Opinion Best of Both Sides: Gaming Act corrects a wrong

That dream didn’t last long; we weren’t to be the messiahs who would help him quit his arduous job and have a tea shop of his own. The persuasive boy would ask our help to pick players he could punt on and part with a tidy sum from his hard-earned salary. As it turned out, he would invariably lose money. He learnt about cricket’s glorious uncertainties the hard way.

Once he knew that his guess was as good as ours, most times even better, he distanced himself from the sports desk. The trust he had in our skill to read the game, the awe that his eyes once exuded in our company, faded in an instant. He soon left the job with empty pockets and a puzzling question. Was fantasy league actually a “game of skill” as the courts told the world when giving legitimacy to this incredibly profitable business venture, or was it something his parents never allowed him to do?

At a very basic level, cricket fantasy leagues are about winning and losing money when predicting the runs and wickets of individuals in a match. How can that ever be a skill-based call and not a throw of dice? Sports has a knack of proving the pundits wrong on an everyday basis. The pull and premise of sport is its volatility.

What expertise can a human have to predict Don Bradman’s duck in his last innings, India’s 1983 World Cup triumph, or Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals fairy-tale IPL story? It is the power that believers say only God can have, or a mortal with access to the Maker’s book of fate.

That’s why banning online real-money gaming is correcting a wrong in a country where gambling on sporting events isn’t legal. What is a societal taboo and not something even the courts allowed was being rampantly advertised during live matches. It needed to stop. So, how was this allowed for several years?

The roots of this misadventure can be traced to 1957, when while hearing the R M D Chamarbaugwala vs Union of India case, the Supreme Court differentiated between games of skill and chance to determine legality. The court held that competitions where skill was the predominant factor would be protected under the Constitution.

According to leading sports lawyer Nandan Kamath, this created the legal distinction between games of skill and chance. Decades later, in 2006, in K R Lakshmanan vs State of Tamil Nadu, the SC applied this precedent to hold that betting on horse racing was a game of skill. The court noted that in horse racing, the ability to evaluate the horse and the jockey was the relevant skill needed on the part of the bettor. So far, so good, relatively. In 2017, the Punjab and Haryana High Court relied on the Lakshmanan case to rule that fantasy sports were predominantly a game of skill. This was the first ruling in India where fantasy sports games were deemed to be based on skill. What was good for horses was true for humans, too.

This opened a window that cricket had been awaiting for years. The underground betting market is as old as the game in the country. Several match-fixing scandals have red-flagged the menace of millions trying to predict the runs and wickets of players — not too different from what our tea seller was doing through a legitimate app from his bonafide UPI account. The corporates saw this as an opportunity and so did offshore investors with deep pockets. A cricket-crazy nation of over a billion with free data — this was the ultimate destination of any sports betting entrepreneur, their El Dorado.

Since there was an overwhelming whiff of gambling, a veneer of legitimacy was needed. So, famous faces and credible voices in the Indian cricket system were now on the payrolls of these new dream-makers, who promised millions on every match day. India’s greatest captain, Sourav Ganguly, while being the BCCI president, would promote fantasy leagues. Virat Kohli had a stake in one. With no qualms or guilt about the constant news stories, from around the country, of real-money gambling driving cricket watchers to suicide and debt, they kept coaxing fans to loosen their purse strings and keep making fantasy teams.

And then one fine day, the government woke up and the dream was over. There are those who say that banning is no solution to any problem. They also quote the potential loss to the exchequer but are silent on statistics of gaming-related suicides and broken homes. In many cases, money meant for schooling and a healthy diet in modest homes was flowing into the coffers of gaming tycoons, with part of it reaching the government’s coffers as taxes.

The “nothing-should-be-banned” argument can work if this was a discussion about lifting the ban on sports betting, but it can’t in a debate over real-money gaming, which is just a fancy euphemism for gambling. And in a country that doesn’t allow sports betting, it deserves to be banned.

sandeep.dwivedi@expressindia.com