The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

  As the IPL’s debut season drew to a close in a thrilling finale, the people’s verdict was easy to judge. Stadiums were packed. Tens of millions tuned in to watch each match. After the first season, the value of a franchise rocketed, as Modi auctioned off two more for more than $300 million each. But even amid the delirious popularity there were also signs of discord, as Srinivasan and other BCCI grandees grew unhappy about the many controversies dogging the event, and in particular the imperious style of its new commissioner. There were rows with conservative Hindu groups about scantily clad cheerleaders, and streams of headlines about player misbehavior. Modi managed to shift the second tournament to South Africa, but not without irking powerful politicians in New Delhi. More to the point, while everyone agreed the IPL was making money, few seemed sure exactly how much, or where it was being spent. Grumbling grew about Modi’s lavish operation, which he ran from a suite high up in Mumbai’s Four Seasons hotel.10 Anxious that the IPL’s financial pull would see star players transfer their loyalty from national teams to the league, cricket administrators in England and Australia began openly to agitate for Modi’s removal. Many in India agreed.

  For a man well versed in the sport’s politics, Modi also had a knack for making enemies. One immediate cause was the second franchise auction. Press reports at the time said the front-runners for the new teams were Gautam Adani’s conglomerate and Videocon, a media and electronics group—until the BCCI suddenly canceled the process and demanded that the process should be rerun. The second auction was then won by two other bidders, one in the western city of Pune led by Sahara, the property empire owned by flamboyant billionaire Subrata Roy, and a second in the coastal Keralan city of Kochi, which went to a consortium of investors under the name Rendezvous.

  Modi was furious at the board’s interference, and began openly agitating against the decision. In particular, he cast aspersions on the ownership of the Kochi franchise, launching an incendiary assault on Twitter shortly after the results were announced. This hinted at irregularities in the victor’s shareholding patterns and linked them to Shashi Tharoor, an urbane Keralan politician and minister in the ruling Congress government. The allegations prompted a new media frenzy. Tharoor denied doing anything wrong, but he was forced to resign his post, damaging a government that at the time was already reeling from the fallout from the season of scams. In an Indian political environment in which businessmen were expected to stay studiously subservient to their masters in New Delhi, Modi’s impetuous attack brought rapid and severe consequences. A few days later, revenue inspectors raided the IPL’s premises and those of its teams, while leaked reports from tax inspectors investigating irregularities in Modi’s business empire became front-page news.

  This escalating drumbeat of dissatisfaction with Modi came dramatically to a head following the IPL’s third-season finale. In the hours after the match, the BCCI suspended Modi from his post, accusing him of various infractions. Some were relatively minor, such as the claim that he had failed to inform the board that three of the team IPL franchises were controlled by his own relatives. But others were more serious. A thirty-four-page letter from Srinivasan listed more than twenty charges of impropriety, including allegations of kickbacks—described as “facilitation fees”—on broadcast deals, and permitting the use of shell companies in Mauritius to hold stakes in teams. The most serious referred to the auction farrago itself, which the BCCI hinted that Modi had arranged in order to ensure that Adani and Videocon won franchises. Modi vehemently denied wrongdoing in all cases, and dug in to fight a court battle. For months the two sides traded lawyers’ documents, before the BCCI finally sacked Modi outright six months later. Fearing for his safety, Modi moved to London, where he talked darkly about earlier assassination attempts for refusing to fix matches in India, and fought legal disputes with his onetime employers, leaving behind an air of rancor and melodrama from which the IPL never really recovered.

  Wicket Wagers

  The recriminations over Modi’s ousting remained the IPL’s defining scandal, until the evening that Operation U-Turn began. The events of that night plunged the tournament into fresh crisis, although their aftermath suggested an even darker possibility: not just that the IPL’s management was opaque and quarrelsome, but that a handful of players and senior executives might actually have fixed matches in cahoots with murky global betting syndicates.

  The idea that world cricket had a gambling problem burst into the open more than a decade earlier, when Indian police released a taped call between a local bookie and Hansie Cronje, the South African captain, during a series between the two countries. Cronje was banned for life, in the process ending cricket’s reputation as a gentlemanly game unsullied by the kind of illegal betting problems that afflicted so many other sports. More scandals then followed, notably in 2011 when a duo of Pakistani bowlers and the captain were caught cheating in a British tabloid sting operation. Back in India, a more minor spot-fixing hit the IPL during the 2012 tournament, when five players were banned.

  Although betting on cricket was officially banned, I had often watched wealthy Indians place discreet wagers on the sport. Local tabloids often carried racy stories about the betting gangs, operated by Mumbai’s criminal underworld but controlled by Indian gangsters in exile in Dubai or Pakistan: “The mastermind is sitting abroad,” as Commissioner Kumar put it after Shanthakumaran Sreesanth’s arrest. Yet, widely known though all this was, it was only Operation U-Turn that brought the corrosive effects of betting rushing into public view.

  Attention focused at first on the way fixing worked, and how a player like Sreesanth might have been lured into it. The IPL’s format was ideal for betting, with a freewheeling atmosphere in which executives, sponsors, and hangers-on all fraternized with players and officials. The cricketers had sizable retinues of their own: the associates, managers, handlers, trainers, and stylists that signified their status as tournament royalty. Information economies built up around teams, in which friends would call insiders seeking gossip, or swap stories in the bar of the team hotel. Any tip could be useful to those setting odds, from lineups and injuries to team tactics and pitch conditions. The better the information, the better the return, hence why bookies and high-rollers sometimes took the riskier step of bribing cricketers directly, at first paying a little for information, and then, if the player seemed willing, taking things a step further and asking them to perform, or not, to order. “The bookies often pay off the players and referees around the competition, in the hotels and the bars,” I was told by Chris Eaton, director at the International Centre for Sport Security, a Qatar-based group that tracked illegal betting. “It might be a honeypot with a girl, or it could just be cash. It’s a slow professional process…and, given India’s growth over the past five years, the size of this illegal market is growing like crazy.”

  Even with plenty of speculative media coverage, it was hard to penetrate the mysterious and understandably secretive illegal betting industry that these tips fed. The best account came via Ed Hawkins, a betting expert and writer, whose book Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy gave a gripping exposé of the seedy underbelly of cricket gambling. Hawkins managed to befriend a handful of minor Indian bookmakers, traveling to remote towns to watch them set up impromptu betting shops.11 Armed with laptops and dozens of mobile phones, they sat in otherwise empty hotel rooms, wielding calls from punters as matches began.

  The wider system in which these bookies operated was run by a handful of larger betting syndicates, who set the odds and provided capital, working with teams of freelance bookies around the country. Word of mouth and trust made the system work; punters used bookies they knew; no cash changed hands and accounts would be settled later. The common view was that high-rollers could win small fortunes by fixing small, low-probability elements of matches—paying a bowler to produce a no-ball in a particular over, for instance—and betting heavily on that outcome. But the reality was more s
ubtle, Hawkins told me, with only a few types of wagers. The most popular was known as a “bracket” bet: a wager in which customers guessed the score after a particular period of play, such as the first six overs. “If Sreesanth did what they say he did, it looks like a classic example of a bracket fix,” he said.

  None of this explained why Sreesanth himself had been drawn in, although even his associates did not seem entirely surprised that the tempestuous sportsman had ended up in trouble. As much as his impudent wicket-taking celebrations, Sreesanth was known in India for one incident: “Slapgate.”12 Towards the end of a match in the IPL’s debut season he was struck in the face by Harbhajan Singh, a burly Sikh spin bowler, known affectionately as the “Turbanator,” for both his religious headgear and his no-nonsense cricketing style. Sreesanth walked off the pitch, tears streaming down his cheeks. The cause has never been more than tabloid speculation, but it came to symbolize Sreesanth’s image: a brat and a crybaby whose petulance made him unpopular with teammates, including the then India captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

  “Everyone knew Dhoni hated him,” an IPL executive told me. “In fact, all the players hated him.” Those who knew him well described a different side: gregarious, generous to a fault, and fun to be around, with a strong traditional, religious streak. But he was insecure and attention-seeking too, according to a close friend from well before the bowler’s entry into the stratosphere of Indian sporting celebrity. “He used to compare himself to Michael Jackson, which I used to think was mad, but Michael Jackson was one of his idols,” the friend said. “When you think about it, they were a bit the same, though: worshipped in one way, hated in others, surrounded by these weird people, and both a bit batshit crazy.”

  Isolated from his teammates, Sreesanth instead stayed in five-star hotels with an ever-expanding court of hangers-on. The coterie provided at least a measure of structure in an otherwise rootless lifestyle, moving from city to city for games and training, and living out of half a dozen suitcases. It was an existence that combined periodic sporting exhilaration and bouts of excess with long stretches of boredom, yet all set against a bewildering backdrop of permanent public adoration. “Sree had his lackeys around him constantly, and I always wondered how they could afford to be with him, given they had no jobs of their own,” his friend said. Eventually it became clear the cricketer funded them himself, paying for air tickets and hotel rooms, handing out bundles of cash for expenses, and inviting them to the glamorous parties at which cricketers of his stature were feted. “It’s hard to describe the madness that went on around them all the time, the huge crowds that appeared in an instant as soon as they went outside. It just never stopped,” his friend told me. And it was exactly in this kind of chaotic, carnival atmosphere that it was possible to imagine an impressionable young man, intoxicated by fame and money, gradually being talked into actions he might later regret.

  Sreesanth spent the best part of a month in custody after his arrest, mostly in New Delhi’s infamous Tihar jail. At first the police said he had given a full confession. Later he emerged on bail and protested his innocence. After Operation U-Turn, journalists at first questioned the lax culture of Lalit Modi’s IPL, in which efforts to detect cheating were virtually nonexistent. But after Gurunath Meiyappan’s arrest their focus changed to the teams and their owners, not least when the head of the Rajasthan Royals franchise also confessed to betting on IPL matches. Meiyappan’s arrest also drew Narayanaswami Srinivasan into the controversy directly, as angry fans began to blame the sport’s most senior administrator for the mess in which the game now found itself. Rolling news outlets covered almost no other story for weeks, treating each small development as a ground-shaking outrage. Times Now, the country’s most-watched English news channel, made particular efforts to castigate Srinivasan, as its pugnacious front man Arnab Goswami led calls for the BCCI head to resign.

  Not a man at ease with the media, Srinivasan sought at first to deflect attention from his son-in-law. Press reports suggested Meiyappan ran the Chennai team. Srinivasan denied this, suggesting he had no formal role, a claim many observers found unconvincing. “The simplistic explanation was given that Gurunath [Meiyappan] was just an enthusiast,” I was told by Ajay Shirke, a courteous businessman turned BCCI administrator, and a sometime Srinivasan ally in the ever-changing politics of Indian cricket administration. “But then why had he been there at every auction representing the team, why had he been notified in our official documents as the team principal, and what is he doing in the dugout with the players? To me it really looked like they are just trying to cling onto power.” Sensing he was losing control, Srinivasan changed tack. At a bad-tempered press conference a few weeks later, he tried to draw a line under the scandal. But the more he stonewalled, the more it looked like he was trying to stop questions turning to his own overlapping roles and the conflicts of interest they brought with them. A power struggle began, as Srinivasan launched a rearguard action to keep his job.

  The Don

  If Lalit Modi was cricket’s impresario, Srinivasan was its power broker. In the IPL’s floodlit glare it was easy to think that the rush of money had entirely reinvented the sport. But underneath, the power structures of old remained largely unchanged, inherited from an earlier era when the game was run by “men of middling talent and limited ambition, serving usually in honorary capacities and concerned chiefly to insure cricket against change,” as Gideon Haigh once put it.13

  Influence in this old world of Indian cricket, as Modi discovered, actually came via control of state-level boards, the bodies one step down the pyramid from the BCCI: the Rajasthan Cricket Association, the Maharashtra Cricket Association, and so on. Some of these were little more than family dynasties, with fathers passing control to their sons. Others were vassals of local businesses, as with Srinivasan’s India Cements group, whose financial support to struggling clubs and cash-strapped players had helped him to take control of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, the body that formed the power base from which he launched his efforts to control the sport. This edifice of cricketing power was democratic to a degree, at least in the narrow sense that anyone aspiring to national prominence had to take care of those below them, creating networks of patronage through which the game’s growing largesse could be channeled in exchange for votes. “The [BCCI] elections every September are such sordid affairs that Caligula would have been proud,” the editor in chief of cricket magazine Wisden India, Dileep Premachandran, once wrote. But this was Srinivasan’s true forte: the weighing of votes, and the discovery of what men needed to be given in return.

  In person he was far from imposing: medium height and heavyset, with a weary, jowly look and graying hair slicked back with oil. Where Lalit Modi was full of pyrotechnics, Srinivasan—or just “Srini,” as people generally called him—talked slowly and tersely, his voice coming in a low growl. Also unlike Modi, he was at least motivated by a long-standing passion for the sport. People talked well of him in Chennai, where the Srinivasans were pillars of a conservative establishment and admired for the free sports kits they handed out to school teams and the jobs they found for retired players. His early years in business were not easy, including a long clash with his uncle over the family cement empire, a skirmish cited by some as the wellspring of his instincts for bureaucratic control. He was wealthy, in an understated southern Indian way, and a conservative of firm Hindu faith, often sporting a red tika on his forehead. By all accounts he had a strained relationship with his only son, who was openly gay.

  Srinivasan became BCCI president two years before Operation U-Turn, having built up his base first as treasurer, then secretary, the position from which he masterminded Lalit Modi’s suspension. He operated mostly from Chennai, flying by private jet for meetings in Mumbai. Power within the BCCI came via the slow turn of committees, an environment to which Srinivasan proved thoroughly well suited. The finance committee was his particular fiefdom, where he held sw
ay through his mastery of agendas and minutes, but also by knowing exactly where all money went, and to whom. It was this capacity for brutal bureaucratic management that proved to be his true talent, according to essayist Rahul Bhatia. “He always prepared well for meetings, he could think like an accountant, he kept his advisers close, and almost never failed to ensure that his supporters were happy and well-rewarded,” Bhatia wrote in a profile in The Caravan.14 Another cricket administrator described Srinivasan’s modus operandi this way: “Gather, assimilate, dissect, understand member club secretaries. What X needs, what Y needs, what Z needs. Every man has a soft spot. Every man has a weakness.”

  Operation U-Turn broke at a time of wider national disquiet: mid-2013, a moment of swirling anxiety about corruption, when public disgust over the country’s various telecoms and mining scandals was much in the air. Yet rather than a practitioner of outright dishonesty, Srinivasan’s own role was more as a ringmaster of patronage. Cricket’s rising economic heft brought in unheard-of sums; he steered it down to the right places, ensuring that he won future votes in turn. It was a deceptively simple mechanism of control, in which the game’s various factions—regional administrators, cricketers, ex-cricketers, commentators, and grandees—were kept in line through a web of generous rewards. “No Medici controlled Florence as comprehensively as the BCCI controlled cricket,” as Indian commentator Mukul Kesavan once put it.15 “During his [Srinivasan’s] reign most living things in cricket’s jungle became the Board’s creatures, bound by contract, muted by money, and sworn to servility.”