It was Lalit Kumar Modi who changed all that when, with the blessings of then BCCI president Sharad Pawar, he set out to monetise every aspect of cricket. It began in late 2005 when he signed up Nike as kit sponsor of the national team for a sum of $27.2 million, and reached its climax a year later when he sold television rights for the IPL to a Sony-World Sports Group consortium for $1.026 billion. It was from that moment on that Indian cricket began valuing its worth in the billions—and as the money began to pour in, the BCCI brass put it to use to cement alliances, to buy silences. So why are politicians so eager to run Indian cricket? Before we come to what happens to all that money, consider the case of Sharad Pawar, who does at least have some indirect affiliation with the sport—his late father-in-law Sadu Shinde was a Test cricketer of 1940s vintage. Before Pawar became president of the BCCI in 2005, his appearances in the national headlines usually involved famines, rising food prices, or farmer suicides. After 2005, he was transformed into cricket’s knight in shining armour—the man who saved the game from the clutches of the rapacious Dalmiya and who, through the IPL, gave the public a dazzling new circus where earlier he was vilified for not being able to provide bread. And consider a few others: Rajiv Shukla, a one-time journalist with political ambitions, who used his clout as an Ambani insider to insinuate himself into the Uttar Pradesh Cricket Association and then into the BCCI. His ability to ingratiate himself with the influencers saw his elevation to the post of IPL Commissioner. Under his watch, the league was hit by spot-fixing scandals twice in two years and yet, the commissioner not only remained untouched, but managed to reinvent himself as the disinterested champion of clean cricket. Then there is Arun Jaitley, a politician with ambition but no base, who for 13 years and counting has ruled over the Delhi and Districts Cricket Association despite serial scandals; Narendra Modi, who saw in cricket another oppotunity to remake his image; Lalu Prasad Yadav, the doting father of a son with cricketing ambitions, who took over the Bihar Cricket Association and used his clout to get Tejaswi Prasad Yadav gigs with the India Under-19 team and then with the Delhi IPL team. The list has only expanded in recent years, with one association after another anointing a politician at its head. (As you read this, Pawar is readying for a second stint as Mumbai Cricket Association chief. Ask yourself why he would want a regional post after having headed both Indian and world cricket.) The benefits of this political patronage inevitably flow even to those not actively involved in the sport. Through judicious use of the annual grants—which, thanks to lack of oversight, effectively become slush funds—the board and its state chapters are positioned to suborn almost anyone, any department, to their cause. For starters, the annual grant to state associations, first raised to ₹ 8 crore (₹ 80 million) when Pawar took control, was more than doubled before the end of his tenure. From then on, you could run a state association with no major cricketing or talent-development activities or even infrastructure to speak of, and you would still get close to ₹ 20 crore (₹ 200 million) every year, regular as clockwork—without the burden of having to strictly account for how you spent the money. If your association is influential, if your vote is crucial to the continuance in power of the entrenched brass, then this minimum grant is mere pin money. The powerful associations are allotted marquee games, and paid substantial sums for hosting them. The corresponding stick, that these games could not be allotted, is sufficient to bring recalcitrant associations into line. When Dalmiya’s fate was being decided in 2006, this implicit threat was enough to prompt even his own protégée Ranbir Singh Mahendra, who defeated Sharad Pawar in the board presidential elections in 2005, into voting against Dalmiya. Associations also get to apply for ‘special grants’ that are routinely sanctioned; a particular favorite has been “stadium development”. Thus, if you control a state association and you play by the rules, you can run the tab as high as ₹ 60 crore (₹ 600 million) in a year. These sums are not accounted for individually in the board’s annual reports, but bucketed under opaque and vague line entries such as “cricket development activities” and “establishment expenses”. Nor is this spending detailed in the reports of state cricket associations—in part because most don’t even file annual reports. Without itemised and detailed accounting, once the money is doled out to the states, there is no way for anyone to keep track of what happens to it, which may be exactly the point: by giving out such large sums with little or no oversight, the BCCI is tacitly buying the cooperation of the state associations. The state associations are effectively shielded from scrutiny—and in the unlikely event of a zealous governmental department poking its official nose into the finances, the board has sufficient political clout to ensure that such inquiries die .
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 00:02:52 +0000
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