by James Astill
None of India’s politician-cricketers has obviously distinguished himself in politics. Yet they have at least greatly improved the quality of the parliamentary cricket team – as I discovered, humiliatingly, when I played against them for a scratch foreign press side. On a sizzling day in Delhi, Chetan Chauhan, Sunil Gavaskar’s former opening partner and now a BJP politician, hit our lollipop bowling for a century.
But why would Pawar bother himself with cricket? I still didn’t get it. He had no obvious shortage of money or fame.
‘How do you find time for cricket?’ I asked him.
Pawar replied patiently. ‘I take half an hour a day on telephone or internet for ICC work. That’s easy enough. And when I was BCCI president, one full day in a month, mostly on telephone, giving instructions.’
For most of his political career Pawar had shown little interest in the game, despite being the son-in-law of a former Test player, Sadu Shinde. But in 2001, his interest in the game freshly awakened, he defeated India’s former captain Ajit Wadekar in a leadership election for the Mumbai Cricket Association. He then set his sights on the BCCI, which was at the time ruled by Jagmohan Dalmiya.
Dalmiya had finished his term at the ICC in 2000 and returned to India to resume control of the BCCI. He was president from 2000 to 2004, and when his term was up he sought to install a loyal proxy, a Congress politician called Ranbir Singh Mahendra, to preside on his behalf. Pawar – who, like Dalmiya, was well known for never having lost an election – stood against Mahendra.
It was one of India’s more controversial polls. To ensure his man won, Dalmiya voted for him three times, once on behalf of each of the cricket associations over which he presided. Yet the vote was tied, whereupon Dalmiya voted a fourth time, having claimed a presidential right to a casting vote. Mahendra was thereby declared president of the BCCI; Pawar was livid. With backroom assistance from Lalit Modi, who had recently emerged as the boss of Rajasthan cricket, Pawar forced another leadership election the following year, and this time won a crushing victory.
His rule over Indian cricket began with the release of a stirring document entitled: ‘The Cricket Board in the 21st Century – A Vision Paper’. It promised to make the board, in all its dealings, open, fair and efficient: ‘The buzzword should be transparency,’ it read. ‘There can’t be a better start to the new-look board than resolve that everything we do from here on will be transparent and in the game’s and public interest, be it election or allotting television rights or the team selection.’ It was an impressive message. And then Pawar went after Dalmiya.
The board accused Indian cricket’s former strongman of embezzling funds from the 1996 World Cup, although the allegations were later withdrawn. He was also forced, under pressure from West Bengal’s communist rulers, to relinquish his main fiefdom, the Cricket Association of Bengal. After yet another legal battle, Dalmiya nonetheless stood for re-election there, and won easily. The state’s chief minister called this a ‘victory of evil over good’.
Having achieved almost everything he had set his mind to, Pawar told me he was almost through with politics, cricket and otherwise. ‘This year, as of today, I will complete 44 years without single day’s break,’ he said. ‘How long should one work? I don’t want to work. I am trying to disassociate myself from these political things and concentrate on sports, cultural activities, reading.’
Yet Pawar was – that very day – rumoured on the Delhi grapevine to be plotting to bring down the government (of which he was, of course, a member) in a final bid to become prime minister. I wondered how Mumbai’s big man felt about having such a spicy reputation.
‘In retirement, will you, er, also be spending much time on your business activities?’
Pawar hardly moderated his kindly tone. ‘I have no business interests at all, except some agriculture,’ he said. ‘My family, yes. My younger brother now he is retired but his son is looking after one major newspaper, with 1.8 million circulation ... so my family also is there ... but I am only person in the family who doesn’t have association with business ...’
‘You are often said to be the richest politician in India.’
‘I also read and I enjoy that,’ said Pawar, just perceptibly smiling on the unfrozen side of his face.
‘You don’t deny it?’
‘Why should I challenge anyone making foolish statement? Why challenge? Let’s enjoy.’
‘You mean it’s not true?’
‘I said it’s a foolish statement. Let’s just enjoy.’
‘You are said to own most of Pune, for example. Is that true? Do you have large real estate interests in Pune and Mumbai?’
‘Not even one ... in Pune, in one company, I have small interest, and that for many years, but except that, no.’
Even after this impertinence, Pawar betrayed not a twitch of impatience. He was calm, his voice untroubled, soothing, like a kindly grandfather, even though the interview had already stretched to an hour, which was twice the time the ruler of world cricket would be devoting to the game that day. So I thanked him and left the ministry.
India’s democracy is justly praised. While neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh have had coups and dictators, India has maintained the democratic rituals except during a brief pause, Mrs Gandhi’s two-year state of emergency in 1977. It is the great achievement of modern India, a source of stability in a vast and diverse country, and a dramatic break with an autocratic past. But take a closer look at the way power is actually wielded in India and that break becomes less obvious. Indian politics remain, as they always have been, feudal, vindictive and corrupt. And India’s pseudo-democratic cricket politics exemplify this.
As India’s princely patrons withdrew from cricket in the 1960s and 70s, they were typically replaced by ambitious local businessmen, such as Dalmiya, who could afford to play cricket politics as an unpaid hobby. Niranjan Shah, the boss of cricket in Saurashtra, a state formed out of Nawanagar and other former principalities, was another example. The Saurashtra cricket association was at first run by princes including, during the 1960s, our old friend Shatrusalyasinhji. But in 1972 the pet-loving Jam Sahib was deposed by an uprising of local students and businessmen, led by Shah. A resident of Rajkot, where Ranji was schooled, Shah was an undistinguished first-class cricketer from a wealthy Jain business family, which owned a newspaper in the city. He vowed to make the cricket association democratic. But four decades later he was still in charge of it.
I arranged to meet Shah at his suite in a luxury Mumbai hotel, where he was staying while on a business trip from Rajkot. He was a short 66-year-old, dressed in surprisingly blue denim jeans and a dapper Oxford shirt. He greeted me with a wide amphibian smile and ushered me to a chair.
His longevity had made Shah one of the most powerful men in Indian cricket. He was a vice-president of the BCCI, its former secretary, chairman of the umpiring subcommittee and a former IPL vice-chairman. At the time of our meeting he was also in the running to be the BCCI treasurer, overseeing the finances of an organisation estimated to be worth around $1.5 billion. No wonder people called him the badshah – the king – of Indian cricket.
I started by asking Shah about his long-ago freedom struggle. He nodded gravely. ‘At that time all the ruling class were controlling cricket, the maharajas, just because they were the ruling class. You have heard the name of Shatrusalyasinhji?’
I nodded. ‘Well, he was a good player,’ Shah said. ‘But some other good players, who were not princes, were not being chosen for the team, so we thought the time has come for us to be given equal opportunity. The maharajas, they were decent players, but maybe we were better, if we had a chance. So I gathered some industrialists and said, “We must fight the system! There is no proper thing going on and this is how we must change the whole thing!” And because I had a newspaper I had a voice.’
‘It was a democratic uprising?’
‘I was wanting more democracy, that’s right,’ Shah said cautiously. ‘But people might say
today I have been controlling since 38 years, and whether that is democratic or not I don’t know.’
I agreed they might say that. Shah was by my reckoning India’s longest-reigning cricket boss. He had recently beaten the previous record set by the Rungta family that had ruled over Rajasthan’s cricket until Lalit Modi seized control of it in 2005.
‘Yes, they might say that. I don’t know,’ Shah continued. ‘But before that there were five or six people controlling Saurashtra cricket. Now there are two or three hundred members of the association, and as long as my members want me, as long as I have a majority, I am ruling. And I feel my members are happy.’
Shah was good at keeping his members happy. Membership of the Saurashtra cricket association conferred high status in Rajkot, and a regular supply of international match tickets. The association was a closed shop – no new member had, by Shah’s admission, been admitted for over two decades. In a semblance of democracy, one of the association’s senior officers once told me, elections were held every six years, at which a third of the members were voted out. But most were then voted back in again.
Many of the association’s lucky members were rumoured to be Shah’s friends, relatives and employees. I asked him if this was true.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘... maybe 15 or 20 only. I don’t know. And employees, hardly, I don’t think there are many.’
It would be hard to check: the association’s membership list is not publicly available. Neither are its annual accounts. But Shah was good enough to give me several issues of these – stamped ‘private and for members only’. They revealed that Shah presided over six of the association’s nine committees, including those concerned with selection, discipline and finance. ‘We do have a governing council,’ he admitted. ‘But generally people depend upon me.’
The accounts also included several gushing profiles of Saurashtra’s captain, Jaydev Shah, who happened to be the badshah’s son. Naturally, the father was very proud. ‘I don’t want to boast,’ Shah said. ‘But my son as a captain is a totally independent persona and he has no liking or disliking of any player and I think the players and selectors respect him.’ No doubt this was true and to his credit. But the seasonal averages printed in the association’s accounts also suggested that Jaydev was consistently Saurashtra’s worst batsman.
His career batting average was 28, about half what the best batsmen expect to average on the flat pitches and against the mediocre bowling common in domestic Indian cricket. Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli both averaged over 60. Yet Jaydev nonetheless had a knack of picking up contracts in the IPL, having at various times been on the books of the Mumbai, Jaipur and Hyderabad teams, even though he had not actually played a game for any of them.
Whatever his merits as a captain, it is inconceivable that Jaydev would have enjoyed such a fine career if his father hadn’t, in effect, owned the shop. Such nepotism is a common feature of Indian cricket, which also recalls its princely past. Another beneficiary is Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, son of Bihar’s cricket boss, Lalu. At the age of 12 Tejashwi, who was said to be an all-rounder, was honoured with Bihar’s highest award for sporting merit. It was bestowed upon him by his mother, Rabri Devi, who was at that time chief minister of the state (she was holding the fort for Lalu, who was in prison on corruption charges at the time).
In 2008 Tejashwi’s skills were further recognised when he was signed up by the Delhi Daredevils. He remained on their playing staff for five years – making him the longest-serving Daredevil – though he never actually made the team. In fact, he has only played a single first-class game, for Jharkhand, Bihar’s neighbouring state, in which he scored 19 in the second innings and took no wickets. ‘Lalu had no interest in cricket except to promote his own son,’ another senior cricket-politician told me. ‘He was always pestering Sharad Pawar to get him picked for India. He thought cricket was like politics – that just as you can get a ticket to fight an election, so you can get a place in the team.’
The politics of Saurashtrian cricket are time-worn – but the economics have changed a great deal in recent times. At the start of his reign the badshah had to beg money from local businessmen to pay his side’s travel expenses. ‘Team would go by train. Not have nice hotel. There was hardly any money from board,’ he told me.
But during the 1990s the television lucre started to flow. In 2000, according to its annual accounts, the association received $470,000 from the BCCI as its annual share of television and other revenues. By 2010 this annual dividend had risen to $6.6 million.
Shah was using this money to build a new 30,000-seater cricket stadium outside Rajkot. He referred to this construction as the ‘Dream Project’, and the webpage of the Saurashtra Cricket Association described it thus:
It was a dream, it was an ambition and it was an irresistible urge and aspiration of Niranjan Shah to give to the city of Rajkot, and in turn, to the cricket fans and sports loving people of Saurashtra region an ultra-modern and state-of-the-art cricket stadium.
The dreamer Niranjan Shah firmly believes what is stated by Karen Stevens:
‘You can be all of the things you dream of being, if you’re willing to work at them and if you’ll believe in yourself more. Be the person you were meant to be. Everything else will follow; your dreams will come true.’
With such belief in dreaming and realising the dream, Niranjan Shah and all at SCA have been endeavouring very hard, persistently and devotedly to realise, to achieve what is dreamt and aspired.
‘So are you going to name it after yourself then?’ I asked. ‘Will it be the Niranjan Shah Stadium?’
Shah smiled and shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said, and then added, ‘Let’s see, I am not very keen on these things.’
In fact Shah wanted to leave more than a poxy stadium as his legacy. He wanted to change cricket – specifically by ending the primacy of international contests, one of the game’s most distinctive and attractive features.
‘At the moment we are getting money only when there is an international game,’ he said, sounding almost resentful. ‘So I think IPL is the first step on this issue. Like in baseball, America is not worried whether other country is playing or not. Because cricket is a major game here, so we should not depend on whether England or South Africa come to India to get money. Why not play between two states? Maybe we call ourselves Saurashtra Lions or something. We can get 40,000 people to that game and bring revenue from TV. That’s what I want to see – cricket has to go to the level of baseball of America. We are one billion people, three times bigger than America. We should not be dependent on whether this or that country comes.’
‘And international cricket?’
‘International cricket, that is OK.’ Shah said dismissively. ‘As long as people like it. But it should not be our core thing because at the moment all earning is through international cricket only. No earning is through our local competition. That’s why we are losing a lot of money.’
Losing money? That was madness. The BCCI was as rich as a Mughal emperor. It was building new cricket stadiums by the dozen. Yet what Shah was proposing made perfect sense to him: it was swadeshi in cricket, a continuation of India’s great struggle. ‘ICC is trying to control us. That’s my feeling,’ Shah explained. ‘Most of the other boards do not like that we make so much money and that their revenue depends on whether our team goes to play them. So the whole thing has been reversed. For cricket the only market in the world is India. The market is here. So we will control cricket, naturally.’
I hoped this was the badshah’s personal opinion. But it probably was not. He was not known for original thinking or for sticking his head above the parapet. In Saurashtra, he was a feudal lord, but at the BCCI headquarters in Mumbai Shah had for decades played the part of a loyal retainer to bigger men, flitting between Dalmiya, Bindra and Pawar, ingratiating himself to each in turn. The badshah was not an outlier at the BCCI. He represented its majority view.
The Dream Project is a couple of m
iles outside Rajkot, next to a railway line running south to the Indian Ocean. When I showed up there one sunny weekday morning, it was, though still under construction, hosting a 50-over friendly between Saurashtra and Baroda. The stadium was almost empty. There were just a few workers in yellow crash helmets sitting in one stand and some officers of the cricket association in the pavilion. A freight train rattled by, bound for a large oil refinery outside Jamnagar; the clanking of its carriages echoed around the empty stands.
The Project is a smooth concrete bowl, not unattractive as concrete stadiums go. It carries, too, the stamp of its dreamer’s ambition – in the form of a perfect replica of the spaceship-like press box at Lord’s. I made for the pavilion, where I found, sitting alone, a middle-aged spectator with thick spectacles and a mop of lightly hennaed hair. This was Haresh Pandya, one of Rajkot’s few English-language journalists. He had kindly agreed to be my guide to Saurashtra.
We sat together for a while, watching the play. Baroda were batting second and struggling, several wickets down, chasing an impossible target. The sound of mistimed thwacks resounded around the ground.
‘You are interested in cricket,’ Haresh said. ‘Very good. And I will help you however I can. But I have to tell you something. My passion for the game is dead.’
‘Oh. Why’s that?’
‘Match-fixing,’ said Haresh urgently. ‘It has killed my passion. I could never have believed that my heroes would do such a thing.’