IPL baby, IPL bathwater

File photo of BCCI headquarters in Mumbai | Getty

Responding to the charge last year that the BCCI was forced to pull IPL out of India to South Africa because the government was incapable of providing security, Home Minister P. Chidambaram had made a characteristically sharp comment. IPL, he said, is a very shrewd and successful mix of cricket and entertainment. There is no reason to bring politics into it. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened over these past two weeks.

Politics has not just got mixed up with cricket, it is now threatening to overwhelm and damage it. Our headlines have been dominated by the stories of raids and leaks even while two semi-finals have been played, to packed houses. Tomorrow is the final of what has been, at least on the cricket ground, a wonderful tournament. It would be tragic if just because of the shenanigans of a chosen few who have operated for six years as if they own the game, IPL itself were to acquire a bad name. It is a wonderful product, a brilliant, new all Indian brand that we have come to feel proud of and which has attracted both envy and admiration in the entire cricket-playing world. It has generated unprecedented wealth for the game, and also distributed it among a very large number of cricketers. Thousands of other jobs have been created. Even more importantly, though, see what it is doing for Indian cricket. New stadiums and world-class facilities are coming up all over the country from Bangalore to Dharamsala, Chandigarh to Chennai and now on to Kochi, funded by the surpluses of IPL.

The problem with Indian cricket or IPL is not commercialisation or some new godawfully decadent hedonism that is corrupting the game. The game is, actually, in really fine fettle. Better than it has ever been in our history. India, today, is ranked at the top in Test cricket, at number two in ODIs, and already has one T20 World Cup in its cupboard. This has been achieved in the past three years and is no fluke, as our steady climb in Test and ODI rankings shows. Our bench strength is better than ever in our history, and our cricket is held in respect and awe it never commanded.

So what is the problem? It is a simple and yet a serious one. And it is mostly political. This phase in Indian cricket began with the ascent of Sharad Pawar as the BCCI president, demolishing Jagmohan Dalmiya. Mind you, the rise of Indian cricket had already begun under Dalmiya, marked by our stellar performances against Steve Waugh’s supposedly invincible Australians. The new clout of Indian cricket reflected in his election as the first Indian ICC president. But he had run the board at his own authoritarian whim and made powerful enemies drawn from the entire political spectrum. They wanted revenge the moment power changed hands in BCCI. What complicated the situation was the fact that this also coincided with the arrival of UPA-I, and with it the exalted new stature of Sharad Pawar in national politics. It was the first time that a top-ranking politician, in fact a senior cabinet member packing the added clout of a major coalition partner, took over BCCI.

Dalmiya was now left to fight all kinds of demons, including criminal cases filed by BCCI. In that feudal, winner-takes-all frenzy, the rest of the cricketing establishment rallied around Pawar, sinking all difference of politics and principle. So you saw Sharad Pawar, Rajiv Shukla, Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi, C.P. Joshi, Anurag Thakur (Dhumal junior), Lalu Prasad quite literally on the same page, preening for the camera. They were joined by others, some purely from the world of business (N. Srinivasan of India Cements, now board secretary, owner of Chennai Super Kings and a Lalit Modi antagonist), some from that peculiar, sleazy but heady world that sits on the cusp of business and provincial politics, like Lalit Modi, and some from absolutely nowhere, like indeed the current BCCI president, Shashank (who is he?) Manohar. It is an aside, but an important one, so let me mention it. In October 2004 when Dalmiya was riding high mainly on India’s on-field successes, and needed to be put in his place, the groundsman in Nagpur had produced a green top for the India-Australia Test (when India were trailing 0-1 with only one more Test to go) so fast-bowler friendly, that one look at it on the morning of Day 1 and Captain Sourav Ganguly got such a stomach-ache that he couldn’t play. Of course India lost within four days, and Australia had conquered their last frontier, winning a series in India. Dalmiya was brought down a peg too. Of course Shashank Manohar’s Nagpur has not produced another wicket like that since. There isn’t very much more a mere mortal can say on this, but on some day of reckoning a distinguished gentleman from Nagpur would have to answer a tough question or two on this.

This slice of our cricketing history is relevant because it tells you what a vicious political game goes on for power in the BCCI. With the rise of an all-powerful Pawar, all dissent, competition, internal political challenge, democracy vanished. Along with it disappeared any semblance of checks and balances. The new cricketing establishment became a cosy, closed, exclusive club whose members struck out together in a display of loyalty not expected from our political class. BCCI in fact, has now emerged as India’s only genuinely bipartisan political body, or rather the only multi-party parliament that functions without adjournments, albeit with no opposition. So close is this political core group that the occasional differences, if at all, have only arisen between the non-politicians like Modi and Srinivasan, for example.

It was this comfy club to which Shashi Tharoor sought an entry with such a touching sense of entitlement. And you could not really blame him. He went to the same parties, was a natural fit in the same socio-political network and, if anything, was better than them at playing cricket. His problem was impatience that led him into a mutually self-destructive school-kid-like fight with Lalit Modi. The collateral damage was, however, much greater. The fight broke the five-year omerta (apologies for drawing from the mafia’s vocabulary, no offence meant) within the cricketing establishment.

This is what invited the government into the affairs of Indian cricket. Armies of taxmen are now raiding anybody with anything to do with cricket as if they have busted the underground network of Dawood Ibrahim or discovered the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Toiba. There are weird demands to ban IPL, nationalise BCCI. Even usually sensible people are saying BCCI should be made a statutory but autonomous body. All of this is dangerous for India’s cricket and must stop. Indian cricket has never been in better shape. IPL is the finest new Indian brand of global value. The crisis in BCCI and IPL is something we are familiar with in the corporate world. It is a crisis brought upon by a combination of disastrous corporate governance and lack of transparency. It is a bit like Satyam, and for a government that converted that disaster into an opportunity, tossing all knee-jerk demands for nationalisation, this is one more such opportunity.

BCCI does not need government control or oversight. It needs corporatisation so it is brought into a transparent, tax-paying, tax-audited, regime where it is made to declare quarterly results and file regulatory compliances. And as we set about instituting that fundamental reform, Pranab Mukherjee would do well to call a halt, or at least take a strategic time-out, on this ridiculous televised tamasha which is best described as T20 of tax raids.