…almost the entire population of Patiala came out to give an unprecedented reception to the torch on February 20. The main bazaars wore a festive appearance unknown in the recorded history of that city… at various corners in the city people distributed sweets. Milk, fruits and flowers were offered to the runners. Thousands of men and women filed past the torch at Yadavindra Stadium where it was kept for the night.42
Similarly, at Ambala city and Cantonment, ‘all arrangements to control the crowds broke down’ as the thousands gathered far exceeded the expectations of the organizers. From Panipat to Delhi, the Grand Trunk Road was lined with thousands as they came to get a glimpse of the holy torch that was to start the National Games.43 Part of the fervour was certainly stoked by the sanctity attached to the Jogmaya Temple of Jwalamukhi but no one doubted the sporting nature of the event. The ritual of the Olympic flame relay had been Indianized and the breathtaking popular response was a measure of the support that the National Games and Olympic sport had at the time, at least in north India.
CRICKET, INDIAN-NESS AND TELEVISION
It is possible to date the rise of cricket as the pre-eminent Indian game almost precisely to the date when television began expanding. Television became a mass medium in India only during the 1980s. The previous chapter has documented the centrality of the 1982 Asiad in its development. There were three intersecting factors: the creation of a national network of transmitters linked with satellite technology; Doordarshan’s commercialization and resultant focus on entertainment; and economic reforms that made television sets cheaper.
Until the 1982 Asiad, Indians had never seen sporting events on television. The only way to follow any game had been to follow the commentary on radio. Now for the first time they could see their sporting heroes, in colour. That changed everything. India’s dominance in hockey had declined since the late 1960s, but in the showpiece Delhi Asiad, the hockey team lost 7—1 to Pakistan in the finals. This was the first time most Indian viewers, not fortunate to be at the stadium, were seeing the hockey team in action and the camera was cruel. For instance, Mir Ranjan Negi, the hapless goalkeeper on that day, later complained that the inexperienced Doordarshan cameramen never showed how he charged at Pakistan’s defenders. The camera would only cut to the empty goal after he had been beaten in his charge, with the effect that television viewers only saw an undefended goal post that seemed permanently open to Pakistan’s roving forwards. Negi never played a game for India after that day and for years was hounded as a ‘traitor’, who had ‘sold out’. Someone even cut the electricity at his wedding function, such was the popular anger he faced.44 His story has since been picturized in the 2007 Bollywood blockbuster Chak De India. That loss to Pakistan on television, watched for the first time by a national Indian audience, did irreparable damage to the image of Indian hockey in the national imagination.
The tragedy of Indian hockey, as Shekhar Gupta points out, was that while television expanded, Indian hockey declined:
Our last championship victory, the Kuala Lumpur World Cup in 1975, was telecast live but then all of India had no more than a thousand television sets, all black and white, and in the metros. Hardly anybody, therefore, would have seen the stirring image of Aslam Sher Khan, brought in as a desperate last-minute substitute to take a penalty corner, kissing his amulet before banging in the hit that took India into the final…
A sporting ‘product’ was needed to sell those wares, to consume the sponsors’ and the advertisers’ money, and hockey did not make the grade.45
A detailed breakdown of Indian hockey performances bears out this analysis. India lost only two games in the first three hockey World Cups. Between 1986 and 1990, it won only one game. While it has performed consistently at the Asian Games, it has languished at the Olympics and in World Cup hockey.
Table 9.1
Indian Performance at Hockey World Cups, 1980–2006
YearVenuePosition
1982 Mumbai 5
1986 London 12
1990 Lahore 10
1994 Sydney 5
1998 Utrecht 9
2002 Kuala Lumpur 10
2006 Mönchengladbach, Germany 11
Table 9.2
Indian Performance at Asian Games post-1982, 1980–2006
Year Venue Position
1982 Delhi Silver
1986 Seoul Bronze
1990 Beijing Silver
1994 Hiroshima Silver
1998 Bangkok Gold
2002 Busan Silver
2006 Doha 5th
Table 9.3
Indian Performance at Olympic hockey, 1980–2006
Year Venue Position
1980 Moscow Gold
1984 Los Angeles 5th
1988 Seoul 6th
1992 Barcelona 7th
1996 Atlanta 8th
2000 Sydney 7th
2004 Athens 7th
The decline in hockey standards began to turn spectators away at a time when television was providing opportunities for building an entirely new support base. In this context, Ramachandra Guha has argued that interest in soccer too began to wane after the telecast of the 1982 World Cup.
This was the first World Cup telecast live in India; alerted to the gap between their own local heroes and the great international stars, men in Calcutta began to turn away from their clubs. The slide continued; twenty years later, soccer ranks a poor second to cricket in the sporting passions of Bengal.46
What is significant from our point of view is that the creation of a national network for the Asian Games coincided with India’s epochal Cricket World Cup win in 1983. This was not Indian cricket’s first great win. The 1971 victory of Ajit Wadekar’s team against England in England perhaps ranks higher in cricketing terms. Wadekar’s team was welcomed back by huge street parades in Bombay but no one had actually seen them play. The 1983 World Cup was different. Unheralded, inexperienced in the one-day format, and led by a new young captain—Kapil Dev—‘Kapil’s Devils’, as they became known, were seen by millions of Indians through their journey to winning the Cup. It is not surprising that this victory was followed by political felicitations that Wadekar’s team and even the hockey players of an earlier era had never received.
The 1983 victory was followed by another victory in 1985 in the Benson and Hedges Champion of Champions Trophy in Australia. Again, television was the conduit, as for the first time, Indians saw the Australian tournament live and in colour. In fact, it is possible to precisely map the rise of cricket with the increase in television penetration. From 1983, the expansion of the television network became a key governmental priority. Between July and October 1984, for instance, practically one TV transmitter a day was commissioned.47 As Fig. 9.4 demonstrates, starting from just one transmitter in 1971, 18 had been set up by 1980. The graph leaps spectacularly in the early 1980s with the total number of transmitters going up to 172 in 1985 and 698 in 1995. This expansion was accompanied by a simultaneous increase in the sale of TV sets. In the first decade of television, the number of television sets increased from 41 to 24,838. It took another 12 years for this number to cross the 2 million mark. But from the mid-1980s, the graph suddenly rockets up and we see the makings of a mass medium. By 1986, 3 million TV sets were being produced in India, including 7 lakh colour sets 48 and by 1992 the figure had reached 34 million TV sets. 1992 was a watershed because that was the year when private satellite television first made its appearance. We examine its influence later in this chapter.
It is no coincidence that the cricketers of this era, while not necessarily more talented than those of earlier generations, became the first brand names among Indian sportsmen. As television advertising expanded, it looked for heroes, and found them in the national cricket team. Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri and Dilip Vengsarkar were hired to model a whole range of consumer products, from shaving cream and toothpaste to clothing and English language guides.
Advertising was first allowed on television in 1976 but it only grew in
the 1980s with the creation of a national audience. The decision to allow advertising, the push to create a nationwide television network and the spread of colour television after 1982 all combined to create a new consumer spectacle. It has been suggested that the rise of commercial television formed the basis ‘for a new notion of collectivity, expressed as “the middle class” and based on the “idea of the democratization of aspiration”’.51 A number of scholars have focused attention on the intrinsic links between the ‘exploding middle classes’ of India in the 1980s and state-sponsored commercial television through the 1980s.52 Certainly, marketing and advertising professionals were in no doubt about what television meant for the new consumer economy. According to Ahmad Khan, head of Enterprise Nexus Lowe advertising:
Figure 9.4 Growth of T.V. Transmitters49
I think what television did was that it opened, for a few million people, whole new worlds which they never knew existed. And it made them want and need things which they never bought before. So from just saving money for the sake of saving money, I think for the first time people said, ‘Oh, I make money so that I can do things with it.’ And this is something which I think happened for the first time in our history. I think that’s what television did.53
Television enabled the circulation of commodity images on a national scale in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. Cricket and cricketers were key components of these commodity images. It is no accident that the historical lineage of the Indian middle class as a political category can be traced to 1985. That was the year when Mani Shankar Aiyar, then a joint secretary in the prime minister’s office, told the Washington Post that India contained a middle class of one hundred million and that this class looked up to Rajiv Gandhi.54 It was the first political articulation of the middle class as a social category and this was only possible in the context of a newly created national television network with an overt middle class agenda, subsuming within it the state’s lofty developmental objectives. This perception, in turn, fuelled television advertising and the focus on cricketers as the new heroes of the nation. By the 1986 Asian Games, cricket had become so popular that a reader of a national daily could write:
Fig. 9.5: TV Sets in India (1959-1992)50
The disgraceful performance of the 400-strong Asian contingent…is not surprising when the nation’s main sport is following the cricket score on radio and television. The result is that city children take to breaking window panes and noses…Village children also have now taken to the Englishmen’s game and dropped fast the Indian games…Unless cricket is banished from this country, the rest of the sports would not get any encouragement, people would not do honest work in their work places and youth would not get adequate exercise.55
As cricket embraced the new charms of television, hockey, with a combination of bad performances, lack of administrative foresight and short-sighted planning continued to languish until cricket supplanted it in the national imagination. As Harsha Bhogle points out:
Television is the seed that breeds sponsorships, ignites passions and carries sport across boundaries. Formula One has shown that. A seemingly monotonous sport with invisible drivers thrives solely due to brilliant television. Hockey can do more, much more, if it chooses to.56
Globalization and the new economy were embraced by cricket while hockey administrators remained mired in old ways.57 The few times that Indian hockey did well, like at the Bangkok Asiad, its success was followed by administrative wrangling and internal discord. Half the victorious team at Bangkok, for instance, was sacked soon after it won the gold because of differences between the players and the IHF. Hockey administrators have made belated attempts to embrace television like with the National Hockey League on ESPN-Star. However, as Rohit Brijnath put it, ‘Cricket has settled on the mind and leaves little place and time for other pursuits. As a nation we are [now] guilty of a one-track mind.’58
‘THE BATTERING RAM’: SATELLITE TELEVISION AND THE CENTRALITY OF CRICKET
This book is not the place to detail the complex processes through which satellite television penetrated India. Suffice it to say that from 1991 onwards, satellite technology allowed private broadcasters to bypass the shackles of state control and break the state’s monopoly over the medium. By 2007, India was home to as many as 300 indigenous satellite television networks. The initial spark was lit by the Hong-Kong based Star TV network that was soon bought over by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Like elsewhere in the world, News Corporation banked on sport as a battering ram to capture the Indian television market. And given the events of the 1980s, by sport it meant cricket. Murdoch had first demonstrated the immense commercial power of sport when he turned around the ailing Sky TV’s fortunes in the United Kingdom by buying telecast rights for the English Premier League in 1992.59 News Corporation’s various entities have consistently followed this strategy ever since—from buying television rights to Major League Baseball and American football to rugby league and rugby union rights in England. Murdoch has since branched out into buying sport clubs, a practice that other media players like Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi have followed.60 In a speech to shareholders, soon after News Corporation acquired Star TV, Murdoch outlined the importance of sport in his business plans for expanding into Asia:
We have the long-term rights in most countries to major sporting events and we will be doing in Asia what we intend to do elsewhere in the world, using sports as a battering ram and a lead offering in all our pay-television operations. Sport absolutely overpowers film and everything else in the entertainment genre. 61
Accordingly, News Corporation chose cricket as a lynchpin of its strategy in India and ESPN announced its entry into the Indian market in 1993 by acquiring the exclusive rights to telecast cricket in India for five years for $30 million.62 This is a lesson that all major Indian broadcasters have learnt as well and since the mid-1990s the exponential expansion of the Indian broadcast industry has been accompanied by vicious wars over cricket telecast rights. India’s well-documented transformation into the ‘spiritual and financial heart of world cricket’63 during the same period is intrinsically linked to the infusion of television money.
Confusion and the Supreme Court: The Cricket Test
As the torch-bearer of satellite television, cricket has played a major role in the history of Indian broadcast reform and was the catalyst for the landmark Supreme Court judgement of 199564 that deprived the state of its legal monopoly over the airwaves. That judgement, in one stroke, gave a legal basis to the burgeoning new economy of satellite television. Since then, new stakeholders have arisen and in relative terms the once all-powerful ministry of information and broadcasting, the executive arm of the state in broadcasting matters, has found its power severely eroded. All of this stemmed from a dispute over cricket.
The state’s monopoly over broadcasting accrued from the colonial Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 which gave the central government ‘the exclusive privilege’ of establishing, maintaining and working telegraphs as well as the right to grant licences.65 The nationalist regime that succeeded the Raj continued to be guided by this 19th century legislation and an amendment to it in 1957 expanded the term ‘telegraph’ to mean any ‘apparatus for the purpose of affording means of telegraphic communication’.66 In 1991, foreign satellite television expanded in India like the American Wild West for two years before the state made its first serious intervention. Until then, satellite broadcasters found ingenious ways to get around the legal restrictions, often with help from ‘pro-reform’ sections of the state, but this dichotomy led to a serious crisis when the ministry of information and broadcasting first decided to enforce its legal monopoly in the dispute over cricket telecast rights between October 1993 and February 1995. Until 1993, Indian cricket had always been covered by Doordarshan and the crisis occurred when the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) sold the telecast rights of the five-nation Hero Cup67 to the multinational television company TWI. Doordarshan, which had failed to match TWI’s bid,
refused to allow the foreign broadcaster to uplink from Indian soil.68 Claiming an exclusive right to do so under the Telegraph Act of 1885, Doordarshan accused the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and CAB of being ‘anti-national’ and the ensuing legal battle illustrated the complexity of economic liberalization.69
TWI and CAB signed the agreement for the Hero Cup in May 1993. Even though Doordarshan saw the grant of rights to anybody but itself as illegal, the ministry of home affairs, on 13 October, approved TWI’s application to allow satellite up-linking. TWI even paid $29,640 to the government-owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL)70 as up-link fees and the finance ministry allowed it to import its own broadcast equipment, waiving customs and additional duties.71 Clearly, other ministries and departments did not have a problem with the TWI deal. In sharp contrast, the ministry of information and broadcasting condemned it as ‘a diabolical move to violate the law of the land.’72 As a pressure tactic, the ministry even forbade All India Radio from broadcasting ball-by-ball coverage of the tournament. Soon thereafter, customs authorities in Mumbai, under governmental instructions, confiscated TWI’s broadcasting equipment.73 This was the first serious muscle-flexing by the ministry and some media commentators immediately made the link with a larger crisis of the reform process itself:
CAB will be bludgeoned into submission and somehow Doordarshan and the government will have their pound of flesh…the next time Mr. Narasimha Rao [then prime minister] and Mr. Jyoti Basu [then West Bengal chief minister] go round the world seeking investments and much else besides, they must expect to be asked some searching questions.74
With TWI’s equipment in the custody of customs officials, CAB appealed to the Supreme Court of India. The court took the matter so seriously that a bench sat to consider it even though it was a government holiday. It has been observed that, ‘Never before in the history of independent India did a Supreme Court Division bench sit in judgement on a government holiday at 11.30 pm’.75 In an important ruling on 15 November 1993, the court overruled the government and allowed TWI to generate its own broadcasts.76 The case was urgent because its significance extended far beyond the game of cricket: the crisis of the Hero Cup seemed to jeopardize the 1996 World Cup, which was to be co-hosted by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The South Africa Cricket Board had threatened to withdraw South Africa’s support for the subcontinent playing host to the tournament unless the wrangle over telecast rights was sorted out immediately. Following this, foreign broadcasting corporations were already demanding their money back from WorldTel, which held the World Cup telecast rights.77 The issue of telecast rights threatened to take away foreign investment and was at the heart of economic liberalization itself.
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