Opinion A tragedy and a farce
I was in Delhi last month when the bids for the new IPL franchises were announced....
I was in Delhi last month when the bids for the new IPL franchises were announced. The over-the-top prices paid by the Pune and Kochi franchises convinced me that this was a classic case of a bubble,not sub-prime but its exact oppositea super prime bubble. Yet bubbles must burst sooner or later. I had then written that the IPL will sooner or later run against the boredom of too much cricket on TV.
There is no doubt that Lalit Modi is a genius entrepreneur. He found a gap in the market and delivered a unique combination of cricket and Bollywood,two things universally loved in India. He also proved its international appeal when he moved the IPL to South Africa. The money being made was beyond the dreams of avarice. Yet it was too much of a good thing. One could see it in the number of small and large towns which had applied for the new franchises. I could almost smell the disappointment of Ahmedabad even then. Trouble,I thought,will follow. I thought it would come from some sex scandal or drug scandal or perhaps even a match fixing scandal. The problem came from outside the game.
One clever way in which the IPL was organised was that politicians were brought into the business. In India it is impossible to make large sums of money honestly,to say nothing of dishonestly,if you dont let politicians into the act. It is a fact of life which will of course be denied. IPL had all the big players of cricket,in Parliament and out of it,included right from the start. The BCCI was squared.
Alas,the problem that has now surfaced is as much due to people squared as due to those frustrated. I have no way of knowing who said what to whom and who got what apart from what we have all read in the newspapers. Yet it is obvious that even the large sum of money paid by Kochi winners was not enough. Someone somewhere is unhappy and spills the beans. Hence the fracas on the daily news channels.
Cricket has clearly been corrupted in the process; not the players,but the game. It is probably a universal law of Indian life that whatever it is that politics touches will be corrupted. Vast sums of money are to be made merely from occupying important positions in politics,and who can resist? Thus it was that the Kochi franchise became an issue for Shashi Tharoor. He is too recent an entrant to Indian politics to be credited with any knowledge of how vicious the system can be. He is finding out pretty fast.
What is bound to spur anger is that in the week after 76 security personnel died fighting for their country in Dantewada,one of the poorest and deprived parts of India,here is another India where Rs 70 crore is just free equity. How can the Indian political system manage to hold its head up without shame if MPs and Cabinet ministers are engaged in quarrels about obscene sums of money which are being made for doing nothing,while jawans and CRPF personnel fight with inadequate equipment and training and are dying? How much easier would the fight against the Naxals be if one could be sure that there was honesty in the system?
Of course the political system will not repent. It will respond with the classic tactic of an income tax raid,not,I hasten to add,on any politicians house,but on all else. This is the power of suppression. It will silence the few who thought they could prosper in India without the help of politicians. How naïve. It would be a farce if it was not so tragic that hundreds are dying somewhere in India while the system is too busy making obscene amounts of money.
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