Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians Read online

  It has to be acknowledged that the BCCI’s handling of the Kohli–Kumble affair was poor. The story had come out at the worst possible time and thereafter, the BCCI wasn’t able to stem the media scrutiny that followed. Whether the off-field rumblings influenced India’s on-field performance in England can never be definitively proved but what is certain is that in trying to understand a comprehensive history of the game in India, one needs to document the two parallel strands running side by side in cricket. Both make the game what it is, a cash-rich industry that attracts the high and mighty and brings out a kind of passion that is seductively intense and, at times, beyond comprehension. It is perhaps the only sport where the West looks to the East. The IPL—regardless of whether we like it or not—is a global template.

  How do you explain 5,000 Indians screaming ‘Sachin! Sachin!’ outside Tendulkar’s Bandra home on 15 February 2015—the day of the India–Pakistan game in the World Cup in Australia, despite the fact that Sachin wasn’t even a part of the tournament, having retired in November 2013? These are the men and women who make this game the phenomenon it is and that’s what makes a study of Indian cricket worthwhile. These fans, spread across the country and numbering in millions, encourage marketers to invest in the game and make the IPL one of the most valued franchise-based tournaments in the world. With their painted faces, these gung-ho fans are symptomatic of a new resurgent India that unabashedly expresses itself through Indian cricket on the world stage. They travel the world to support the team and aren’t overawed by any kind of impediment. In England, they outnumber the English fans at Lord’s, and at Melbourne, they are significantly more in number than Australian cricket supporters. They are the huge blue billion that give the Indian cricket industry teeth and muscle.

  From the time when players had to depend on Air India employees to bail them out when touring abroad in the 1960s to today, when the skipper signs endorsement deals of over INR 100 crores each for eight years with leading global brands, this is a story of a sport which represents the complexities of contemporary India as an aspiring global superpower.

  Before getting on with the story, it must be stated that it has never been a unilinear narrative but rather a story that has been mediated at every stage by unexpected twists and turns and is now a dynamic, everyday narrative that can never be captured in all its nuances. Further, not everything that one has seen or heard in the last two-and-a-half decades of association with Indian cricket can be backed up by incontrovertible proof. For example, which are the players included among the thirteen names that remain in a sealed envelope with the Supreme Court of India and who are yet to be investigated for corruption? Does this list include icons who have massive fan followings in the country and beyond? Will these names ever come out? Will anyone mention any of these names in the public domain based on information available from that much-abused word: ‘sources’? Besides, can such information ever be backed up with sufficient proof ?

  Most who write on cricket in India will say they know some of the names listed in the envelope. And most, as it may be, would be right. However, has anyone seen the contents of the envelope and can anyone ever put these names out in the media without the consent of the apex court? And should it not be asked why the court will not allow these names to be revealed if such a thing allows for a cleansing of the game? While administrators were pulled up and penalized for possible wrongdoing, why is there a different yardstick in place for players?

  Tendulkar, whose autobiography Playing It My Way I have cowritten, said it well. ‘Yes I was pained by match-fixing. [I] was angry, very angry, in fact. But when people asked me why did I not speak up and give names, the answer is I had no idea who was doing it and how. As a player all I was interested in was winning cricket matches for India. That’s all that mattered to me. Play the sport with distinction and integrity.’

  However, this did not pre-empt me from questioning Tendulkar over and over again. Did the team not suspect any wrongdoing and, if so, how was that even possible? And, if they did, how did they deal with it? How disappointing was it to come to terms with the fact that matches or results had been influenced, and did it ever cause a sense of disillusionment? And did he ever have a sense that the game would again be back in all its glory?

  Even after India lost to Pakistan in the Champions Trophy final, questions were asked about the defeat. Social media was abuzz that something murky had gone on behind the scenes. It is important to acknowledge that such inane speculations, based on completely unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations, will forever be a feature of Indian cricket going forward. Every unexpected result, more so if it is an adverse one, will be met with a sense of doubt by the ever-passionate Indian fan. The same fan, however, will spend a whopping £1,000 or more for a hospitality ticket the next time India faces Pakistan in an ICC event. That’s what Indian cricket is all about. It is a phenomenon that has more than a billion Indians addicted to it. No other sport comes near it in popularity and no sport will, at least in the next two decades. Its power is such that the Indian political class is eternally attracted to it and remains associated with it, even if it is from behind the scenes. Every business tycoon wants to own an IPL team, for it is the ticket to a world of glamour and media attention that thousands of crores of rupees can’t buy. It is religion to over a billion Indian men and women.

  When the Indians returned home after a dismal World Cup campaign in 2007, M.S. Dhoni had to make the Tollygunge Club in Kolkata his home for five days. He couldn’t risk going back to Ranchi. Four years later, when he won India the World Cup, all of Ranchi was his. They couldn’t wait for him to come back.

  This is the story of Indian cricket, uniquely Indian in every sense.

  PART ONE

  THE CURSE OF FIXING

  PRELUDE TO THE MODERN GAME

  It was the eve of the Champions Trophy group-stage match between India and Pakistan on 4 June 2017, and Mohammad Azharuddin, the former Indian captain and a legend of the game, was in Birmingham to do television expert duties for Aaj Tak and India Today. On 3 June, the day before the match, India Today did a special show, from opposite the Edgbaston Cricket Ground, on the high-octane clash, bringing on board multiple experts. Just as the show finished did it transpire that Azharuddin did not have tickets for the game the next day. As a former India international player who has captained India in three World Cups—1992, 1996 and 1999—it was odd that he would have to struggle for tickets. Another former player, surprised to hear this, suggested to the producers of the show and to the India Today crew that he would speak to the ICC and arrange tickets for Azharuddin. The problem, we all thought, was sorted. However, till late evening, Azhar did not have his tickets and when the player who had agreed to help was asked what happened, he looked uncomfortable. The truth was that the ICC had refused to entertain the request simply because it was Mohammad Azharuddin.

  Despite being cleared by the Indian judiciary, the allegations of his involvement in wrongdoing continued to haunt him. It is improper to go into the morality of this issue. Rather, I won’t. Was the ICC being unfair? Was it a case of different parameters for different people? And could Azharuddin and some of the others, who were implicated at the turn of the millennium, ever consider this issue a completely closed chapter?

  These are questions, yes, but there are no real answers.

  Azharuddin—one of my favourite Indian batsmen of all time— had filed a case in 2001 against the ban imposed on him the previous year, and finally got a verdict in his favour in 2012. Ajay Jadeja, the former India batsman, too, has been cleared of the match-fixing taint and so has the wicketkeeper-batsman Nayan Mongia. Legally, the trio have won the battle. The question, then, is simple—have they been cleared because there is no conclusive proof or was the entire saga blown out of proportion by an evolving 24x7 media between 1997–2000? Why should cricketers suffer the outcome of an extreme media reaction? Or is it a case of truth being concealed forever?

  Frankly, it might be a
bit of both. The Hansie Cronje-scandal, for example, could not have occurred in isolation. Hansie’s confession is in black and white. The media exposés are a fact. Books, some of them painstakingly researched, exist and will forever be out in the public domain. Testimonies were recorded, investigations conducted and men were found guilty. Something was, indeed, going on and players were surely involved. They are the principal actors in this spectacle called cricket. A senior journalist in India lost his job in the process and a few others were questioned. It was murky. Credibility was at stake and the game was vulnerable in the absence of a preemptive mechanism. Authorities were caught by surprise; instead of taking the crisis head on and try and cleanse the rotten underbelly, they turned rabbits and closed their eyes, feigning ignorance.

  Was it an overreaction of sorts—a real good story, as we understand today in the context of 24x7 media? To an extent, it perhaps was. The news magazine exposé is a case in point. While it was spearheaded by some of India’s finest journalists and done with precision and passion, it was essential for the news magazine which broke the story of match-fixing in 1997 to be able to sustain the campaign at the time. One of the founders of the magazine, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, suggested that they needed a cover story that would completely take competition by surprise. The match-fixing exposé was a brilliant story. While the magazine had India’s worst-kept secret on the cover, its singular rival had a story on Sitaram Kesri, the Congress president. The result was a no-brainer. The news magazine needed Manoj Prabhakar, the former Indian all-rounder, as much as Prabhakar needed an outlet to expose the rot. It was a marriage of convenience between the two parties. But then, did Justice Yeshwant Vishnu Chandrachud, the retired Chief Justice of India—who headed the one-man investigation commission instituted by the BCCI to investigate the match-fixing allegations—not treat Prabhakar’s testimony with the seriousness it deserved? Was a 30-minute meeting with Prabhakar good enough to get to the root of the problem? And by suggesting that Mongia disagreed with Prabhakar on the 1994 India–West Indies ODI in question, and hence there was no problem, did Justice Chandrachud approach the crisis rightly?

  However much we try and probe, this will forever remain a grey area in the history of Indian cricket. Nothing except Cronje and his death is in black and white. Testimonies were changed, the truth concealed and cricket came out of the whole issue scarred and jolted.

  Sample this: A senior journalist who is a good friend of mine and has covered the game for three-and-a-half decades was in the Caribbean in 1997 to cover India’s Test series against the West Indies. In Antigua, he was struggling for accommodation and, for a night, had no option but to request another journalist friend to bail him out. The friend in question readily agreed. Such things happen and are hardly uncommon.

  ‘Navjot Sidhu was not playing that Test match. I had done my copy and it was fairly late when I mentioned this to the friend I was staying with. It wasn’t anything earth-shattering and I just happened to mention it. But his reaction was startling. He started pacing up and down the room and looked anxious. His mood and body language had changed. And eventually he ended up making a few calls to people very late into the night,’ mentioned my friend, after much cajoling.

  Three people were sharing the apartment in Antigua. While one of them was fast asleep, my friend couldn’t sleep after seeing the reaction the piece of information had elicited. ‘At around 2.30 a.m., I could hear a phone conversation going on in the drawing room. It was odd. Why would anyone make calls that late at night? When I asked if anything had happened, I was told the story had to be passed on. It wasn’t the age of 24x7 media, but I decided to leave it at that.’

  A few months later, this incident was reported in Outlook magazine. My friend, however, hadn’t shared it with Outlook. The person speaking on the phone wouldn’t have. So was it the third journalist, whom they had suspected to be asleep, the one to provide this information? Was he an undercover investigator of sorts trying to blow the lid on corruption?

  Again, there are plenty of such questions without any real answers.

  The grapevine has it that journalists would regularly speak to bookies and pass on information. This was done in exchange of fairly decent sums of money. While betting and passing on information never amounted to fixing—it is important to make a distinction between the two—passing on team information did constitute an act of corruption.

  Stories like the above are aplenty. Almost every journalist who has covered cricket in the 1990s has his or her own story on fixing to tell. While some journalists like G. Rajaraman have written a book on the subject, others have written magazine pieces and newspaper op-eds. There are still others who know more truths about the scandal than most but continue to feel apprehensive in talking about colleagues. The Outlook exposé quotes Kamal Bindra, wife of the cricket administrator I.S. Bindra, multiple times. It is clear that she was cagey and, after a point, refused to divulge more.

  The trail turned cold, with the BCCI deciding to turn a blind eye.

  A very senior sports-marketing professional, who had set up his firm in the mid-1990s, narrated some rather fascinating stories to me at the time of writing this book. However, like most others who have shared information with me about the fixing episode, his condition was that he could not be quoted. He mentioned a friend of his from a Delhi college visiting Jadeja’s room on multiple occasions during a particular series. There was no ICC Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU)—cricket’s independent watchdog—back then, and visitors weren’t subject to any security checks in Indian cricket in the 1990s. As long as the player was comfortable meeting with the visitor, no one was stopped. And the visitor in question was a schoolmate of Jadeja. The visitor had, in turn, mentioned to the sports-marketing professional that the people hovering around the cricketers weren’t the best kind. They looked shady and it was all a kind of veil. Again, that’s where the trail dies. The veil never lifted. Not much information is available on these individuals being alluded to. Rather, what we do know is that the political class did get involved. The press conference by the activist and president of the Samata Party, Jaya Jaitley, on the corruption issue, is a case in point. Jaitley, it was reported, was standing up for her daughter, Aditi Jaitley and her friend Ajay Jadeja. Given her proximity with the defence minister of the country, Jaitley’s interference became the subject of much political gossip in the capital. But that’s where it ends. There are opinions galore, but no conclusive evidence. There is gossip aplenty, but no concrete follow-up. There’s been endless talk, but little action to show for it all.

  Since then, as I already mentioned, the judiciary has cleared Azharuddin, Jadeja and Mongia of all allegations levelled against them and the case now stands closed.

  The same sports-marketing professional mentioned above also said that one of the players he is close to—who is now a legend of Indian cricket—once told him that senior cricketers had instructed him to be careful on the West Indies tour of 1997. Sharing of rooms among players was a practice back then and the player in question was warned about his roommate and told that he should step out of the room if he saw anything suspicious. If this is indeed true, the players, too, had suspected wrongdoing. They knew, or suspected at least, that questionable activities were being conducted. Why they did not speak to the BCCI or chose to remain silent on the issue is a matter of conjecture. Was it because they were scared of stirring a hornet’s nest? Was it because they were aware that the BCCI would not look at such complaints favourably? Or was it because of that vital cog in the wheel that was missing—conclusive proof ?

  Was the BCCI aware of such things? Were Jagmohan Dalmiya, A.C. Muthiah, I.S. Bindra and Raj Singh Dungarpur, men who controlled Indian cricket at the time, interested in going into the deep end of the matter? Did the lure of television money and a fear of controversy prevent them from doing so? Could stories—which keep flying around, most of them being based on hearsay—be relied on or taken seriously?

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; Will we ever know who the actors were? With Cronje dead, all that is left of it is a cold trail. How was the process orchestrated? Was it similar to what was done in 2013 with the IPL spot-fixing scandal? Did journalists and team support staff act as conduits, as is often speculated? Finally, was the investigation under Justice Chandrachud a fair one or was the investigator keen on concluding that the glass was half full rather than half empty? Was such an approach a defence mechanism prompted by an anxious BCCI and has it hurt the game in the long run?

  It was a shady world, no doubt, and answers to these questions will forever be subjective.

  All that we can conclusively say is that match- or spot-fixing— trying to influence the outcome of a match by paying players—was a mid-1990s phenomenon in cricket. The toss-related incident involving Asif Iqbal and G.R. Vishwanath in 1978–79 at Eden Gardens notwithstanding, fixing was the by-product of cricket’s transformation into a big-money sport in India and across the world. Yes, there have been instances of players selling out in cricket in the past as well but such instances can never be equated with the attempted systematic fixing of matches that started in the 1990s. Such attempts were a product of the television and mobile phone revolution, which made sure that almost every cricket match played in the world was televised in India and followed in real time using digital technology. Real-time-information flow was the key and could only happen in the aftermath of the economic liberalization of 1991. For instance, Ranji Trophy games aren’t attractive for a bookie; they can never be. Most of them aren’t televised yet and the stakes involved aren’t as high as an IPL or an international contest.

  For me, personally, the match-fixing crisis was a deeper challenge. I had just started a PhD on the history of Indian cricket when the Cronje scandal broke out. All of a sudden, every cricket-related activity was under suspicion. No match was considered clean. Icons were turning into fallen mortals overnight. Fans were distraught and angry, and determined to not watch the game any more. Cricket just wasn’t the same. And here I was starting a doctoral dissertation on a sport that was perceived rotten. Was the dissertation on cricket or on a staged charade? Was I writing a 100,000 word-epitaph? Were the matches I was planning to comment on being played for real or were they fixed? Self-doubt began creeping in. I remember a meeting with my supervisor David Washbrook, where we discussed if there was any sense in pursuing the dissertation further. All dressed-up and nowhere to go, I was a fan and analyst impacted in the strangest manner. And, clearly, I wasn’t alone. There were thousands like me all over the world whose belief had been shaken and confidence stirred. The impact of match-fixing wasn’t simply restricted to the game and its immediate actors. The tremors were felt across the fraternity and caused irreparable damage.