The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  As I was thanking him, Arvind suddenly interrupted me. He needed to be sure I had appreciated the crucial point. ‘What you have to understand is this,’ he said. ‘My son had the worst facilities in India, but the best record in India.’

  If democratising Saurashtrian cricket was the badshah’s objective, he had made a poor fist of it. He ruled the association in Rajkot more obviously like a feudal lord. In this it resembled most Indian political parties. The Congress party, which may soon have its fifth Gandhi–Nehru ruler, in the diffident form of Rahul Gandhi, son of Sonia and Rajiv, is only the most prominent of India’s dynasties. Most political parties are family-run businesses, passed from father to son or daughter – as perhaps the Saurashtra cricket association will also be.

  Feudal politics, in cricket or otherwise, might not be fair or efficient, but it is not without merit. In the right circumstances, it imposes a certain stability: the ruler rules and his acolytes benefit. But where power is contested, the flaws of India’s patronage politics become much more obvious. This takes us to India’s capital, one of the world’s great power centres.

  Delhi is littered with the Ozymandian debris of empires. (There were the monuments of at least four – Lodi, Sayyid, Moghul and British – within a short walk of our flat.) It is an historic city of politics and contestation – and its cricket reflects this. Cricket in Delhi is run by the Delhi District Cricket Association, also known as the Delhi Daddies Cricket Association, or the Delhi District Crooks Association. You get the idea. No Indian cricket administration is so notorious for nepotism and misrule.

  This often arises in the matter of team selection. In 2006 the DDCA’s boss, the Hindu nationalist Arun Jaitley, sacked the association’s selectors after they allegedly picked a player because his friends had threatened to beat them up if they did not. Jaitley said he was ‘trying to immunise the selection process from any kind of associational activities’. He is one of the more admired cricket politicians, with an impressive knowledge of Indian cricket history. But his explanation didn’t say much for his association. Nor did this stop the rot. Delhi’s best players, including Virender Sehwag, have repeatedly threatened to quit the state in protest at its biased and inconsistent selections.

  The problem is greatest at youth level. In 2007 one of the DDCA selectors was alleged to be demanding sex from mothers in return for picking their sons for his age-group side. On learning that this was a sure-fire route to getting his son picked for Delhi, one ambitious father was reported to have fixed up the selector with a 5,000-rupee-a-trick prostitute, masquerading as his wife. If this happened, commented Kadambari Murali of the Hindustan Times, it was ‘far less than what some parents have allegedly paid to get their sons to play for Delhi’.

  Such capers have not improved Delhi’s results. Though it is not one of India’s traditional cricket centres, Delhi has contributed a dozen players to the national side over the past two decades, more than any other city except Chennai. They include some of India’s biggest recent stars, such as Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Virat Kohli and Ishant Sharma. This success reflects the Indian capital’s size and prosperity – Greater Delhi has a population of 25 million and is one of India’s richest regions. But over the same period Delhi has won the Ranji Trophy only once.

  Rotten coaching is also to blame. In 1999 the association spent only 20,700 rupees on coaching – less than the 24,606 rupees it made that year by selling empty bottles from the members’ bar for recycling. As so often in India, Delhi’s star cricketers rise in spite of the system not because of it. According to Tarak Sinha, a disenchanted former head coach of the DDCA (who was coaching the Rajasthan side when I met him), if there were 50 Delhi boys sufficiently talented, motivated and tough enough to play cricket for India, no more than five would have a hope of making it. The rest would get ignored or ruined by the DDCA.

  Jaitley has tried to improve matters. But his influence is limited. India’s former law minister wields nothing like the same power in Delhi cricket as he does in the BJP. He presides over it at the grudging behest of two mutually loathing factions, each dominated by a local businessman whose power derives from the number of DDCA members he claims to represent. Those claims are also controversial and contested – owing to the association’s arcane system of voting by proxy. Under its rules, DDCA officers claim, for years on end, to represent the votes of thousands of silent members, some of whom are almost certainly deceased. Like feudal lords measuring their battle strength, Delhi’s cricket bosses refer to themselves and their rivals in terms of the number of proxy votes they wield. The leader of one of the biggest factions, C.K. Khanna, is said to command over 1,000. He is known as the ‘Proxy King’.

  Understanding Delhi’s cricket politics is not easy. The voting system is opaque and most DDCA bosses are reluctant to illuminate it. But one of them, Sunil Dev, agreed to explain matters to me.

  We met in the dowdy south Delhi office where Dev runs the family fertiliser business. It was cluttered with the usual paraphernalia of the Indian cricket administrator: Hindu icons, autographed cricket bats and pictures with self and Sachin. Dev, a squarely built and prosperous man, was head of the DDCA’s sports committee – a powerful post.

  Across his office desk, he studied me in silence. Then he emitted a long sigh, rubbed his face with a meaty hand, sucked in his cheeks, and started shouting.

  ‘Today you see before you a pained man!’ he exclaimed. ‘Appalled by what THEY are doing in the name of cricket. Shall I tell you of the secret wars, the OFFENCES they are committing in cricket? I may tell you. Yes I may. But what of me?

  Dev paused.

  ‘How will you use what I say? How will they harm me?’ He was grimacing in mock torment. Bollywood had clearly lost a bright talent to the fertiliser business. Then with a mighty thwack he slapped his hand down on the desk. ‘But now I recall what Lord Krishna said to Arjuna: “YOU’RE RUNNING AWAY FROM YOUR FUCKING DUTY!”’

  Dev jabbed himself in the chest. ‘They have called me a “loose cannon”. Oh, have they? I say, GOOD! In today’s society a man has to be a loose cannon to speak the truth!’

  Dev bowed his head. He put his hands on the desk between us, clenched his fists and then looked up, snarling with ham ferocity.

  In the DDCA, there are 25 men who matter, Dev explained, each elected on the basis of his strength in proxies. These officers are known as the directors, and he is one of them – having, Dev reckoned, somewhere between 300 and 400 proxies.

  The directors secure their proxy votes either by wooing existing members or, more often, by sponsoring new ones, whose votes they will then command. There were thought to be around 4,500 members in all. But this was a rough estimate.

  ‘Who keeps the membership list?’ I asked.

  Dev raising his eyes to heaven. ‘That is a very great question and I will give you enormous respect and many great parties if you can find out and explain to me how it works.’

  Like almost all positions in Indian cricket, the DDCA’s directors are ‘honorary’, which means voluntary and unpaid. But Dev suggested they were not always uncompensated for their efforts.

  ‘Are any corrupt?’ I asked.

  ‘Many!’ he hissed.

  Even for the scrupulously honest administrator, the benefits of being a Delhi cricket boss are substantial. The Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium in Delhi is one of India’s top cricket grounds. This makes a man with access to a regular supply of match-tickets a powerful fellow. Tiger Pataudi, who played for Delhi in the early 1960s, before shifting in disgust to Hyderabad, once told me how this works. ‘If you can get hold of 200 spare tickets for an India game, you can organise yourself pretty well,’ he said laconically. ‘You give some to the income tax people, to the police, to anyone whose good offices you might need in the future. It’s been like this at least since the late 1950s or early 1960s, which is how far I go back.’

  This is serious influence in India. But according to Dev, it is easily lost. I had asked him what, for an ambiti
ous Delhi cricket boss, were the main threats. Dev shot a suspicious glance towards the closed door, leant forward in his chair, and hissed: ‘He must, must, must keep his members obliged. Or else he may LOSE THEM!’

  ‘And how is that done?’

  Dev froze, as if bludgeoned by the question. Then he exploded: ‘HE MUST KEEP GIVING PASSES AWAY!’

  Dev slumped back in his chair like a spent oracle. And suddenly he looked up, flashed me a wild glance and lunged at the drawers of his desk, tugging them open with melodramatic abandon while saying, ‘Here, I will show you, yes, yes, I will show you!’

  Reaching into the drawers, he started heaving out brick-sized wads of unused match tickets and piling them on to the desk. I noted a stack from a recent World Cup match, West Indies v the Netherlands. I sensed that Dev didn’t want me to inspect them too closely.

  He appeared extremely agitated and was chuntering manically to himself. ‘I will not do it, no, no, I will not and I cannot!’ he rambled, while flinging more multi-coloured slabs on to the desk. Then he looked up and said gravely, ‘I am keeping these for the courts.’

  The South African cricket administrator Ali Bacher once asked one of his Indian counterparts an uncomfortable question. ‘Why is India so much less good at cricket than it should be? Producing a top cricket side is not rocket-science,’ Bacher said. It requires three things: money, talent and popular support, all of which India has in unrivalled abundance. ‘So if you’re not far and away the best in the world,’ Bacher said, ‘there’s something wrong.’

  There is a lot wrong with how Indian cricket is run. Yet India is run even worse. The BCCI – for all its caprice, bombast and nasty politics – is actually one of India’s better-run institutions. It has hosted three World Cups, not without trauma, but much better than India handles most public events.

  The 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, organised by the Indian Olympic Association, provides a bleak comparison. It was a decade in the planning. Yet a few days before the event, despite massive cost overruns, almost none of the venues was ready. A road bridge outside the stadium collapsed. The athletes’ village was ‘filthy and uninhabitable’ according to the Commonwealth Games Federation – there was dog excrement on the beds and human excrement in the sinks. The Federation was anticipating a fiasco: ‘If the minister tells me one more time, “Don’t worry. Haven’t you seen Monsoon Wedding? It’ll all come good in the end,” I’ll go mad,’ one of its despairing officials told me at the time.

  In the event, the games went OK, but it was a close-run thing. As a vaunted display of the new India, it was a humiliating episode. And this was not for want of cash. India spent at least $4.6 billion on building facilities and upgrading Delhi for the event – having estimated that this would cost no more than $500 million. At least part of the problem was that the organising committee was as sullied as the sinks. There was evidence of massive over-invoicing on procurement contracts: soap dispensers costing $1.97 were invoiced at $61 and toilet paper at $80 a roll. The boss of the Olympic Association, the Congress MP Suresh Kalmadi, was sacked and jailed over the allegations. Yet after ten months, he was released on bail, returned to parliament, and reinstated in his Olympics post. At the time of writing his case was pending.

  India’s cricket administration is better than that. It is also improving, partly thanks to investments – especially in infrastructure – brought about by Pawar. The BCCI has had, since 2006, smart new offices outside the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai and a dozen full-time employees. It previously operated out of a basement office in the stadium, with concrete floors and a lavatory that required key access. The New Zealander John Wright, India’s national coach from 2000 to 2005, reckoned these ramshackle surroundings were the ‘greatest feat of camouflage since a wolf put on sheep’s clothing’.

  India’s national side is now as professionally run as any other. There are also few allegations of the regional bias that once plagued its selections. Television, by giving stark exposure to cricketing talent, has made that unsustainable. Some of the state associations are also better run these days, especially in India’s richer and better-governed southern states: including Karnataka, where, uniquely in India, cricket is now run by two former India cricketers, Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath.

  This is promising. Yet a much greater force for improvement is the effect that cricket’s boom has had on the game’s image. Indian cricket, once elite and exclusive, has come to be seen as a route from poverty to riches. Across India, poor boys are now thronging to play it, hoping to emulate their heroes’ earning power as well as their hitting.

  Even Saurashtra’s complacent badshah has noticed the change. ‘Before, parents said to their sons, “you study, you don’t go, you must take care of your family,”’ he told me. ‘But now people know players can go by plane and stay in good hotels. Now parents will send their boys to cricket because there is a hope that he will be good at cricket and earn money.’

  This change is manifest in an increasing number of cricket stars hailing from humble backgrounds. Sehwag learned batting by studying Tendulkar on his neighbour’s colour television in Najafgarh, a suburb of Delhi. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, India’s captain, is the son of a humble engineer from Ranchi, in the poor eastern state of Jharkhand. Such players are typically self-taught, introduced to the game by television, and hungry for its riches. They are also emerging from India’s furthest-flung towns. In the first decade of this century, Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and traditionally a cricketing backwater, has supplied seven international players, more than any other state.

  This democratisation of the game, as one commentator has termed it, promises a huge expansion in Indian cricket’s talent pool. It might also be seen to represent the wider burgeoning of opportunity that has come with India’s growth spurt. This is one of the world’s great developments – the raising of millions from poverty to middle-class status. Yet India’s recent progress is still fragile. Its rags-to-riches success stories, in cricket and otherwise, are still exceptional, and highlight just how hard it remains for most people to get on in India. For every Sehwag or Dhoni that emerges to the light, hundreds of talented players remain mired in poverty and obscurity.

  India’s north-eastern state of Bihar was once one of the glories of Asia. It is where, sometime around 400 BC, Gautama Buddha achieved enlightenment under a pipal tree. In medieval times Bihar’s main city, Patna, was a centre of scholarship, a wellspring of mathematics, astrology and Hindu philosophy.

  But Bihar now struggles for any memory of its former greatness. It is India’s poorest state, overcrowded, lawless and wretched. Bihar’s average income is a quarter of the national average. Almost half its 100 million people live below the poverty line. Bihar is India’s last redoubt of polio.

  This makes it a tough place to govern, and Lalu and his wife, in power from 1990 to 2005, hardly seemed to try. Under their rule, law and order in the state broke down. It was known as the Goonda Raj: Rule by Gangster. Now matters are improving. Their successor, Nitish Kumar, has locked up many of the gangsters, cleaned up the streets and deployed thousands of teachers in Bihar’s schools. India’s least hopeful state now has a fighting chance. But this cannot yet be said of its cricket, which Lalu still controls.

  The Bihar Cricket Association was formed in 1935 and, until a decade ago, was run from Jamshedpur, a company town of Tata Steel. It is by far the biggest employer in Jamshedpur. It also runs much of the city, managing its hospital, schools, academies for football, archery and athletics, golf courses, a zoo, and Jamshedpur’s international cricket stadium. It also used to run the state cricket association. But in 2000 a chunk of southern Bihar, including Jamshedpur, was hived off to form the new state of Jharkhand. This partition – or ‘bifurcation’ as it is called – cost Bihar over 20 million people and most of its mineral wealth and industry.

  Most of Bihar’s cricket estate, including its main stadium, administration, pitches and $1 million in the cricket association’
s kitty, were located in Jamshedpur, within the breakaway state. So was its best player – India’s future captain, Dhoni. Yet this development was not uncontested: power rarely changes hands in India without a fight.

  The members of the old Tata-run cricket association, based in Jamshedpur, renamed themselves the Jharkhand Cricket Association (JCA). Yet their right to run cricket in the new state was challenged by another group, formed by local clubs, which called itself the Cricket Association of Jharkhand (CAJ).

  In Patna, a group of Bihari businessmen formed a new Bihar Cricket Association (BCA), and unanimously elected Lalu their leader. ‘Even though I was least interested, I took up the responsibility,’ the politician declared. ‘I will contribute my share to prop up Bihar on the world sporting map.’ All three new organisations claimed the right to the erstwhile Bihar association’s lucrative BCCI membership and cash reserves. It fell to the Indian cricket board to decide which of the rival claimants to recognise. And, lo, this local wrangle became enmeshed in loftier politics.

  The outgoing BCCI president, a Tamil industrialist called A.C. Muthiah, recognised Lalu and his BCA Patna. But soon afterwards Dalmiya, newly returned from running the ICC, rescinded that decision, and recognised the JCA. The issue went to court, and as the writs and counter-writs proliferated, so did the outfits claiming to represent Bihari cricket. In 2002 Kirti Azad – the World Cup-winning all-rounder who lost his trousers at Lord’s – formed the Association of Bihar Cricket.

  Azad, a BJP politician, held a parliamentary seat in Bihar. Hence his claim to run its cricket. ‘I’d already said to Lalu, if you do something for cricket in Bihar, I will support you. But he was doing nothing,’ Azad told me. He and his followers organised some district competitions in his constituency and, naturally, also ended up in court against Lalu’s BCA. An outspoken man, Azad took a poor view of Indian cricket politics. ‘We learned from you English,’ he guffawed. ‘We corrupt really well.’