everywhere else. That’s my most vivid memory of IPL, not the matches, not the parties but the endless travel and exhaustion — and next year, with 34 games more, it will only get worse.
The star was, again, undoubtedly Modi who, leaning on a bat and flanked by cheerleaders, hovered over the headline ‘Billion Dollar Baby’ on the cover of India Today, the country’s biggest newsweekly. But amid the constant distraction, nobody noticed that the final agreement for Rendezvous’ purchase of Kochi seemed to be taking rather a long time to finalise. Not until Manohar sent a BCCI lawyer to Bangalore to track Modi down on 10 April was progress made, and it wasn’t until 2.30 a.m. the following morning that the document was actually signed. An hour later, Modi deviated from the usual hoopla and celebrity endearments on his Twitter account to compose four uncommonly detailed tweets about his league’s newest franchise. ‘Who are the shareholders of rendezvous’, he began. ‘And why have they been given this 100’s of million dollar bonanza?’ [sic] He listed first the acknowledged equity holders, then those who had been given ‘free equity’—apparently rights convertible into shares. These included a name prompting a select few to instant recognition: Sunanda Pushkar. In response to an inquiry from ‘xxxDEVxxx’—a Bangalore-based follower Roshan Dev—Modi then went a little further: ‘a big? I was told by him [Tharoor] not to get into who owns rendezvous. Specially Sunanda Pushkar. Why? The same has been minuted in my records’. [sic]
Dubai-based Sunanda Pushkar, formerly sales manager of a company called Tecom, is best described as the significant other of Shashi Tharoor, the former under-secretary-general of the United Nations who had been political patron of the Kochi bid; Tharoor was at the time in the throes of divorcing his Canadian second wife, Christa Giles. Modi’s inference was hard to avoid: that Tharoor had cut, literally, a sweetheart deal. Members of the BJP—with whom in Rajasthan, of course, Modi had been allied—did not miss the opportunity to embarrass a government minister. Members of the Communist Party were more extreme still, calling for the IPL to be ‘banned’. ‘Cricket is being maligned in the country’, said MP Gurudas Dasgupta. ‘Black money is coming from Mauritius and Dubai through dubious sources and betting is going on openly … It is a only a game of gamble, an organised gamble.’
Modi’s motivations were ambiguous. Mischief? Pique? Spite? According to Harshad Mehta, Modi had spent a good deal of the bid process trying to discourage the Rendezvous consortium. ‘He told us that so many partners can’t handle a team’, Mehta complained to the National. ‘We listened to whatever he had to say. He is the IPL chairman. We listened and we kept our cool.’ Shantanu Guha Ray of Tehelka alleged that the success of the Kochi bid had been more than a surprise—it had been a deuced inconvenience. Modi had been carefully orchestrating the bid process to provide a franchise for Ahmedabad, bankrolled by the infrastructure magnate Gautam Adani and approved by the Gujarat Cricket Association, and also to deliver Pune to Venugopal Dhoot’s Videocon Industries. The reason? Since his ousting in Rajasthan, Modi had been seeking a means of recovering his vote on the BCCI, and been promised same by the Gujarat association’s boss, Narendra Modi, also the state’s chief minister. Guha Ray spiced his story further with background on the tensions between Modi, Tharoor and Miss IPL Bollywood contestant Gabriella Demetriades:
A few days earlier, newspapers had carried front-page stories linking a beautiful South African model, Gabriella Demetriades, with Modi. It seems Modi no longer wanted the association and had requested Tharoor’s office, as Minister of State for External Affairs, to deny Gabriella a visa. Piqued by the back-room pressure and anxiety Modi had been visiting on his boss and the Kochi team, Tharoor’s aide Jacob Joseph refused to entertain the request and not only expedited the visa but apparently taunted Modi’s aides about it. The story goes that when Modi found out, he called Tharoor in a rage at night and slammed the phone down, vowing vendetta.
Modi has consistently told the media that he does not know Gabriella and has nothing to do with her. Unfortunately for him, however, he seems to have left an e-mail trail when he wrote to Joseph for help about denying the visa. These emails contravene his claim about not knowing Gabriella because in his hurry to shunt her off, he apparently forgot to delete his chain-mail exchanges with her.
Whatever the case, Modi’s tweets resounded like the crack of doom. BCCI president Manohar publicly upbraided the IPL’s founder for making the ownership details public. Tharoor condemned it as an ‘extraordinary breach of all propriety’ designed to discredit the franchise; he also denied nest self-feathering: ‘I have neither invested nor received a rupee for my mentorship of the team. Whatever my personal relationships with any of the consortium members, I do not intend to benefit in any way financially from my association with the team now or at a later stage’. Modi, who had never shown any interest in transparency, suddenly became a convert, calling on all the IPL franchises to divulge full ownership details. There was the sound of paper being shuffled awkwardly, and some intriguing disclosures. The register of the Rajasthan Royals was especially confused, shares having been transferred freely but without the approval of the Foreign Investment Promotion Board or the Reserve Bank of India; Shilpa Shetty and Raj Kundra, it emerged, had brought their glamour to the Royals, but not their money.
Members of the Rendezvous consortium, meanwhile, were confiding anonymously of extraordinary pressure brought on them to either quit the scene or offer equity to thwarted investors, including rich businessmen and senior politicians. According to Rediff.com, two consortium members became so concerned at the intimidation that they went direct to Congress Party boss Sonia Gandhi. Prime minister Manmohan Singh was in Washington for talks with Barack Obama about the Nuclear Liability Bill when the mother of all bombs detonated. Shailendra Gaekwad’s brother Satyajit, a former Congress Party MP, told CNN-IBN that, a week after its success, Rendezvous had been offered US$50 million by Modi to ‘just quit the game and get out’. Gaekwad went on:
That is where the investors thought that since they had won the bid and had worked hard for the last six–seven months to get this bid, they did not agree. That’s the reason there were some delaying tactics taking place and a confusion created by Mr. Lalit Modi that he didn’t know who the owner was. In that case, if it was so, why would we have won the bid? That’s the million-dollar question Modi needs to answer.
Modi, of course, was giving as good as he was getting, contending that Rendezvous had ‘a lot to hide and as such have lied about who are the actual owners of the shares’. The day after, when income tax officials swooped on his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel seeking documents to do with the auction, he insisted that he welcomed investigation. He denied the bribe allegation, and Shailendra Gaekwad was subsequently replaced as Rendezvous’ CEO by Harshad Mehta. The immediate casualties of the crossfire, in fact, were Pushkar, who chose to forgo her stake ‘given the deeply unpleasant publicity surrounding my involvement’, then Tharoor, who quit in order not to further ‘embarrass the [Congress] Party’.
Modi still had strong relations with franchise owners like Vijay Mallya, and also obtained political support from India’s energy minister, Farooq Abdullah, a member of the IPL governing council, who deplored the Indian equivalent of the tall poppy syndrome: ‘It is an old Indian habit to try and pull down someone who is going up’. And the BCCI, at least initially, seemed to hope the whole affair would blow over. Manohar hesitated, foreshadowing a meeting of the IPL governing council ‘within ten days’, whose timing then slipped further. Income tax officials were now swooping left and right, on each of the franchises in turn, and also selected shareholders. There was widespread talk of ticket scams designed to evade entertainment tax, of monies routed through tax havens to avoid attracting levies in India, of restive state associations wondering why they lost money on the IPL while franchises benefited, of Air India flights rerouted for the IPL’s convenience; the name of crime boss Dawood Ibrahim, the Subcontinent’s Professor Moriarty, was being bandied freely. But what brought matters to a head was the publication on 19 April in the Times of India of the details of a confidential tax investigation presented to the Indian government six months earlier. ‘Mr Lalit Modi’, the report began, ‘has had a trail of failed ventures and defaults till four years back but has a lifestyle now that includes a private jet, a luxury yacht and a fleet of Mercedes S class and BMW cars all acquired in the last three years’. The key to his fortunes, said the report, was equity held on his behalf in no fewer than three IPL teams: the three—Kolkata Knight Riders (Shah Rukh Khan), Kings XI Punjab (Preity Zinta) and Rajasthan Royals (Shilpa Shetty)—with glamorous Bollywood links.
If the allegations were substantiated, Modi was toast. He was said to have done his deals for television, mobile and digital rights in return for commercial favours; he was reported to be ‘deeply embroiled in both generation of black money, money laundering, betting in cricket (match-fixing of certain IPL matches)’. The more interesting story, perhaps, was how such a report had come to be compiled and had then languished for six months before being leaked at this particular time—but on these issues, the Times was silent. But the issues for Modi to address were now multiplying daily, even if they sometimes seemed inconceivably involuted. There was, for instance, a ‘facilitation fee’ of US$80 million paid by MSM in order to rebid for the IPL broadcasting rights, US$25 million of which was alleged to have been routed to Modi. Then there were the IPL digital rights which four months earlier had found their way to Global Cricket Ventures, a Mauritius-registered company half-owned by UK-based Elephant Capital, whose principals included Modi’s son-in-law, Gaurav Burman, brother of the co-owner of Kings XI Punjab. Even if above board, this sounded suspicious. The media tide was also turning. Three weeks after his appearance on the cover of India Today, Modi was back there; this time the headline read ‘Run Out?’ Editor Aroon Purie was unabashed:
Rule No. 1 of journalism: there are no gods. And if they appear to be so they usually have feet of clay. So it was with a fast-talking dynamic 46-year-old man who came from nowhere three years ago and became the god of cricket in India … It is rare for India Today to fete someone on the cover for spectacular achievement and then put them on it within the same month for being in trouble. It was, however, inevitable as the IPL is not only a phenomenon that has revolutionised cricket but last week shook the government and led to the exit of one of its ministers.
Attention also fell on Pawar, incoming president of the ICC, whose daughter turned out to be working for the IPL, and whose son-in-law emerged as a shareholder in MSM. He was already under political pressure after a precipitous rise in food prices, which in some centres had incited riots. The day after the revelations in the Times of India, the ‘King of Maharashtra’ met two key cabinet colleagues at Parliament House in New Delhi—home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and finance minister Pranab Mukherjee—to discuss Modi’s position. Pawar was apparently still inclined to defend him, as he had in the past, but incurring bad political blood as a result. Unsatisfied simply with Tharoor’s scalp, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, was pressing for a thorough government inquiry: ‘A lot of people, including people in the government, are neck deep in this scam. IPL has turned out to be a huge scam. I think the worst ever, the biggest ever in this country and therefore there is a need for an impartial enquiry into this whole episode’. The Congress Party was countering with its own allegations, such as a call for investigation of the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association, Modi’s first stamping ground, now run by Anurag Thakur, a BJP member of parliament; the administration of Thakur’s chief minister father, Prem Kumar Dhumal, had spent extensively on bringing two IPL matches to Dharmasala, including the provision of a helicopter for Modi’s family. The atmosphere was confused, frenzied. Rajeev Shukla, it was reported, had twice provided detailed briefings to Manmohan Singh himself: the annual summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in Kathmandu was delayed to allow the Indian prime minister’s late arrival.
Dropping the Pilot
Modi was not going quietly. He challenged the validity of the calling of an IPL governing council meeting scheduled for 26 April because its agent was his adversary Srinivasan, whom he argued was only a council member because of his role as BCCI secretary. ‘I do not propose to attend any unauthorised meeting’, Modi wrote to Manohar. ‘He is actually an ex-officio member of the GC as an office bearer of BCCI and as he is a conflicted party who owns an IPL team. He has never and can never call a GC meeting.’ It was a technicality with a whiff of desperation from which he then backed off, issuing instead a challenge to the governing committee to put up or shut up by circulating his own agenda, requesting ‘complaints in writing with the requisite supporting documents at the meeting … so they can be replied in full’. He revived, too, his dormant Twitter account, breathing defiance: ‘People pressurising me to resign—I can tell you will not happen. Let them remove me then. Truth will prevail soon. Trial by media and no chance to present the facts is like the wild west’. Then: ‘Wait for the IPL to finish. I will reveal the men who have tried to bring disrepute to the game and how we stopped them from doing it’.
The BCCI did wait for the IPL to finish on 25 April, but just a few minutes. Even as Lalit Modi was presenting the trophy to MS Dhoni of the Chennai Super Kings—ironically, the franchise run by Srinivasan—a show-cause notice was winging its way to his email account, giving him fifteen days to prove why disciplinary action should not be taken against him, as well as a 34-page document containing twenty-two issues for which his explanation was sought. In the meantime, he was suspended as the chairman of the governing council, which in his absence next morning promoted another member, Chirayu Amin, to replace him: executive chairman of Vadodara-based pharmaceutical company Alembic Ltd, Amin had spent twenty-two years as president of the Baroda Cricket Association.
The suspension—rather than a sacking—had been Bindra’s suggestion. Modi’s oldest ally, indeed, was the only individual to speak in his protégé’s favour at the meeting, providing the saga with a sound bite to cherish: ‘The media has been ready with the guillotine to hang the hero of the IPL’. Those who had basked in Modi’s reflected glory, such as Gavaskar and Shastri, were reportedly silent; Abdullah did not turn up. Investigators, meanwhile, were beginning to feel like Old Mother Hubbard. As the income tax authorities had found before him, the BCCI’s administrative officer, Professor Ratnakar Shetty, learned that the crucial documents had disappeared. So many gaps were there that the BCCI actually forbade employees taking work home with them.
Then, another shoe dropped, with ECB chairman Giles Clarke becoming involved. On 7 May, Clarke notified the BCCI of a 31 March lunch in Delhi between Modi, Yorkshire CCC chief executive Stewart Regan, Warwickshire CCC chief executive Colin Povey, Lancashire CCC treasurer David Hodgkiss, and IMG’s Andrew Wildblood and Peter Griffiths. Five pages of minutes kept of the meeting by Regan for circulation among the bosses of counties staging Test matches adumbrated a plan for the IPL franchises to bid for franchises based around these grounds: the franchises would keep 80 per cent of gross revenue, the counties the balance, with a guarantee of US$3–5 million and an additional annual staging fee of US$1.5 million. The raison d’être, Regan explained, was the existing limits on the IPL season: ‘The only way to leverage more value is to offer the existing franchises the chance to buy a second franchise in the Northern Hemisphere’. He also recorded Modi’s expansive table talk:
The IPL model relies heavily on ‘star players’ and this is why they have been so successful. They have taken TV and sponsorship monies from the film and soap opera categories and brought women into the game like never before. Matches include fashion shows, after-match parties and entertainment. They have launched the word ‘CRICKETAINMENT’ which I think is really innovative. Players are now the new ‘idols’ in India … Going forward, availability will be key and Modi predicts a revolution among players if they are not allowed to get involved. Indeed, he will soon launch a new franchise rule stating that a player has to be available to be auctioned. Given the earning potential, he expects players to demand to be part of it. If governing bodies try to block the development of IPL20 then the franchisees could simply buy out the players and create their own structure. Modi believes that most star players would take the money rather than spend months playing county/state or indeed Test cricket. Indeed, if he wanted he could launch IPL Tests & ODIs!
Clarke’s email to Manohar claimed that Modi’s plan was ‘to destroy world cricket’s structure and especially that in England, and create a new rebel league’, a plan that would eclipse boards of control altogether and ‘involve players in a fashion unheard of’. The counties backpedalled hastily, Regan insisting that they had sought Modi’s counsel in an ‘educational’ capacity: ‘The success of the IPL proves that cricket is a product that people want to buy and that sponsors want to get involved with, and those were the key learning areas that we were interested in. It would not be appropriate to comment any further’. Given that this was belied by the content of his own notes, it’s not surprising others begged to differ, including the BCCI, who issued Modi with another show-cause notice. If Clarke’s allegations were true, it said, Modi’s activities would amount to a blow to ‘the very foundation of the way cricket is administered and played across the world’, with governing authorities ‘forced to watch helplessly while the game and the power of administration are hijacked’. Legal teeth were bared in London and Mumbai.
The IPL was now experiencing further and deeper criticisms as a result of the World Twenty20, won by England, but during which India and South Africa were conspicuous underachievers. With India’s pampered batsmen all at sea on unexpectedly fast and bouncy Caribbean pitches, MS Dhoni commented on the gulf between the IPL and international cricket; with South Africa’s players badly short of match practice, former chairman of selectors Craig Matthews complained: ‘The IPL doesn’t help other teams. The only South African who benefited from playing in the IPL was Jacques Kallis. The rest of them all sat on the sidelines’. Expansion of the IPL from sixty to ninety-four matches in 2011 no longer looked quite such an undiluted good, and governing council member MAK Pataudi confessed that he had already harboured misgivings:
I can’t exactly tell you what happened in the council meeting but it wasn’t exactly a unanimous decision I assure you. A lot of people said there is too much cricket going on, but it was carried. It will be a long summer for cricket. Cricket is going to become more and more stressful as we continue, and people will have to be fitter and tougher mentally as well as physically.
A dispute that had begun with Twenty20-style pyrotechnics would now evidently resolve itself in Test match-tough attrition, with both sides acting to shore their positions up. On 17 May, Manohar and Srinivasan met Wildblood and two IMG colleagues, Paul Manning and John Lafflagen, to discuss their future role in the league; IMG was threatening to sue Clarke for his correspondence with BCCI. Modi’s lawyers, meanwhile, had wheeled 15 000 pages of documentation into the BCCI headquarters in six large cardboard containers, his marquee lawyer Mehmood Abdi promising more if needs must: ‘The BCCI President is a renowned lawyer and has the habit of reading 1,000 pages in a minute. So, I feel he should not take much time in reading our reply’. Modi’s response to the BCCI charge sheet, a fourteen-page letter widely leaked on 25 May, was essentially to draft his own, accusing Manohar and Srinivasan of knowing more than they had let on, and demanding they both be rescued from the adjudication on his suspension, with Srinivasan himself suspended.
In a rather unconvincing ‘in-sorrow-not-in-anger’ tone, Modi insisted that Manohar’s had been the hidden hand in the cancelled auction of the new franchises:
The allegation that I tried to rig the bidding in favour of two bidders, namely Adani’s and Videocon has caused me much anguish … I had kept my peace in the larger interest of the Board but now that such an allegation has been made I am constrained to put the following facts on record.
Manohar, he claimed, had sought, at Tharoor’s request, to accept the Kochi bid after the official 5 p.m. deadline:
I declined to accept the same, saying it was beyond time. You [Manohar] however asked me to accept the bid. You advised me to anti time the bid to 12 noon for 6th March 2010 … You seemed to be under extreme pressure to ensure that the late bid be included in the bidding process. Since you failed to ensure that the bid be included you then decided to ensure that the bid process itself is cancelled.
The wandering tenses were confusing; the inference was clear. Official grounds for the cancellation had been Modi’s too-onerous demands of bidders’ net worth; by Modi’s account, terms had not been onerous enough. Srinivasan, meanwhile, was accused of a variety of misdeeds to advantage the Chennai Super Kings, including efforts to appoint local umpires to its games, hang on to key players, and a flouting of the board’s constitution in holding on to his conflicted position. He had pressure from another legal quarter too. Slowly but steadily, his erstwhile rival in Tamil Nadu, AC Muthiah, had been working up a legal challenge to his dual hold on office at the BCCI and the Chennai Super Kings. Muthiah popped his head up amid the wranglings between the BCCI and Modi to remind both of that old clause 6.2.4 with its prohibition on ‘direct or indirect commercial interests in the matches or events conducted by the Board’.
The BCCI, however, had by now closed ranks tightly. The facilitation fee was unravelled, the BCCI announcing that it rather than WSG Mauritius would now be the recipient; compensation payments to the Rajasthan Royals and the Chennai Super Kings for the cancellation of the inaugural Champions League were likewise rescinded. The BCCI terminated the relationship with Colors, killing the IPL parties, and even audited Modi’s limousine and hotel bills, demanding repayment of private usages. The franchises, which had fallen in line behind Vijay Mallya, were prepared to do business with the BCCI—providing, of course, their needs were met. As Mallya said, they were ‘in it [IPL] for business interest’.
With the abiding exception of Bindra, Modi had no public allies left. An earlier defender, Abdullah, was speaking darkly of his ‘major irregularities’. The Times of India published another startling revelation: that, contrary to earlier denials, a company associated with Pawar, City Corporation, had been involved in an unsuccessful bid for the IPL franchise in Pune. The revelation was less significant than the strategy underlying its leakage: Manohar and Srinivasan were letting Pawar know that his defence of Modi was no longer acceptable. A BCCI source quoted in Calcutta’s Telegraph laid the blame for Modi’s indiscretion directly at Pawar’s door:
Once unlimited powers are given, officially or otherwise, it’s next to impossible to withdraw them. It’s because of the carte blanche given to Modi that he didn’t bother to take the IPL’s governing council into confidence … Never bothered to consult it … The council kept quiet because most, if not all, of its members knew of Modi’s arrangement with Pawar.
Interestingly, when Modi leapt to Pawar’s defence in the wake of the disclosure, Pawar did not reciprocate. At a special general meeting of the BCCI on 3 July, which referred Modi’s case to a three-member disciplinary committee, not one delegate spoke in his favour: Bindra, one who might have, did not attend. Modi tweeted defiantly: ‘Battle lines have been drawn. Agendas fixed. Timelines laid. Let’s see who wins and who is guilty of what. Now truth will emerge. Wait watch’. But when he announced a Supreme Court challenge to the disciplinary process a week later, Modi, while never to be underestimated, was very much on his own.
Howard’s End … and Modi’s
The ICC looked on throughout the foregoing without comment: over quite possibly the biggest cricket story in a decade, since match-fixing, it had no jurisdiction and no influence. Such marginalisation of the ostensible control body for global cricket had become such a routine feature as to pass unremarked, although not, at Cricket Australia, unnoticed: indeed, in about September 2009, it had been the impetus for an unusual initiative, with an approach to former prime minister John Howard to become involved. Under the latest iteration of the rotation policy for the ICC presidency, it was the turn of Australia and New Zealand to promote a vice-president to serve from July 2010, and succeed to the role of president two years later. Courted by CA chairman Jack Clarke, and former political ally Ian McLachlan, Howard agreed to put his name forward as Australia’s candidate in a straight fight with New Zealand’s Sir John Anderson. A lengthy and rather laborious selection process by a specially appointed committee ensued; that committee’s chairman, businessman Rod Eddington, finally used his casting vote to choose Howard on 2 March.
On the eve of the IPL, and the travails therefrom, it was soon swallowed up by events. Murmurs of discontent took nearly seven weeks to emerge, at the ICC executive board meeting in Dubai on 19 and 20 April, which was nonetheless inconclusive, several nations being unable to attend because of the volcanic disruption of civil aviation. Agitator-in-chief was the dubious chairman of Zimbabwe Cricket, Peter Chingoka, whose country’s pariahhood Howard had deepened by forbidding a 2007 visit by the Australian cricket team. Whether directly or indirectly influenced by ZC’s position, Cricket South Africa chairman Dr Mtutuzeli Nyoka sent a poisonous letter to ICC president David Morgan claiming that an ‘overwhelming number of directors were opposed to Howard’, even if he named none; in fact, as the BCCI, which nations financially dependent on tended naturally to follow, had yet to make any determination, no consensus was ascertainable. CA trusted in what it believed were good relations with the BCCI and CSA: they were, after all, among other things, CA’s joint-venture partners in the Champions League. They were gratified when Pawar, shortly before his ascension to the ICC presidency, pronounced himself a supporter of the Howard nomination, while Jack Clarke emerged from a meeting between Howard and Chingoka in Harare confident that a rapprochement had been reached.
They may have deceived themselves; they were certainly deceived. Pawar was no longer indicative of the BCCI’s views. Even as Clarke, his chief executive James Sutherland and NZC chairman Alan Isaac left for the ICC executive board meeting, representatives of the boards of South Africa, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and, at the last moment, the West Indies were signing a letter announcing their unwillingness to support Howard. No reasons emerged. No precedent existed. Howard was not permitted to address the refuseniks. A rich variety of reasons were advanced by bien-pensant pundits, some writing in good faith, others not. For a four-term prime minister, it was an epic snub; for CA, it was, as clearly intended, a humiliation. Whether it meant the rise of an ‘Afro-Asian bloc’, as some described it, was another matter. Rather, because any protest would have vaporised without the BCCI’s support, the gesture was a tacit admission of weakness, representing as much relevance as any of these increasingly beleaguered organisations had experienced in years. Faceless cricket administrators could suddenly feel like weighty men of affairs, through an act costing no time, no caste and, most importantly, no money. In very few other respects, one reflected, had they any significance at all.
The second half of 2010 was cast into darkness by the allegations of spot-fixing by Salman Butt, Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif during the Lord’s Test, first levelled by News of the World, then duly taken up by the ICC and the police. Pakistan’s players, gradually precluded from sharing in the Twenty20 riches of their near-neighbours, had long been thought susceptible to corruption. At sight of the headline ‘Caught!’ there was a weary sense in cricket that this interlude had been a long time coming – the pity was that the malfeasance had been detected not by the ICC’s own anti-corruption and security unit but a one-off investigation by a tabloid newspaper. The PCB’s helplessness lay revealed; the suspension of the trio by an ICC judicial panel on 5 February 2011 after a week of hearings in Doha felt like a small mercy.
Less visibly, the BCCI was in court trying to make stick their announcement on 10 October 2010 that Rajasthan Royals and Kings XI Punjab, the two franchises closest to Modi, were to be turfed from the IPL on grounds of agreement violations and contract breaches – essentially unnotified changes of ownership. With the continuing misadventures of the Kochi franchise, there was fleetingly a threat that the envisaged ten-team competition for the fourth IPL would become a seven-team shadow of its former self. The franchises did rather better than the Pakistani trio: after several stays in the High Court in Mumbai and attempts at arbitration, the BCCI lost the stomach for the contest. All ten franchises, including the Kochi Kerala Tuskers and Pune Warriors, lined up for the new auction of 350 players at Bangalore’s ITC Royal Gardenia on 8 and 9 January, spending freely up to their $9 million salary cap – if not, in a few cases, perhaps a mite beyond.
In a sense, the BCCI had accomplished its objective, by aggressive and ham-handed means, but always with an end in mind of extirpating Modi’s influence in IPL. The IPL governing council was turned over, and reconstituted sans Gavaskar and Pataudi as essentially a board sub-committee. As for Modi, disciplinary forums set up to hear the allegations against him came and went. Hearings were held, challenges continued, but the wheels of BCCI justice ground so exceeding small that interest in the matter steadily faded. Modi, having retreated to London, was left with a defamation case to pursue alongside IMG against the ECB’s Giles Clarke. A low-key website that pleaded his side of the story continued to describe him as the ‘founder and architect of the successful Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket’, but the BCCI dogs had barked, and the Twenty20 caravan had moved on. Even a proposed Bollywood biopic, The Commissioner, was cancelled.
The BCCI also continued to brazen out Srinivasan’s dual roles as board secretary and Chennai Super Kings boss, the subject of the long-wending legal complaint of A. C. Muthiah. At the end of April 2011, the Delhi High Court gave a split decision: Justice Gyan Sudha Misra agreed with Muthiah that the amendment to clause 6.2.4 had been ‘an abuse of the amending power exercised by the BCCI’ introduced ‘not to promote the game of cricket but to promote the interest of Mr. N. Srinivasan’. Justice J. M. Panchal took the more robust attitude that there was no conflict of interest if nobody complained of one: ‘The record does not indicate that any franchisee or any other member of the BCCI has complained of any alleged conflict of interest. Thus, the plea of conflict of interest is substance-less and is hereby rejected.’ And so the challenge persisted, being referred up to India’s chief justice, S. H. Kapadia for posting before a larger Bench.
On the field, it was actually as glorious a period as India has known. Having played just enough Test matches in 2010 to consolidate its number-one world ranking, M. S. Dhoni’s team wrested the World Cup in front of their own crowds at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium on 2 April 2011. This time victory was not the shock it had been twenty-eight years earlier. India were a formidable team, well-led, well-resourced, and well-rewarded. Interestingly, though, when the fourth IPL began less than a week later, with its new teams, new management and host of new allegiances, the ratings fluctuated, tapering off after a solid start. Without Modi, someone said, it was like ‘chocolate without sugar’.
After disappointing recent crowds, the ECB had also announced plans to scale down its FP T20 competition, while Australia’s Big Bash League was having teething troubles as well, with about the only details public being the names of the teams and their colours – private ownership was proving rather more complicated than simply a big payday for everyone. A tedious squib in its second outing in South Africa, the Champions League was struggling to find a constituency: as of May, no venue had been agreed for the third, scheduled just four months hence. Some levelling-off in Twenty20’s heady growth was to be expected, although these were salutary warning signs that an undue dependence on the format could also be costly. Cricket has historically thrived on glorious uncertainty; not so much cricket administration.