by James Astill
Alongside the vast potential rewards for broadcasting cricket, there were risks, which the rocketing cost of television rights had accentuated. First, the overarching focus on India’s national team made cricket broadcasting more or less a zero-sum game. The winning bidder had the hottest property in Indian television; the runner-up had no compelling sports programming at all. Second, the television companies had to deal with the cantankerous and changeable BCCI.
Third, the Indian cricket broadcaster was, in effect, taking a costly gamble on the form of the Indian team. If they had a good tournament, as in the 2011 World Cup, which India went on to win, the rewards could be fabulous. ESPN Star Sports sold ten-second advertising slots for India’s early games for a little under $10,000; it sold slots for the final in Mumbai, in which India triumphed over Sri Lanka, for almost $50,000. But when India got knocked out of a tournament early, Indian cricket fans switched channels and broadcasters could make enormous losses. After India failed to progress beyond the group stages of the 2007 World Cup, the tournament’s Indian viewership slumped by almost 45 per cent.
These problems were especially irksome to that pioneer of Indian television, Subhash Chandra at Zee TV. Between 2000 and 2006, he bid in vain for televised cricket rights on five occasions. In 2000 Zee bid $650 million for rights to the 2003 and 2007 World Cups; the ICC rejected its bid on the basis that the company was too inexperienced at sports broadcasting. In 2003 Zee bid $307 million, in 2005 more than $340 million, for four-year rights to Indian cricket. On both occasions it lost out despite, it claimed, having made the biggest bids.
In 2006, after a change of leadership at the BCCI, Zee was confident its time had come. The cricket board’s new boss, Sharad Pawar, a former chief minister of Maharashtra, was an old associate of Chandra. In anticipation of success, the company therefore launched a new sports channel, Zee Sports, and invested heavily in an existing one, Ten Sports. It then bid $513 million for five-year India cricket rights – only to lose out to a sports marketing agency, Nimbus, which bid $630 million. A few months later Zee bid $800 million for rights for the next two World Cups, along with the new-fangled T20 version of the tournament. But ESPN Star Sports scooped them up with a bid of $1.1 billion.
This was getting out of hand. At such prices Chandra thought it would be impossible to turn a profit; he had been resigned to losing up to $100m on his own bids, so desperate was he to establish Zee’s sports channels. ‘What was happening in the marketplace was completely insane,’ Zee’s head of business, Himanshu Mody, told me. And Chandra was not the man to accept that. If he couldn’t buy the board’s cricket, he resolved to make his own.
‘We said, “OK, if we’re willing to lose over $100 million where we don’t even own the intellectual property rights, why don’t we invest that sort of money in something that we do own?”’ said Mody. This made a lot of sense. A broadcaster that owned its own league could guarantee itself a good supply of cricket content and do away with the risks presented by the cricket board and India’s misfiring national team.
The idea had been around for some time. Back in 1995 Lalit Modi, a Mumbai-based media entrepreneur, had pitched the notion of a new domestic contest, which he proposed calling the Indian Cricket League. It would be a 50-over tournament, launched in partnership with the BCCI, and contested by eight city-based franchises. But the board, fearing that this might devalue international cricket, its main cash cow, said no.
Then in 2003 the Indian division of Sony proposed another new tournament, to be called EMAX, which would also involve privately-owned teams and a crash-bang 15-over cricket format. Again the board said no. And so it did the following year, when Zee proposed yet another new tamasha, a 50-over joint venture with the board, as part of its latest bid for India team rights.
ESPN, similarly frustrated by the board’s stranglehold on the cricket business, meanwhile tried to rekindle India’s love for hockey. In partnership with the cash-strapped Indian Hockey Federation, it launched the Premier Hockey League, more or less along the lines of what its rivals wanted to do in cricket. The PHL was a city-based tournament, involved foreign hockey stars, dance music and flashing lights. Its first game, in Chandigarh in 2005, drew a crowd of 35,000. But its television audience remained modest and, in 2008, when India’s hockey board were expelled by the game’s world governing body for failing to hold meaningful elections, the tournament was mothballed. The only sport that really mattered in India was cricket. Yet, for fear of being shut out of the bidding for India cricket rights, no television company was ready to challenge the BCCI’s monopoly. After his run of losing bids for rights, however, Chandra was willing to give it a try.
On 3 April, he announced the launch of the Indian Cricket League at a press conference in Delhi. It would be a Twenty20 tournament, fully owned by Zee, which would consist of six city-based teams, playing for annual prize money of $1 million. The announcement was well timed. The board was both distracted by a contract dispute with its best-paid players and cowed by India’s embarrassing exit from the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies. This allowed Chandra to present his new tournament as a patriotic effort to improve India’s cricketing stock. As he said sanctimoniously, ‘We feel that despite cricket being a passion, a religion in this country and despite it having great commercial players ... there is need for some united effort to create a talent pool.’
The press were delighted. Here was a huge cricketing story – an assault on the board’s monopoly by one of India’s richest and best-connected men. It was also possible, in the generally enthusiastic coverage of Chandra’s announcement, to detect an echo of a more profound struggle. This was between India’s dysfunctional public sector, which the cricket board had come to resemble in the public mind, and the country’s entrepreneurial private sector, whose billionaire tycoons were revered by members of India’s ambitious middle class. To cricket fans, it also recalled the war between that other disgruntled media tycoon, Kerry Packer, and the Australian board in the late 1970s. ‘Chandra does a Packer’ was the headline in the Business Standard.
The comparison was imprecise, however. Packer was able to recruit most of the world’s best players to his rebel World Series Cricket tournament by offering to pay them ten times more than they were getting from their impecunious national cricket boards. In 2007 the Indian board could pay India’s stars as much as any private broadcaster. Moreover, their main income, from advertising, was largely dependent on their continued status as India team players. There was therefore no chance of Tendulkar and his team-mates forsaking the BCCI for Zee.
Unlike Packer, Chandra sensibly sought to avoid conflict with the board. He promised that Zee would continue to bid for the rights to broadcast India games. ‘The initiative that we would launch is about a talent hunt and a talent-building process,’ he said, and added hopefully, ‘We are yet to get a reply from the BCCI. But the feedback so far is positive. While the previous regime was a control freak, things have changed now.’
It was audacious; but Chandra reckoned he might just get away with it. Private cricket leagues were nothing new in India. There were hundreds of them, run by companies and clubs, albeit on a much more modest scale than Zee was planning. He had also taken the trouble to brief Pawar about his plans and, at the time, the BCCI’s ruler had shown no sign of opposing them. But it was not long before the BCCI hit back, through the man who had tried a similar cricketing venture himself, Lalit Modi, who was now a vice-president of the cricket board. ‘The board does not give private parties permission to do anything like this,’ he said.
Undeterred, Zee recruited an ‘ICL board’. It was led by Kapil Dev, and included a clutch of other former international cricketers, such as India’s Kiran More, Australia’s Dean Jones and Tony Greig, a South African who had captained England but is best remembered for having abandoned it for Packer. Kapil’s home town, Chandigarh, said it would provide the ICL with a stadium. Many foreign stars were rumoured to be prepared to sign up for the new league. Bria
n Lara, a retired West Indian genius, did so, for around half a million dollars a year. Australia’s Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne admitted to mulling similar offers.
Tangled up in the excitement this caused was a sense that cricket, for good or bad, was about to be profoundly changed. Zee and its cheerleaders promised to globalise their tournament further – even to crack North America, a longstanding ambition of cricket impresarios. ‘This game is fast, it’s exciting,’ Kapil told me at the time, ‘It can go to America, it can go to China!’
In August, at the ICL’s official launch, Zee unrolled an impressive cast of players. They included 44 Indian first-class players and four Pakistani internationals – including a pair of aging great batsmen, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Muhammad Yousuf. Addressing them for the cameras, Kapil Dev was at his impassioned best. ‘I will back you till the last day I live,’ he swore.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Pawar and the Glory
To see the ruler of world cricket, I naturally headed for Krishi Bhavan, the home of India’s agriculture ministry. A big cuboid building, mixing Mughal red-stone colours with 1950s brutalism, it was, like most New Delhi ministry buildings, hard to enter and harder to navigate. After leaving my details in three ledgers, passing through two metal detectors and wandering the building’s mazy corridors I arrived, a minute before my appointment was due to begin, at room 120. It was from here that Sharad Pawar ruled over the agricultural livelihood of 750 million Indians and the affairs of the International Cricket Council.
It was not a very hot day, one of the last of spring. But as I was flunkeyed into the minister’s presence, I felt a trickle of sweat under my armpits. Pawar would not be the first Indian minister I had interviewed. Yet he was unusually imposing. He was a pachyderm of Indian politics, one of the biggest of the regional satraps who, over the past two decades, have come to dominate it. Few Indian politicians could match his reputation for ruthlessness in the exercise of power.
Pawar was the unrivalled boss of Mumbai, from where he had ruled his native state of Maharashtra during three separate terms as chief minister. He was a master of Indian elections. In a 44-year career, he had won 14 consecutive votes to India’s and Maharashtra’s parliaments. In recent years, he had not even bothered to campaign. He had been India’s defence minister, agriculture minister and, in 1991, had nearly become prime minister in one of only two Congress Party governments not ruled, directly or behind the scenes, by a member of the Nehru–Gandhi family. Pawar had served under Indira, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, either as a member of Congress or, more recently, as the head of his own Nationalist Congress Party, a coalition partner of Congress in both Maharashtra and Delhi.
He was a far more effective and clever politician than any of the latter-day Gandhis. If he had a weakness, it was only his reluctance to prostrate himself before them in the manner Congress required of its acolytes. He had twice been forced out of the party, most recently in 1999, when he was expelled after expressing a view that, having been born in Italy, Sonia Gandhi should not be India’s prime minister. But even after this outrage Congress needed Pawar.
There was no more formidable or enduring Indian politician. It was also said none was richer. He was rumoured to own stakes in many companies and a vast land bank in his home city of Pune. Almost any new tower block that went up on Mumbai’s coastline was said to be his. He strongly refuted these rumours.
As I entered his office, Pawar was sitting behind an austere desk wearing a grey safari suit. He pointed me to a chair, unsmiling but courteous, and asked if I would take tea and how he could help. He was hard to understand. This was partly because his English was accident-prone, but mainly because cancer had left half his face paralysed. He had therefore to squeeze his speech out of the right side of his mouth. (When he said ‘Test matches’ I at first thought he was saying ‘chess matches’.) He was also the first Indian politician I had ever heard say ‘thank you’ to the peon who brought his tea.
‘Mr Pawar, what brought you to cricket?’
He cogitated, sipping his tea, then said softly, ‘I like game.’
‘Anything else?’
Pawar appeared to reflect. ‘It keeps my association with younger generation.’
‘And I suppose that helps you politically?’
‘No,’ Pawar said firmly, with a look of benevolence on his semi-frozen features. ‘We don’t bring party and political there, but we get happiness. You see, person who is continuously in the political field also wants some changes, no?’
‘You find cricket relaxing, then?’
‘Yes. Away from your day-to-day political things if you spend some time on ground with sports players, you forget about other things.’
I saw his point. Cricket is relaxing. No doubt kabaddi and kho kho, traditional Indian games that Pawar also presided over, are relaxing too. But I still didn’t see why Pawar needed to control them.
After a long pause he concentrated his features into a frown. Something important was coming. ‘I’ll tell you frankly, sir. There are three kinds of section in the society which I have observed being ICC president. First take the English. An Englishman prefers Tests. He doesn’t like Twenty20 or one-dayers so much as Tests. I personally come into the category of an Englishman. An Englishman gives a lot of attention, gives a lot of time, to Tests because that is the real game, where you can see the calibre, the capacity of the players. So Englishmen like Tests. Me too.
‘But there are other sections of the society. Some like one-dayers. Others like Twenty20 for some evening entertainment. In India all three classes are there. To watch five days of cricket is one thing and to watch three hours is another.’
I thought I probably agreed with this. But surely there was no need for such an exceptionally busy Indian politician to take charge of world cricket in order to discover it.
In fact, Pawar’s interest in cricket was in line with a trend. In the past two decades dozens of Indian politicians have piled into the game. Arun Jaitley, a leader of Bharatiya Janata party, took over cricket in Delhi, assisted by Rajeev Shukla, a Congress politician closely attached to the Gandhi family. Shukla also presided over cricket in Uttar Pradesh; another Congressman, C.P. Joshi, India’s rural development minister, was the boss of cricket in Rajasthan. Gujarat’s cricket association answered to the state’s BJP chief minister, Narendra Modi. Another regional leader, Lalu Prasad Yadav, a former Indian railways minister, moonlighted as Bihar’s cricket boss. In all, about two-thirds of India’s 27 state cricket associations were being run by politicians, drawn from all the main political parties.
This was remarkable. Imagine if British MPs took over the running of the Football Association? Or if American politicians surged into basketball? There would be uproar. In India, the takeover was not unnoticed, but there had been little resistance to it. A recent public interest suit, filed in the high court, was a rare exception. It singled out Pawar for having ‘failed to manage his agriculture ministry due to his heading three premier cricket bodies ... resulting in excess or inadequate harvesting of variety of crops like vegetables, onions, garlic, grains, pulses, groundnuts, cotton and so on.’ Yet, by and large, the political capture of Indian cricket elicited little negative comment.
This reflects the outsized role that politicians occupy in India. Cricket is not the only sport they dominate. Praful Patel, India’s minister of heavy industry and Pawar’s main henchman, ran Indian football. The Congress MP Suresh Kalmadi was head of the Olympic Association – even after being briefly jailed over corruption allegations related to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi. Indian theatre and academia were also often run by politicians, especially in Kolkata, where the arts are unusually popular. The political scientist Yogendra Yadav attributes this ubiquity of politicians in Indian society to the abiding influence of the freedom struggle, in which political leaders displaced princes and religious leaders in importance. He calls politics India’s yuga dharma, or ‘power of the age’.
Yet Indian politician
s’ annexation of cricket is a comparatively recent phenomenon, as sudden as the entry of the native princes into the game in the early 20th century. The princes were attracted to the prestige the Raj gave to cricket. Contemporary politicians are drawn by its modern equivalents, money and fame, the keys to electoral success. By 2010 India’s state cricket associations were each receiving over $5 million a year in cash handouts from the BCCI. It would be remarkable if some of this cash did not end up in campaign war chests. Yet this is probably not the main reason Indian politicians love cricket. Rather, it is the stupendous opportunity it provides for showing off.
There is no surer way to be seen by millions of Indians than at a televised cricket match. And to be seen ruling over the proceedings, enthroned in the VVIP gallery alongside celebrity tycoons, Bollywood stars and revered cricketers, is power itself. Indians refer to this sort of high-rolling attention-seeking as ‘visibility politics’, and it is especially useful for politicians, such as Jaitley and Shukla, who are not directly elected to parliament, but rather nominated to its upper house, the Rajya Sabha. In such cases, prominence in Indian cricket is almost an alternative to electoral prowess.
Another illustration of cricket’s political potency is an increasing traffic in the opposite direction – star players heading into politics. In 2012 Sachin Tendulkar was nominated for the Rajya Sabha by Congress (many Indians considered his willingness to enter India’s corrupt polity the first ever stain on his reputation). At that time the elected lower house, the Lok Sabha, included a dozen former international cricketers, including India’s former captain Mohammed Azharuddin, for Congress, and Navjot Sidhu, a former hard-hitting opening batsman, for the BJP. They are appropriate representatives of a house in which a third of the members have been charged with criminal offences. Azharuddin was banned from cricket in 2000 for match-fixing, though he was later exonerated by India’s high court. Sidhu was convicted in 2006 of beating a man to death in a row over a parking space; though he, too, won a reprieve after India’s Supreme Court stayed his three-year prison sentence to allow him to contest an election.