by James Astill
Ajeet Kacker was one of these entrepreneurs. In January 1991 he was 24, the son of an army officer in Noida, a satellite city of Delhi, and ambitious to make money. While casting about for business ideas, a magazine article caught his eye. ‘It was about how people in Bombay were watching movies at home from a wire coming into their house,’ recalled Ajeet, now a very large middle-aged Punjabi, with a splendid moustache, waxed and curled upwards in salute to the family profession.
He had decided to give the new cable business a go. Ajeet therefore installed a video cassette recorder in the servant quarters of his parents’ house and offered his neighbours a selection of Hindi and English movies for a small monthly fee. To those who took up his offer he ran a copper cable, slinging it over the rooftops and threading it through the branches of trees. His business took off. But then a rival cableman bought a satellite dish and started offering his customers CNN.
This was a popular offer in Ajeet’s suburb, most of his neighbours being army men. To retain his customers Ajeet clubbed together with three friends and raised 115,000 rupees to buy his own dish, which allowed him to offer CNN too. His cable network started to grow rapidly. ‘But even so I thought this was going to be quite a small business,’ said Ajeet, chuckling at the naivety of that thought, as his tiny wife ushered in servants bearing trays loaded with ham sandwiches and cream cakes for a mid-afternoon snack.
Across India, thousands of miles of cable were being uncoiled: within a few months India’s cityscapes became a tangle of copper wires. The new cable television business was unregulated, unpoliced and dangerous: many innocent pedestrians have been electrocuted by walking into cables carelessly slung around power lines.
The new industry was probably also illegal, being in contravention of the dusty Telegraph Act of 1885, under which the Indian state claimed a monopoly on broadcasting. Yet the government, with its mind on a bigger crisis at this time, let it grow, and the cablemen found their own ways to police the industry. When one or two of Ajeet’s neighbours started freeloading on his network by hooking up to it on the sly, he put surveillance cameras on the rooftops to film them clambering around at night, then played the demeaning footage to all his subscribers.
The cablemen were making hundreds of dollars a month, even thousands. Many were local grocers who had started the business as a modest sideline, little guessing how it would grow. According to Ajeet, in and around Delhi the industry was run by Punjabis, who have a reputation in India for enjoying the good life. ‘They were all Punjabis so it was all the vices,’ he said, holding a tiny cup of syrupy coffee in his enormous hand. ‘Most of them went mad, getting into bad habits, drinking all day, womanising. Even today, show me a cable operator and I’ll know him instantly from his flashy clothes, his way of talking, his sunglasses, his holidays in Bangkok.’
Bigger entrepreneurs were impressed by this success. In 1992 a well-connected Marwari businessman, Subhash Chandra, launched the first Hindi satellite station, Zee TV. The son of a north-Indian wheat-trader, Chandra had made a vast fortune after briefly securing, under Indira Gandhi, an exclusive licence to manage India’s rice exports to the Soviet Union. When Chandra launched Zee, with seed-money from the Anglo-French titan Sir James Goldsmith, he knew nothing about the media industry. But he had sensed a hunger for entertainment among India’s swelling middle-class that Doordarshan could not sate.
Zee TV started out as a daily four-hour package of Hindi soaps and game shows. The shows were produced in India and recorded on to video cassettes which were then – to evade the Telegraph Act – flown to Hong Kong and bounced off a satellite back to India. Viewers loved them. ‘Something modern was happening on television,’ is how Ajeet remembered Zee’s arrival. By 1993 India had an estimated 70,000 cable operators and over 3.5 million cable television households.
India was not known for such growth. It was known as an economic basket case. Four decades of utopian industrial policy, administered under the ‘licence raj’, had made Indian industry lumbering and uncompetitive. ‘We have to industrialise India, and as rapidly as possible,’ Nehru had declared in 1951. But by 1991 India’s main exports included iron ore, cotton and artisanal goods, such as jewellery and leather-work, things India had been exporting for centuries. Because it made so little that anyone else wanted to buy, India was periodically on the edge of insolvency, with too little foreign exchange to pay for its essential imports, such as oil, which India has little of. In 1991, just as the satellite revolution was taking off, this led to the mother of all balance of payments crises, for which Saddam Hussein’s invasion was also partly to blame.
The war sent the oil price soaring. It also sent thousands of Indian migrant workers scurrying home from the Middle East, which caused a steep fall in the dollars and dirhams they had been sending home. By the time India turned to the IMF for an emergency bailout, it was technically bankrupt, with less than a billion dollars in reserve – not enough to cover a fortnight’s oil imports. Knowing the IMF would demand reforms in exchange for its money, Narasimha Rao, the Congress leader of a weak coalition government, appointed a respected technocrat, Manmohan Singh, as finance minister. He instructed Singh to do whatever was necessary to refloat the economy.
Little was expected of him. Singh was better known as an honest and biddable civil servant than for any bold thought or action. But, in that time of crisis, he announced the reforms demanded by the IMF and then went further, slashing tariffs, scrapping licences in some industries and dismantling barriers to foreign investment. The licence raj was largely dismantled. In July 1991 Singh announced many of these changes in his budget speech to parliament. As he drew to a close, in his whispery academic voice, the meek-mannered Sikh sounded a sudden bullish note. ‘No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come,’ he said, quoting Victor Hugo. He predicted a new course in Indian history, the rise of an economic giant.
For some investors, Indian and foreign, the cable revolution was an augury of that change. It was a glimpse of the enormous potential in India’s hitherto constricted consumer market, and of the animal spirit of Indian enterprise so evident among Indians abroad. Rupert Murdoch, who bought Asia’s biggest satellite television network, Star TV, in 1993, derided India’s cable operators as ‘pirates’; but also ‘splendid entrepreneurs ... pioneering the market’.
In one impudent spurt they had laid the foundations for India’s modern media industry. They had also, in a spaghetti-mess of copper cable, provided much of its infrastructure. But this opening would not remain unchallenged for long. Within the state monopolist, Doordarshan, a jealous rage was brewing, which would boil over at the prospect of losing control over its richest prize, Indian cricket.
Until the late 1980s Doordarshan had actually charged the BCCI a fee to broadcast cricket. But Dalmiya was not slow to grasp the implications of competition in Indian broadcasting. In 1992, even before it was obvious who owned what on India’s airwaves, the BCCI sold the rights to a forthcoming India–England cricket series to a private broadcaster, Trans World International (TWI), the television division of the sports marketing giant IMG. TWI paid $600,000 for the rights then flipped them to Doordarshan, to the state broadcaster’s chagrin, for a million dollars.
A few months later another Dalmiya fiefdom, the Cricket Association of Bengal, attempted something similar. It invited Doordarshan to bid for the rights to a one-day tournament, the Hero Cup, which it was organising to commemorate its diamond jubilee. Unimpressed with Doordarshan’s bid, the CAB sold the rights to TWI, for a minimum of $550,000.
As the sand slipped under their feet, Doordarshan’s controllers hit back. Citing the Telegraph Act, the state broadcaster announced that only the government had the right to carry out live telecasts in India and, further, that allowing foreign companies to do so was a threat to national security. Doordarshan’s spokesman labelled India’s cricket authorities ‘anti-national’.
In a hasty effort to appease the state broadcaster, Dalmiya offered it a share of
the rights with TWI. But Doordarshan was not fighting for equality. Its director-general, Rathikant Basu, demanded the BCCI recognise the state broadcaster’s exclusive right to film and broadcast the Hero Cup in India, and, what was more, pay a fee of 500,000 rupees per match for the service. Dalmiya refused, thereby sparking a protracted legal battle, which would show the Indian state at its most maddening and self-destructive.
On 7 November 1993 the Hero Cup opened in Kanpur, with a handsome Indian victory over Sri Lanka. Yet Indian cricket fans had to wait until the next day’s newspapers for news of the game. With Doordarshan and the CAB still at each other’s throats, TWI had been prevented from filming it, and the state broadcaster and All-India Radio were enforcing a blackout. Cricket lovers in the other participating countries were also deprived of coverage of a tournament that, in some cases, their local broadcasters had already paid for.
The farrago got worse. At the request of India’s information ministry, TWI’s production equipment was impounded by customs in Bombay, even though India’s finance ministry had already cleared it for entry. Biting his lip, one of TWI’s bosses, William D. Sinrich, told Indian journalists, ‘At a time when your country is opening its economy, this act of the government is far from encouraging.’ At Dalmiya’s pleading, Calcutta’s high court ordered Bombay’s customs officials to release TWI’s kit. But the customs men simply ignored the court’s order.
Three Hero Cup games had now been played and TWI was facing mounting losses. Calcutta’s cricket bosses appealed to a higher authority, the Indian Supreme Court: it ordered Bombay customs to release TWI’s equipment but, dodging the bullet, called on the Indian government to resolve the more fundamental dispute over the status of Doordarshan’s jaded monopoly. Within hours, the issue was back in the Supreme Court, and this time the bench ruled that TWI must be allowed to film and telecast the remaining games. Yet, in a typical Indian fudge, the judges granted this permission strictly and exclusively for the cricket. TWI was forbidden to point its cameras at anything off the field, including the spectators.
India had been made to look ridiculous. Foreign broadcasters had lost money because of its inability to enforce not merely a high-profile contract but the rule of law among its own feuding institutions. Many questioned what this would mean for the forthcoming 1996 World Cup, which was scheduled to be held on the subcontinent. Dalmiya had sold the TV rights to that tournament to another foreign company, an American sports media firm called WorldTel, for $10 million – ten times the fee for the previous World Cup, held in Australia and New Zealand. Yet would it, too, be forbidden to film the crowd? With foreign broadcasters breaking off negotiations, WorldTel’s boss, Mark Mascarenhas, declared that ‘irreversible damage has already been done’ to India’s reputation in sports media. Others foresaw an even worse outcome. Business India feared it might ‘put the clock back on the entire reform process of the Narasimha Rao government’.
If that was an exaggerated fear, the mess certainly showed how hair-raising doing business in the new liberalised India could be, especially for naive foreigners. No politician could bring India’s disputatious institutions to heel. Nor even, as the conflict between the finance and information ministries had shown, could the government be relied upon to pursue a single clear policy.
To prevent another damaging legal battle, Mascarenhas did a judicious deal with Doordarshan, giving it broadcast rights for the World Cup. But again the BCCI stirred the pot. It announced that it had sold five-year television rights to cricket in India to TWI and the American sports cable channel ESPN for $30 million. Doordarshan’s boss, Basu, was incandescent: ‘Who created Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev?’ he chuntered, as the dispute headed back to the Supreme Court. But this time its verdict, delivered in February 1995, was crushing. The court ruled that the Telegraph Act was ‘intended for an altogether different purpose’. India’s airwaves were public property and open to all under the right to freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution.
Indians often console themselves that, when every other branch of their state fails, their judges will save them. They often do, even if, as TWI had discovered, they can take their time over it. But this was a momentous reform, and it was no coincidence that cricket, because of its enormous advertising value, had helped drive it. The growth in India media that would follow, in the view of the historian Boria Majumdar, would ‘forever remain a gift of Indian cricket to the Indian nation’.
In February 1996 the World Cup came to the subcontinent for the second time in less than a decade. But the contrast with the previous rendition, in 1987, was profound. That tournament, the first outside England, was praised for its careful organisation and good-spirited crowds. It was a fine advertisement for India’s unique cricket culture. But the 1996 tournament was held in a different India – richer, more ambitious and belligerent – and the tournament reflected that.
It was blighted from the start, with Australia and West Indies both refusing to play qualifying matches in Sri Lanka for fear of Tamil Tiger terrorists. India’s cricket bosses were livid.
There was further background to this ill will. The previous year three of the Australians, Mark Waugh, Shane Warne and Tim May, had accused the former Pakistani captain Salim Malik of trying to bribe them to throw a Test match in Karachi. This was the first big clue to something seriously wrong in cricket: a culture of match-fixing – of throwing matches in response to inducements from illegal Asian bookmakers, who were also finding rich pickings in cricket’s growth.
Having received threats from Pakistan – where the World Cup final was to be played – some of the Australian players were reluctant to participate in the tournament. The Indian board, in flat denial over the match-rigging claims, accused them and their West Indian allies of nursing a vendetta against the Third World. It took Sir Clyde Walcott, the gracious Barbadian head of the ICC, to point out that the West Indian countries were also of the Third World.
The arrangements for the tournament were often shambolic. An ostentatious opening ceremony at Eden Gardens flopped after a gentle breeze disrupted its expensive laser show. The tournament’s protracted early stages, designed to maximise advertising revenues, exhausted the players with arduous travel and viewers with too much meaningless cricket. Worst of all, the Indian crowds, so delightfully ‘colourful’ in 1987, were now bursting with belligerent nationalism.
When India met Pakistan in the quarter-finals at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, the Pakistanis were jeered by the Bangalore crowd, hitherto known as one of India’s most informed and orderly. Many feared that if India lost the game there would be a riot. But India won, so passed through to the semi-finals against Sri Lanka at Eden Gardens. And there the feared riot ensued: as India struggled to 128 for eight, chasing a Sri Lankan score of 251, the crowd reacted with fury. Spectators rained plastic bottles on to the pitch and started fires in the stands. As smoke drifted across the outfield the game was called off, and awarded to Sri Lanka by default. Indian cricket was disgraced.
Dalmiya’s plans for the tournament did not all go awry, however. The 1987 World Cup had been a commercial failure, with the BCCI losing $40,000 on it. But the 1996 rerun was a bonanza, reported to have returned a $50 million profit. Every facet of the tournament was flogged for advertising: the Indian tobacco company Wills paid $12 million for the naming rights.
This was a sign of how India was changing. Just as Manmohan Singh had predicted, opening India’s economy had unleashed the dynamism exhibited by India’s drunken cablemen. It had also brought foreign companies flooding into India, eager to claim terrain in one of the world’s biggest and still largely untapped markets for consumer goods. The 1996 World Cup was a global advertisement for this change. It was perhaps most conspicuous in a row between two famous rivals, Coca Cola and PepsiCo, which was more memorable than almost any of the cricket.
Coke had fled India in 1977 after refusing a demand from the government to divulge its secret formula. It returned in 1993 as a result of the new forei
gn investment rules. Pepsi had arrived in 1988 but, under the old rules, was saddled with a local partner until 1994. As the World Cup approached, both companies were therefore thirsty for a share of a vast market for fizzy drinks and saw cricket, the biggest draw in Indian media, as the ideal means to promote themselves.
Pepsi moved first, signing up India’s cricket captain, Mohammed Azharuddin, its boyish star Tendulkar and his childhood pal and teammate Vinod Kambli for its ads. Though by no means the first campaign to use cricketers, this was by far the glitziest, awarding the cricketers a status previously reserved for film stars. According to Anuja Chauhan, who ran the campaign as creative head of the advertising agency JWT, the aim was to piggy-back on the India team’s recent success. ‘Cricket was the one thing in which we had done well internationally,’ said Ms Chauhan (which goes to show what most Indians know about hockey). ‘That’s why cricket was cool. It was very tied up with our Indian self-esteem. Everyone stood taller, everyone walked with a bigger strut, when India played well.’
Pepsi also bid to be the ‘official soft drink’ of the World Cup. But Coke won that right with an offer of $3.6 million. ‘Pepsi was devastated’, said Ms Chauhan. ‘We’d been investing in cricket for quite a while and now Coke had just swept us aside.’ Her response, which has become a case study in ambush marketing, was to devise a campaign that poked fun at Coke for precisely the ‘official’ status that Pepsi had also sought. ‘Officially,’ a plummy-voiced narrator said archly, as one advert opened with footage of Pepsi’s paid-up stars flinging themselves around a cricket pitch, ‘cricket is played in whites, at a leisurely pace. The official players are gentlemen, of restraint, who have to drink the official drink ...’ Pepsi’s cricketers were then shown turning their noses up at a cup coloured Coca Cola red, in favour of an ice-encrusted bottle of Pepsi. ‘Pepsi – nothing official about it,’ the narrator concluded. ‘Nothing official about it,’ Tendulkar chimed in.