The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

  India’s local boards were hardly known for good governance, but they were generally viewed as the cleanest in a tawdry lineup of Indian sporting bodies, and without question the most professional. “Srini’s gig was always about control,” I was told by a former official at the International Cricket Council (ICC), the global body Srinivasan would eventually be appointed to run in 2014. “But he is not dishonest…He made the system work. Srini has never enriched himself, and in my view it has cost him a good amount of money.” As outrage over U-Turn grew, Srinivasan’s instincts were to dig in, cashing in the support this patronage had built. “He seems to be very organized, very controlling,” Kesavan told me later. “He genuinely thinks that he can get away with virtually anything by squaring the politicians…that if they all buy in, nobody is really going to worry about conflict of interest.”

  Maintaining this political support was now imperative if Srinivasan was to have any hope of survival. Cricket’s sheer prestige drew big-name politicians to the BCCI, a few out of devotion to the game, but most for the many other opportunities it provided. Among the most prominent were Arun Jaitley, a wily lawyer who became Narendra Modi’s finance minister, and Sharad Pawar, a forceful Maharashtrian satrap, notable both for his reputed cunning and personal wealth. Even Narendra Modi, no noted lover of cricket himself, had been president of the Gujarat Cricket Association for five years until his election as prime minister in 2014, when he handed the job over to Amit Shah, his closest political ally. (Narendra Modi and Lalit Modi are not related.) In his own way, Srinivasan learned to keep close to all of these men, and adroitly managed to navigate their various shifting alliances. So long as they continued to back him, Srinivasan assumed his position was safe. But as the howls from the talk shows grew louder, and the op-eds demanding his resignation grew more frequent, even that faith was thrown into doubt.

  Srinivasan had not been accused of personal wrongdoing: few thought so terse a man had been laying wagers and gossiping with bookies, as his arrested son-in-law was alleged to have done. He stressed his own innocence in interviews, doing little to disguise his anger at what he described as “trial by media.”16 But critics asked, reasonably enough, whether he could preside over a fair investigation into the aftermath of Operation U-Turn, given his various overlapping roles as owner, regulator, and relative.

  As the scandal grew, attention focused ever more on the broader problem of conflicts of interest. Srinivasan controlled the body that owned the IPL, and hence the many revenues it produced. As head of the BCCI, he also distributed much of that money downwards to supplicants in the lower orders of the game. As chairman of India Cements he was not simply an IPL team owner, albeit indirectly, but also a major sponsor. His backing for the Chennai Super Kings proved to be especially problematic, given that it was formally against the rules for BCCI office holders to own teams when the franchise bidding first took place. The conflicts between Srinivasan’s roles were so striking that they almost seemed to excuse the many other smaller examples of patronage that riddled the lower reaches of the game. Yet for all the self-evident conflicts his web of interests represented, Srinivasan plowed on. Using just the kind of squalid backroom maneuver his critics loathed, he cleaned up one of his problems with the Chennai Super Kings a year later, by having the BCCI’s constitution changed retrospectively, in the process making it legal for IPL team owners to be cricket administrators too.

  Events came to a head during a BCCI crisis summit in a plush conference room at the Sheraton Park hotel in Chennai in early June, a few weeks after U-Turn had begun. Srinivasan ran proceedings, first pushing through agenda items unrelated to the scandal, then trying to paint himself as the only man with the authority to help the BCCI ride it out. Yet such was the clamor for his head that even the board’s loyalists were unnerved. By the meeting’s end a compromise had been struck: Srinivasan agreed to step aside, at least temporarily, until an investigation had been completed. In the days that followed, the BCCI announced a raft of minor cleanup measures, prohibiting team owners from mingling with players, banning post-match parties, and promising an end to pitch-side cheerleaders. An inquiry run by two judges from Chennai was set up by the BCCI. Meanwhile India’s Supreme Court also became involved, establishing a commission of its own. The BCCI’s panel came back first, revealing to no one’s surprise that Srinivasan had done nothing wrong—a “clean chit” that, in his own mind, gave the BCCI’s president the excuse he needed to begin planning to retake control.

  While the domestic scandal raged, Srinivasan’s position was complicated further by India’s growing role abroad. A year after U-Turn began he was elected as head of the ICC, a position from which he presided over a notorious carve-up that gave India, England, and Australia—cricket’s “big three”—an outsize share of future television revenues, with India taking most of all. Indians made up the majority of cricket’s fans, and contributed well over half of its revenues. Operations in smaller nations like New Zealand and the West Indies were kept afloat only by the rights they sold during Indian tours. India felt it had been bossed around for too long in a sport run until relatively recently along neocolonial lines from London and Sydney. Hopelessly divided over how to sort out the problems in its domestic game, India’s cricket establishment was firmly united that its own position as cricket’s sole hyperpower should be recognized internationally, and that India should in turn be given a greater say over the global game itself.

  The take-it-or-leave-it style in which Srinivasan announced his ICC deal sparked a backlash, however. Cricket’s minnows, already sensitive to Indian bullying tactics, were furious, while fans reacted badly too. A low-budget 2015 documentary called Death of a Gentleman, made by two young cricket fans, won wide acclaim for decrying the corrupting influence of money. Srinivasan allowed himself to be interviewed for the film, and was felt by many to have come off looking shifty and evasive.

  “India has ended up with a special gift: the clout to shape an entire sport,” wrote Lawrence Booth, editor of the cricket bible Wisden, around the same time. Instead, Booth argued, India’s preeminence appeared to be resulting in a new kind of “Twenty20 nationalism” marked mostly by “the growth of private marketeers and high-level conflicts of interest.”17 Many fans worried about the BCCI’s new style of muscular diplomacy, with its mixture of brute financial considerations and unabashed India-first attitude. More than anything, the ICC episode suggested that the administrative style of Srinivasan’s BCCI, with all of its attendant money-spinning deals and backroom bust-ups, was now being transferred up to the global stage as well.

  Back at home, a different power battle raged, as the old BCCI establishment turned to the courts to try and contain the fallout from U-Turn. The first commission established by the Supreme Court reported later in 2014, clearing Srinivasan, but finding that Gurunath Meiyappan had been involved in illegal betting. The court then launched a second investigation, led by a retired judge, with a broader remit to reform cricket’s governance. The court gave Srinivasan’s attempts to return short shrift too, with one judge describing his machinations as “nauseating.”18 Eventually the judges prevailed, stopping Srinivasan from standing at the BCCI’s next elections in 2015 and in effect barring his return as chairman.

  Later that year, the BCCI sacked Srinivasan from his role at the ICC as well, as if sensing the waning powers of their once-dominant former master. The Supreme Court’s commission then launched a radical overhaul, banning politicians from holding office at the governing body, and suspending both the Rajasthan Royals and the Chennai Super Kings from the IPL for two years. Eventually, in early 2017, its patience exhausted, the court also in effect sacked the BCCI itself, installing a temporary four-person committee of grandees to run the game, which included Ramachandra Guha among its members. As if the parallels between cricket’s corruption scandal and those that plagued India more broadly were not clear, the court picked Vinod Rai, the government’
s crusading former auditor, as the body’s new chair.

  Almost no one emerged from the aftermath of Operation U-Turn with much credit. Shanthakumaran Sreesanth was banned for life and never played competitive cricket again, although the trial court in Delhi dropped all charges against him in 2015 for lack of evidence. Gurunath Meiyappan was found guilty of bringing cricket into disrepute and banned from the game as well. Lalit Modi remained in London. Openly and vocally aggrieved, and having lost little of his capacity to attract attention, he lobbed incendiary allegations on Twitter against political enemies and onetime cricketing allies alike. Srinivasan returned to Chennai and kept out of sight, keeping a careful hold over his cricket board in Tamil Nadu, and waiting to see if the national tide might shift again in his favor.

  Modi’s and Srinivasan’s contrasting styles were clear from their respective exiles. Yet as the game struggled to escape their twin legacies, their common traits became clearer too. Both enjoyed hereditary wealth, born of families with businesses in regulated industries—cement and cigarettes, respectively—where success rested on influence and political connections. Both were dismissive of the amateurism of the old guard and had worked industriously to overthrow it. Both grasped instinctively the shifts India’s economic rise would unleash, and foresaw how they would come to change cricket. And both, at once innovators and old-fashioned wielders of power, were brought down by changes they themselves had unleashed.

  After a decade of scandal, judging the present state of Indian cricket is difficult. On its own terms the IPL remains a gigantic success. At the height of the U-Turn furor, some wise heads predicted the tournament would have to be scrapped. But it has since bounded onwards, with each iteration bigger and more lucrative than the last. Even during the crisis, its supporters were phlegmatic about allegations of cheating. “The Indian public’s memory is very short, and next season a lot of this will be forgotten,” I was told then by Harsh Goenka, a respected industrialist, who had tried to buy an IPL franchise. “Sadly, it’s a bit like [US televised] wrestling. Everyone knows that it is fixed, but you don’t know the actual result, and so it’s still exciting. And while some wrestling is one hundred percent fixed, maybe the IPL is just one percent fixed. So people will still go, that’s how it is.” Even so, the fallout from the Modi and Srinivasan years left its mark. Today’s IPL is more carefully run: the cheerleaders are still there, but the after-match parties are tamer, and much more has been done to combat the temptations of betting.

  For all their grumbling, cricket purists have much to thank the tournament for as well. Before India’s ascendancy, cricket was stuck in a gentle but inevitable decline, dominated by a five-day product that bored rigid all but its most committed fans. The IPL’s popularity finally convinced a hidebound establishment that it had to change, and also provided a popular, lucrative model on which to base its renaissance. In India, all those various TV deals and sponsorship contracts have now built better stadiums and provided more money for local clubs, as well as bumper pay packets for players. Unimaginable as it might now seem, as late as the 1960s cricketers in India were paid just Rs250 to play a five-day test match—a per diem rate of Rs50. If the team performed well, and won in four days, they were docked a day’s wages.19 There seems little reason to look back on those years of straitened amateurism with nostalgia. “There is something genuine about the outrage that people like Srinivasan feel when they are accused of being predatory or rent-seeking,” Mukul Kesavan told me, suggesting that the men who revolutionized cricket felt that the positive side of their contribution had not been fairly recognized.

  Yet India’s cricketing rise, and the brash and bankable version of the game it spawned, remains deeply problematic. Whether you took him seriously or not, Lalit Modi’s vision of a game run along free-market lines and governed by transparent rules self-evidently did not come to pass. Modi thought the IPL could become a blemish-free Indian success story, a kind of sporting version of the country’s largely corruption-free IT outsourcing industry. But instead the first decade of the IPL ended up far closer in character to the darker corners of the industrial economy, with its power politics and rife accusations of cronyism and powerful tycoons carving up the game’s riches between themselves. In this, Indian cricket is not alone: the governance of the game in England and Australia has had its share of embarrassing episodes. But India’s game is now on a different scale from those lesser powers. Cricket administration in India has long suffered from conflicts of interest, but those mattered little when the interests themselves were so minor. As the financial rewards swelled, a culture of opaque governance and overlapping became a serious problem, and one the game is yet fully to solve.

  This system of entrenched patronage and influence proved just as difficult to reform in cricket as it did elsewhere. The irony that the Supreme Court had to call on an outsider like Vinod Rai to fix the game was lost on no one. There was a further similarity: in trying to clear up corruption in industries like iron ore, India’s courts felt they had no option but to ban mining entirely. Now in cricket, too, it seemed there was nothing to be done: so rotten had it grown that the judges decided they had no choice but to shut down the BCCI’s system entirely, if there was to be a chance to cleanse it. It was hard to feel sympathy for Srinivasan, a man who ran cricket as a client state. But the manner of his defeat at least reflected a deeper and more positive change, and one in which Srinivasan himself misread the kind of country India was becoming. It remains to be seen if the sport can be run along more open and transparent lines, free of the blatant conflicts of interest of old. But the publicity after U-Turn, and the glare of the media that came with it, at least made clear that the old world was no longer tenable.

  Later in 2013, after he had temporarily stood down, Srinivasan tried to clear his name by appearing on Frankly Speaking, an interview show hosted by Times Now anchor Arnab Goswami. Srinivasan seemed flustered as the presenter peppered him with questions. “You have the benefit of the television, you have the media,” he complained at one point. “You can say what you like. I don’t have a channel.”20 A few weeks after U-Turn began, Srinivasan snarled much the same complaint during a combative press conference. “I would request you all to be wary of trial by media,” he said. “TV news channels have been carrying unverifiable statements devoid of truth.”21 But complain as he did, Srinivasan never did find a way to respond to this new world of accountability, with India’s ferocious media at its fore. The public’s outrage was too strong; India’s courts were too active; the glare of the media was simply too fierce. When demands for public legitimacy were set against the squalor of backroom deals, there was now only one winner.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE NATION WANTS TO KNOW

  Muckraker in Chief

  One moonless night in September 2016, a small band of Islamist militants crossed from Pakistan into India and attacked an army base near Uri, a village in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The assault left seventeen Indian soldiers dead.1 Nearly two weeks later, Indian paratroopers hit back, launching what were described as “surgical strikes” against terrorist camps across the line of control that divides Kashmir between the two nations, both of whom claim it as their own. The attack was hailed as a triumph by India’s army, which held an uneasy peace in the area, often accusing its neighbor of helping militants to conduct cross-border raids. A wave of nationalist fervor swept through social media, while news channels showed clips of jubilant men on street corners, waving tricolor flags. But few could match the endorsement from television anchor Arnab Goswami: “The entire country is celebrating this evening,” he told viewers of a patriotic special Times Now broadcast, encouraging supportive tweets with the tag #IndiaStrikesBack. In thunderous form, he chided Pakistani duplicity and praised India’s jawans, who were reported to have killed thirty militants or more. There were few hints of journalistic objectivity. “We here at Times Now support the surgical strikes,” Goswami
said twice in the first three minutes of the broadcast alone.

  That night’s program was typical of Goswami’s high-octane style, mixing a rush of jingoism with flashy graphics and breathless presentation. His regular show—The Newshour with Arnab Goswami, to give it its full title, airing at 9 p.m. on weekdays—was India’s most-watched English-language political broadcast. It was here perhaps more than anywhere that India tuned in to get views on its many public scandals, from the season of scams to corruption in the IPL. Its host’s hectoring style transformed Arnab, as he is generally known, into the country’s best-known broadcaster, and one of its most controversial public figures.

  As editor in chief of Times Now, Goswami was widely credited with fashioning a new and aggressive reporting style, in a country where rolling news channels were still barely a decade old. Yet dozens of competitors now vied for these same viewers’ attentions, most of them by mimicking Goswami’s own pacy delivery and monomaniacal obsession with breaking news. Lampooned by local comedians and Bollywood movies, this hyperventilating persona had even gained some measure of international notoriety. British comic John Oliver featured clips of Goswami’s abrasive questioning on his own US talk show in 2014, suggesting with some incredulity that India had managed to spawn a news style even more excessive than Fox News.2

  India’s media landscape is large and complex, with more than 82,000 newspapers and nearly 900 TV channels,3 mostly in languages other than English. It boasts a venerable print tradition and, in the Times of India, the world’s most-read English newspaper.4 Yet as tens of millions bought their first television set in the years after 1991, the balance of power swung away from print and towards broadcast. Times Now, which launched in 2006, stood out for the nationalistic tinge to its coverage, not least in Goswami’s habit of inviting Pakistani guests onto his show, only to brusquely shout them down. But the anchor became a household name more for his campaigning style and ear for simmering middle-class anger. Beginning with the Commonwealth Games scandal in 2010, and intensifying throughout the season of scams, The Newshour laid into a familiar cast of villains, from dishonest government ministers and dodgy business cronies to corrupt cricket administrators. Channels in Hindi pulled in more viewers, but Times Now’s appeal to English-speaking urbanites gave it outsize importance. And as his approach won viewers, so Goswami’s political pulling power grew too, securing the two most coveted interviews of the 2014 election: a faltering performance from Rahul Gandhi and a more assured display from Narendra Modi.