on The spot
Tavleen Singh
From the moment I started watching the opening ceremony of this season’s IPL on Tuesday night I found myself captivated. I missed the beginning because of confusion about which channel I should turn to and so started to watch only from when the woman in white floated up against a dark Kolkata sky with the cup held tantalizingly in her hands and then I watched the show to the very last moment when that same dark, velvety sky shimmered with the incandescent light of fireworks. I must admit at this point that I am not a follower of cricket but for me what was fascinating about the magnificent opening ceremony was that it was such a celebration of India, such a wonderful reminder of India’s enormous soft power and her ability to represent sports, magic, peace and a joy in a neighbourhood that has for decades seen such horrendous ethnic violence, war and religious fanaticism.
The IPL has from the time it began, just months before the 26/11 attack on Mumbai, been a symbol of the leadership role that India can play in a very dangerous region that is currently in the throes of a very dangerous time. Not since India was partitioned in 1947 has there been so much violence on the sub-continent but no matter what Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh were going through in terms of domestic crises, that have often seemed insurmountable, cricketers came from these countries to play in the tournament. And, just by being able to organize the tournament on such a mammoth scale Lalit Modi showed the incredible potential of the private sector in India to produce excellence despite what seemed like impossible odds. Personally, I continue to believe that Lalit was hounded out of India by rivals in the sports world and that he will one day be able to prove his innocence but this piece is not about him. It is about the obstacles that the IPL has overcome to survive.
These obstacles have been created by politicians and bureaucrats who from the very first IPL season tried in different ways to either stop the tournament from going ahead or tried to seize control of it. The first attack on the tournament came in its second season when P. Chidambaram as Home Minister refused to allow it to go ahead with its scheduled itinerary on the grounds that the general election in the summer of 2009 required all the police deployment that Indian security agencies were capable of. It would have meant canceling the tournament altogether that year because cricket has its own seasons and players could not have ditched their national teams to play in the IPL so Lalit Modi took the tournament to South Africa.
When it came back to India for the 2010 season it quickly became besieged by major political leaders who wanted a share of the action. This happened because men who had controlled all sporting activities and organizations for decades could not believe that such an important tournament had slipped out of their hands. There was the added allure of filthy lucre. It seemed from the snug isolation of government offices in Delhi that the movie stars and businessmen who invested in the IPL teams were making huge amounts of money so why should politicians and officials not get a slice of the cake?
Somehow despite income tax raids, corruption charges and protests against ‘scantily clad’ cheerleaders the IPL has managed to survive. But, if you looked in the front rows of the opening ceremony you would have seen that they were occupied mostly by senior political leaders and their friends and families. The new commissioner of the IPL is a politician by the name of Rajiv Shukla whom I have known from the days when he was a humble provincial journalist who came to Delhi in the eighties and managed to get into Rajiv Gandhi’s good graces. From then onwards his rise has been as meteoric and dazzling as is humanly possible. He now owns a television channel, counts Shahrukh Khan among his best friends and is a senior minister in the Congress government. If this were not enough he is now also in charge of the IPL and undoubtedly nobody will ever charge him with money laundering or making profits out of commissions because once you become a politician in our fair and wondrous land people hesitate to accuse you of such things. Even our intrepid CAG thinks carefully before recommending that a senior political figure be sent off to jail.
What I am getting at, and not too subtly I hope, is that now that the IPL is no longer controlled entirely by the private sector it will probably survive but when are we going to realize that it is time to kick all politicians out of all sports? Under their aegis Indian sportsmen have suffered much too long with cricketers being the only exception because there is enough money in cricket for cricketers not to be dependent on officialdom. Take a look at the teams we send to the Olympics though and you may notice that often it has more officials in it than sportsmen and India’s abysmal record in international tournaments speaks for itself.
It is only since the IPL began that we have seen how much excellence can be brought into sports if it is released from the hands of officials. In most other democratic countries sportsmen are sponsored by private sponsors and clubs and this is what should happen in India in the future. Unless it does we will continue to see sportsmen treated like pawns in the hands of officials who are interested in sporting tournaments only because it helps them expand their already immense powers of patronage and it gives them a ringside seat when there is an opening ceremony like the one just held in Kolkata.
So although I enjoyed the ceremony very much and reveled in the exhibition of Indian soft power I have to end this piece by saying that I did not like seeing so many political leaders seated in such exalted positions. Will we need to wait for another Commonwealth Games type scandal to realize that everything should be done to keep politicians out of the IPL? It is a creation of India’s private sector and it should stay that way. Politicians and officials must have absolutely no role to play if we want the IPL to remain the shining star it has become in Indian’s sporting firmament.
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