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Journalism of Courage
This calls for a thought experiment. Just suppose the revered members of the Board of Control for Cricket in India BCCI have been called upon to take to the field in a one-day match on which rests the nationacirc;euro;trade;s pride. As the opposition gets on with accumulating what seems likely to be an insurmountable total, a message comes from the dressing room that the spinner bowling from the north end seems to be intentionally facilitating huge hits. Take him off, is the message. I cannot, sighs the BCCI skipper, what if he drags me to court for not allowing him his quota of 10 overs? Very well. A few hours later, after matters have been compounded by BCCI batsmen defending every delivery as if they were trying to save a Test with three days to go, the team reacts rather belligerently to criticism. How dare you say we batted slowly, they demand, how dare you malign us? Poor strategy, the purist would pronounce. The more cynical observer would conclude that thereacirc;euro;trade;s more to it than meets the eye.
They may not be battling it out in the middle, with passionate fans baying for blood, but the manner in which the board members have been going about the matchfixing scandal can be compared to this hypothetical situation. Pad up to every delivery, and shrug helplessly at every suggestion while reeling off excuses about legal untenability. Let us sum up the story so far. A month ago a CBI report indicated a deep nexus between some Indian cricketers including most damningly Mohammed Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja and Manoj Prabhakar and bookmakers. The BCCI in its wisdom preferred to have an independent inquiry into the CBI inquiry, which in the end practically echoed the findings of the first report. And this week the great men who control cricket congregated in Calcutta to pronounce judgment. Hence the frenzied media interest. But what do these men do? They fob off queries about the promised stringent action against the guilty cricketers and instead launch an offensive against the CBI. Waving some figures aboutBCCI transactions the CBI misquoted by a factor of ten, they say the investigating agency has lavished them with unwarranted brickbats. What have they to do with matchfixing, they ask, when it is falls in the realm of national security.
