Cosmetic changes like clipping Modi’s wings are not the answer
Going by the income tax raids on the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the stories about how the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) plans to clip IPL Chairman Lalit Modi’s wings, it’s not too difficult to see how things will unfold in the Modi-Shashi Tharoor saga. Tharoor may get away with a light censure given that it’s difficult to pin down how exactly his “mentoring” helped the Kochi franchisee. BCCI-IPL bigwigs have already said they’ll declare the names of the owners of all franchises; they’ll probably force Modi to agree to consult the IPL Governing Council on everything — certainly the IT investigations will act to curb his bravado. This, however, can only be the beginning of the clean-up process, not the end — and it’s difficult to see how only Modi can be blamed for the rot in the BCCI-IPL stable.
Let’s take, first, the argument that since the Kochi franchises bid the highest sum ($333.33 million over 10 years) ever in IPL’s history, Tharoor couldn’t conceivably have helped them. By contrast, it is argued that a franchise — Rajasthan Royals —in which one of Modi’s relatives has a large stake, was sold for the lowest price ($67 million in 2008) among all the IPL franchises. This is perhaps Tharoor’s best defence. But probe it a bit and it may not amount to much. For one, the question that needs to be asked is whether the franchises have the financial muscle to pay the kind of money they’ve bid for — we don’t know if it is true, but Modi says Tharoor called him up and asked him not to ask too many questions when he wanted to know who the real owners of the franchise were. Given all the fuss about Know Your Customer for banks and mobile phone firms, and about not allowing shady investments into the country, it is unacceptable that franchises be allowed if the source of their funds is not known — in fact, Modi has said that BCCI President Shashank Manohar also asked him to gloss over the ownership structure.
Readers would also do well to recall the struggling baseball club called the Texas Rangers that was bought by George W Bush in 1988. In 1990, when his father was US president (he was vice-president from 1981-89), Bush managed to convince the city of Arlington to largely fund a swanky stadium, and the profits from the increased ticket sales went almost entirely to the Rangers — the Rangers even got power to decide what land they wanted acquired and, needless to say, the value of Bush’s investments rose many times over. Whether Tharoor is in a position to swing lucrative post-bid deals for any franchisee is not the issue, what’s important is that various politicians are, and that’s why it is so important to delink sports from politics.
And while there are the obvious questions that will hopefully get answered about whether Modi’s associates/relatives got sweetheart deals from the IPL, there is little doubt the IPL is run in an opaque manner — BCCI-IPL derives its legitimacy from the fact that the government has anointed it as the custodian of cricket in the country, but its politician-administrators run it like a private firm. Long before the Tharoor fight came out in the open, Modi shocked everyone by jacking up the net worth criterion for the new bidders to $1 billion, effectively ensuring that just two firms bid for the two cities up for bid — this was reversed and the IPL Governing Council got more bids. But no one thought it problematic that Modi remained in charge even after something so blatant. And, as Shekhar Gupta has pointed out in The Indian Express, what does it say of the way the IPL is run that the owner of India Cements who is the secretary of the BCCI is also the owner of the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) franchise; that the brand ambassador of CSK was the head selector for the country’s cricket team; that the BCCI has contracted Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri as commentators and anyone who wins the broadcast rights to the IPL series has to have BCCI-appointed commentators?
Since gate money is an important part of the revenue stream for any franchisee, it is curious that no one in the BCCI-IPL set-up asked how someone could be bidding for a Kochi franchise when the city has no stadium. Till a stadium comes up, the Kochi team will be allotted different stadiums across the country for different matches — but without knowing which these were and how big they were, how did a bid take place? Once again, evidence that the bid process wasn’t as rigorous as you’d like it to be.
Or, take the agreement that the IPL had with Multi Screen Media (formerly Sony). Sony won the bid for 10-year coverage of matches for $1.02 billion in 2008. The IPL cancelled the contract the next year, citing grounds like poor quality broadcasting. Sony took the IPL to court; the IPL began discussions with other competitors and then renegotiated a new nine-year contract with Sony for $1.64 billion. This helped the IPL get more money, but no independent mechanism exists to ensure such renegotiations are fair.
It is expedient to blame all of this on Modi, but few others in the BCCI-IPL set-up have done anything about it — no one even protested when, for instance, the BCCI used its clout to ban players who joined Zee TV’s Indian Cricket League (ICL) and even got PSUs to take action against cricketers who worked for them and joined the ICL (the Delhi High Court had to intervene). If this opportunity is used to clean up the cesspool called Indian cricket, we owe a debt to Mr Tharoor for unwittingly bringing it all out in the open. For starters, an independent audit into BCCI-IPL’s functioning is called for.
