Wah ustaad, allegations in public, proof in private!

Kapil tried to come clean in the BBC Television interview by saying that “anybody in the country can go to my account and check my accounts” and implored people who had any evidence against him to “go to the police”.

He also had a message for the Mumbai police in that interview: “Is the Bombay Police so incompetent that they have in their possession hard evidence for years and still keeping quiet?

“I wish I had not played the game… I will rather commit suicide than take a bribe…,” Kapil said incoherently, his choking buried in his heavy heart.

There was nothing more that Kapil could have done. The onus clearly rests on Manoj Prabhakar and Inderjit Singh Bindra. The latter was quoted as saying on Wednesday that he would send a detailed report to the CBI “within a week or ten days” supported by hard facts and documents. Allegation in public and proof in private! After putting Kapil in the position that he now finds himself in, Bindra cannot take the CBI route. Bindra should without any loss of time seek a similar public platform to substantiate his charges. It’s unjust that Kapil and his family be condemned to an agonisingly uncertain future while the CBI working mechanism takes its time to go into the findings presented by Bindra — if and when he produces it.

And what about Prabhakar? True, he has not spilled the beans about the Øteam-mate who who had allegedly made the Rs 25-lakh offer to him to underperform in India’s Singer Cup match against Pakistan in 1994 at Colombo. But he has also not denied Bindra’s damning allegations against Kapil on CNN. It’s years since Prabhakar threatened to expose the team-mate. Since then he demanded and got government security but has only sustained his allegations and threatening to substantiate his charges without actually doing so.

Had Prabhakar been in the army, he could have been tried for treason. Forconcealing the identity of an enemy within one’s own camp almost tantamountsto a virtual abetment of a crime.

“Since I could never tolerate the quirky ways of the people in command, I never could get to serve my country better… as a cricketer, the game is foremost on my list of priorities and, if need be, I will fight to my last drop of blood to purify the system,” Prabhakar wrote in Outlook when the scandal first hit the headlines.

Years have rolled by, but not any heads. The cricketing public, the Board of Control for Cricket in India and the Indian government is still waiting for the man to keep up his promise to cleanse the system. Yet the only cleanser that he has espoused is more cosmetic than real. Beauty products are not the need of the hour of a nation scarred by betting and match-fixing scandal.

The options before Bindra and Prabhakar are quite clear: Come out with the proof and emerge as heroes or else pay the price for tainting beyond redemption an icon of our times.

Innuendos and insinuations will have to end immediately if innocents are to saved from being dragged into the cricketing quicksand.