Nothing is quite perfect in this world and certainly not human beings, as the Mahabharata reminds us. Our tendency to latch on to bad news at the expense of good news is unequalled, and we tend to lose all balance in our judgements and miss out on the small victories of the day. Lalit Modi, the creator of the Indian Premier League (IPL), has gone on from being a public hero to becoming a public enemy and this turnabout causes us some discomfort. If only we realised that dharma in the public place is different from private morality, we might be spared the confusion.
The good Vidura tells us in the Mahabharata that in judging a king’s action he looks at results. If it benefits people, it is an act of dharma. Hence, a ruler would agree to “sacrifice an individual for the sake of a village and a village for the sake of a nation”. Vidura is half-brother and royal counsellor to the king of Hastinapur and he speaks from the experience of managing a state. In agreeing to sacrifice a person in order to save many, he has drawn a distinction between public and private dharma, a pragmatism that is uniquely suited to public policy. The English thinker, Jeremy Bentham, went on to make this criterion famous in the 19th century via his utilitarian slogan: “the greatest good of the greatest number.”
Our confusion in judging Mr Modi arises from our inability to distinguish between public and private acts. Like Yudhishthira, we get into a muddle because we bring in intentions. Mr Modi’s problem began in March when it was decided to expand IPL from eight to ten teams. The winning bids came from the Sahara Group for Pune and the Rendezvous consortium for Kochi. The affair came out in the open on April 11 when Mr Modi revealed in a tweet that among the shareholders of the Kochi group was one Sunanda Pushkar from Dubai, who had received Rs 70 crore in sweat equity and been seen in public with Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor, who had introduced her as his fiancée. There was public clamour. Who was Ms Pushkar and why did she receive stock options worth Rs 70 crore? And if this was Mr Tharoor’s share, what did he do to deserve it?
Mr Tharoor twittered back saying it was a case of sour grapes since the teams Mr Modi had backed had lost the auction. Mr Tharoor claimed that he was merely mentor to the Kochi franchise without any financial interest. Ms Pushkar explained that she was an events manager in Dubai who planned to promote the Kochi team and it was common for professionals to get sweat equity instead of salary at the start. Neither the Opposition nor the government was convinced and Mr Tharoor resigned as minister. Within three weeks, Mr Modi was suspended.
Sources close to Mr Tharoor allege that after the auction, Mr Modi tried to coerce the Kochi winners to back off, offering them $50 mn to do so. Since they were adamant, he allegedly appealed to them to shift their franchise to Ahmedabad. Mr Modi counters that 75 per cent of the Kochi franchise was from Gujarati businessmen who wanted to stage the matches in a Gujarat city. Besides, the Kochi stadium was incomplete and likely to be embroiled in environmental issues for years.
Other allegations were made against Mr Modi — he was a benami shareholder in the Rajasthan team and his relatives had stakes in the Punjab and Kolkata teams; $80 million was paid as “facilitation fee” by Sony/MSM to the World Sports Group to compensate the latter after the contract was renegotiated but the money allegedly went into dubious bank accounts. Lalit Modi’s extravagant lifestyle did not help — a private jet, a yacht, a fleet of Mercedes Benz and BMWs. But he was always a high roller. His father apparently gave him $5,000 to buy a modest car when he was a student in America, but the young man promptly gave a down payment for a Mercedes Benz. He was also convicted of drug abuse.
Mr Modi retorts that he comes from a wealthy family and what does his lifestyle have to do with it? Since he does not suffer fools, he quickly made enemies with the minions at BCCI who were consumed with envy over his success. But they admit that IPL would not have been born if the flawed Mr Modi did not possess a rare talent for execution. When faced with adversity in its second year, he shifted IPL’s entire structure to South Africa within weeks, and without a hitch. If he had not snatched autonomy from the small minds of BCCI, IPL would have ended as Ranji trophy’s pale copy where they sometimes forget to bring a ball.
The only explanation for Mr Tharoor’s supposed gains is that that businessmen in India still place great faith in the power of politicians to influence outcomes, and in this case 4.5 per cent equity was the price to ensure that their bid won. The losing consortia may also have had their political mentors. It is another reminder of the ever-present danger of crony capitalism in a free market democracy.
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How do we judge the moral failures of IPL? Vidura would balance the good against the bad. He would point to the magical nights that it brought to millions of cricket fans on TV; the new cricketing talent it unearthed; the Rs 600 crore that the government earned through service and income taxes; the staggering $4.13 bn in brand value it achieved; and the indefinable value of rare, flawless execution in a nation that is in agony over the Commonwealth Games. Vidura would then weigh this against the negative deeds of Mr Modi and unhesitatingly agree that the law must take its course, and Mr Modi should be punished for wrongful acts.
But in his personal judgement, Vidura would be ambivalent. As he would do in judging ambiguous figures like Dhirubhai Ambani, Pratap Singh Kairon, and the Pandava heroes in the epic. Let me illustrate. A few years ago, a young man on a beach in Goa jumped into the sea and saved a drowning child. A few days later, the hero confessed to a reporter that he may not have jumped if no one had been watching. He did it, he said, to impress his friends, and particularly one girl in their college party. The reporter said, “In that case, you are not such a hero!” Vidura, however, would have looked at the result and said, “But the child was saved! Dharma was done. Why worry about his motives? But, Yudhishthira would have jumped in even if no one had been looking. He would have done it as his dharma, as a duty to ahimsa, to save a life.”
It is because we confuse intentions and consequences, ends and means, that dharma is sukshma, or “subtle”, according to Bhishma. In Mr Modi’s case, we bring in his motives: He got tempted by greed; he needed to feed his ego and extravagant lifestyle, etc. We must remember: The child was saved! What difference does it make if the hero was trying to impress a girl?
Das is the author of ‘The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma’