The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  Back in Delhi, Modi was set to work in the family business. But he soon got bored of the tobacco business. He wanted his own success. So, after causing another scandal (by marrying a friend of his mother’s, a divorcée nine years his senior), he moved to Mumbai and started a media company, Modi Entertainment Network. This was in 1993, just as India’s television revolution was beginning and the opportunities for a well-capitalised, well-connected entrepreneur were immense. Modi formed a string of lucrative joint ventures with foreign media companies including Disney, Fashion TV and ESPN, whose content MEN agreed to distribute in India. Yet Modi, at once controlling and unpredictable, could be a difficult partner. Several of these promising ventures soured, leading to legal battles and eventual divorce. Almost anything Modi touched seemed to become controversial.

  Modi’s interest in cricket dates from around this time. He had previously shown little enthusiasm for the game. When I asked him if he actually liked it he looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘Sure, I like all sports, always participated in sports,’ he said vaguely. But Modi was interested in money, and during his ill-fated student days he had been impressed by the revenues American sports churned out. He became convinced that Indian cricket was a seam of undiscovered gold, waiting to be mined.

  In 1995, shortly after launching his media career, Modi pitched his idea for a new 50-over tournament to the BCCI: he even registered its name – Indian Cricket League Ltd (ICL). Amrit Mathur, who would become CEO of the Delhi Daredevils IPL side, was part of a four-man team hired by Modi to plan the contest. ‘We had it all worked out, city-based teams and with lots of entertainment,’ he told me. ‘It was going to be pretty much like the IPL has turned out.’ But the BCCI said, nothing doing.

  Foiled by the board, Modi resolved to join it. He got himself elected to the cricket association of the small Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, but his involvement there was short-lived. He then resurfaced in Rajasthan in 2005 on a firmer wicket. The state’s Hindu nationalist chief minister, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, a member of the royal house of Gwalior, was an old friend of the Modis. She was also controversial. At a time of galloping growth in Rajasthan – fuelled by a property boom in and around its lovely pink capital of Jaipur – Scindia’s government was alleged to be more than usually corrupt. This looked bad for Modi, because he was said to be advising his old friend. He was often seen in Jaipur, staying in a suite at the luxury Rambagh Palace hotel; investors began speaking of Modi as a route to the chief minister. The opposition Congress dubbed him Rajasthan’s ‘super chief minister’, a grand vizier to the state’s maharani leader. Ahead of Rajasthan’s next election, in 2008, the Congress party sought to capitalise on these allegations with a campaign poster that asked: ‘Who is Lalit Modi?’

  He has been convicted of no wrongdoing in Rajasthan. Yet Modi clearly did well under Scindia in one respect. With her help he managed to get hold of the Rajasthan Cricket Association from a family, the Rungtas, that had ruled it for 38 years. He launched his campaign surreptitiously, joining the association under an abbreviated version of his name: as one ‘Lalit Kumar’. ‘I didn’t give my full name because in those days my name would crop up and all of a sudden – pssch! – people would want to cut off my entry,’ he later confessed. Scindia then introduced an ordinance, the Rajasthan Sports Act, which disenfranchised most of the association’s members, hand-picked by the Rungtas, in favour of Rajasthan’s 32 district cricket representatives. In February 2005 they were then persuaded to elect Modi, a man with little history in Rajasthan or cricket administration, president of the RCA by a single vote. Modi was now on the inside of Indian cricket. India’s cricket bosses quickly recognised his potential. Most had got into cricket before the television-fuelled boom; Modi had come in, bristling with enterprise, because of it. He was unabashedly commercial, the most enterprising administrator Indian cricket had seen. At a Test match in Mohali he was presented to the media by I.S. Bindra, Dalmiya’s great rival, as the coming man of the BCCI. ‘Cricket in India is a $2 billion a year market,’ Modi declared. ‘We are sitting on a gold mine. Our players should be played on a par with international footballers and NBA stars, in millions of dollars and not in measly rupees.’

  No one in the BCCI paused to question Modi’s probity, his divisive character or his scandalous history. Instead they gave him the keys to drive Indian cricket to yet greater profits. After Sharad Pawar took over the BCCI in 2005 he made Modi head of its marketing committee, with responsibility for negotiating commercial contracts. Modi proceeded to raise $150 million from a pair of sponsorship deals, with Nike and the Sahara Group, and $630 million from selling five-year broadcast rights to Indian cricket to Nimbus. That was a deal that would have historic consequences.

  It helped convince Zee TV’s Subhash Chandra – Indian television’s historic monopoly-buster – to launch his rebel Indian Cricket League.

  In August 2007 Kapil Dev unveiled Zee’s first 50 signings for the ICL. They were better than the Indian board had been expecting. Zee had recruited several high-class veterans, including the West Indian Brian Lara, the Pakistanis Inzamam-ul-Haq and Muhammad Yousuf, and the South African Lance Klusener, each signed for around $400,000 a year. The calibre of the ICL’s Indian contingent was much lower, the BCCI having threatened to ban any player who joined Chandra’s revolt. ‘Our stand is very clear. Players who take part in the ICL will never be eligible to play for the country again. It is up to the players to decide what they want to do’, said the board’s secretary, Niranjan Shah. Nonetheless, the ICL had bagged a few jaded big-name players, Dinesh Mongia, Deep Dasgupta and J.P. Yadav, and a lot of promising young cricketers, including most of the Hyderabad state side.

  The BCCI feared that if Chandra’s rebel tournament became established that exodus would grow. Only a handful of Indian cricketers could play for India, after all, and Zee was offering salaries far in excess of what India’s state associations paid. Chandra also had powerful friends. Laloo Yadav, India’s railways minister, promised him use of his ministry’s many grounds. Jokingly, he also urged the BCCI and Zee to settle their argument with a cricket match between their best players. Digvijay Singh, a Congress leader with the ear of the Gandhi family, wrote to Pawar imploring him on Chandra’s behalf to ‘prevail upon the hardliners in the board and make them understand the sentiments of millions of cricket lovers in India’. India’s anti-monopoly watchdog, the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission, meanwhile let it be known that it would investigate any attempt to ban cricketers playing for the ICL. It was a fine old Indian scrap.

  Pawar sought to manage the conflict. ‘There is no confrontation between the BCCI and ICL,’ he announced, perplexingly to most observers. Yet he had already set in motion a plan to fix Chandra. Modi had demanded Pawar’s permission to resurrect his own scheme for an officially sanctioned domestic tournament. Owned and run by the BCCI, it would be bigger, glitzier and richer than anything Chandra could pull off, and it would feature all India’s star players. Pawar gave Modi the go-ahead, plus a promise of $25 million seed-money for the venture.

  Many others on the board were sceptical, or so Modi later claimed. ‘Mr Pawar and Mr Bindra, they were the ones who backed me,’ he told me. ‘Everyone else was saying it’s not possible. They didn’t understand what I was proposing. They said, “This tournament of yours, it’s a bloody useless idea.”

  ‘But I had already made so much money by then. I had locked-in contracts for four or five billion dollars. So they basically said, OK, let him do it, he’s done so much for us, let him do it and let him fall flat on his face. And that’s basically how it started.’

  Over tea at Wimbledon in July, Modi outlined his ambition to Andrew Wildblood, a heavy-hitter in the sports management giant IMG. Though IMG was locked in a longstanding payment dispute with the BCCI at the time, dating from an India–Pakistan one-day series it had helped organise in Toronto in 1998, Wildblood was gripped. A new domestic Indian cricket tournament, harnessing the tea
raway cricket enthusiasm of India’s tens of millions of new consumers, could be enormously profitable. Indian television executives, after all, had been demanding one for years. And now the board, in fear for its threatened monopoly, was right behind the idea. Wildblood agreed to go away and flesh out a plan for the new league. Modi meanwhile embarked on a tour of the cricket world, to warn the world’s best players away from Chandra. ‘We basically started pulling out all the guns. I went all around the world, country to country, board to board, persuading them not to have anything to do with the ICL,’ he recalled. ‘Fuck, players were being wooed left, right and centre at this time. Brian Lara’s a prime example. I made four trips to London to meet Brian, saw him, saw his agent, told him to hang on. But Brian just felt we would never launch and [the ICL] had already launched, so he was just going to go ahead and play with them.’

  By early September IMG had produced a draft design for the IPL, cobbled together from British and American sports. Like Chandra’s upstart ICL, it would use Twenty20 cricket, the short, fast, knockabout format introduced in England in 2003. As in English football – to which its name paid homage – the league would be city-based. Its eight teams would be privately owned under a franchise arrangement with the BCCI. Unlike in America’s Major League Soccer and National Football League, the board would own the league, not the team-owners. But these investors would be guaranteed a large share of the league’s central revenues: initially including 80 per cent of television and 60 per cent of sponsorship revenues.

  The IPL was unveiled in Delhi in September at a ceremony attended by India’s top cricketers, including the holy trinity of Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar. The inaugural six-week tournament, Modi announced, would begin in April 2008, with prize money of $3 million – three times what Chandra was promising. Unlike the ICL, it would also have the blessing of foreign cricket boards. To encourage them, Modi also announced the launch of a new international T20 tournament, the Champions League, in which the best two IPL teams would compete against the Twenty20 champions of Australia, England and South Africa. Representatives of all three countries’ cricket boards attended the launch, as did the South African president of the ICC, Ray Mali. A few foreign players were also present, including Australian Glenn McGrath and New Zealander Stephen Fleming, both of whom had recently pulled out of negotiations to sign for the ICL.

  Cricket had seen nothing like this. The IPL promised to align the interests of the Indian board and private investors behind a tournament that had nothing whatsoever to do with international competition. If it took off, the players would earn more from playing six weeks of T20 in India than from a year of Test and one-day cricket for their countries. The threat to international cricket was obvious. The IPL threatened to tear a six-week hole in the international calendar – and what was to stop it spreading? Modi did nothing to reassure those who worried about this.

  ‘Cricket is a very old and traditional game,’ he declared. ‘We have something new and are trying to put it into reality. We have taken some bold steps. We’re going forward and trying to change the world order in that scenario.’

  Yet Modi was not quite as confident as he seemed. He now urgently needed to sell IPL television rights and teams for sums that would justify the expectations he had raised. And neither sale was straightforward. Hitherto, Indian cricket fans had only been interested in India’s national team, and there were plenty of experts who doubted whether their interest could be aroused by a tournament in which national pride was not at stake. Nor was it absolutely certain that they would even go for Twenty20. Just as the board had been slow to embrace one-day cricket in the 1980s, so it had turned its nose up at the game’s new shortest form. But this doubt, at least, was soon allayed.

  Just six days after the IPL’s launch, Yuvraj Singh walked out to bat against England in the inaugural T20 World Cup in South Africa. India were in utter control, on 155 for three, which made this a perfect situation for Yuvraj. Though an ordinary Test batsman, with a brittle temperament, he was a rare hitter of the ball, as he was about to demonstrate. He proceeded to hit the fastest international fifty, off only 12 balls. It included six sixes off a single over, bowled by Stuart Broad. Five days later India beat Pakistan by five runs to win the T20 World Cup: and India promptly went wild for T20.

  Modi’s sales pitch was now a lot easier. In January 2008 he sold ten-year television rights to the IPL for a little over a billion dollars, to a consortium of Multi Screen Media, the Indian division of Sony, and a sports marketing agency called World Sport Group. The figure was based on Modi’s estimate that each IPL game would be worth a million dollars in advertising revenues – a number he had more or less plucked from the air. Later that month, at an auction in Mumbai, the eight IPL franchises were sold to a who’s who of Indian tycoons for a total of $723.5 million, payable over a decade in annual instalments.

  The cricket world was astounded. To put these sums into perspective, the England and Wales Cricket Board, the world’s second richest, had total revenues in 2007 of £93 million. And the Indian cricket board had just landed the best part of $2 billion, in less than a fortnight, for a tournament that didn’t yet exist. The commentator Harsha Bhogle was following an Indian tour to Australia at the time. ‘The Aussies were completely amazed,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think they’d realised how much money there is in India.’

  Yet again Indian cricket seemed to encapsulate India’s national fortunes. The economy was putting on a blistering growth spurt, having expanded by over 9 per cent in each of the previous three years. This was up to Chinese standards, and India’s bullish finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, predicted that ‘double-digit growth’ was around the corner. Sober observers thought that unlikely: India, with its rotten infrastructure and paralysing politics, was not China. Moreover, for anyone minded to look, there were signs that the current growth rate was unsustainable. Bubbles were expanding in India’s property market, inflation was soaring, India’s roads, ports and airports were clogged with traffic – all signs of an economy overheating. But few middle-class Indians – including respected economists who should have known better – were minded to doubt the economic miracle they saw unfolding around them. The high growth rate was a source of tremendous national confidence and loudly celebrated. India, for so long poor and embarrassed, was at last emerging as a global power – and the IPL seemed to many Indians like a powerful symbol of that.

  Modi and his retinue encouraged such thinking, by talking endlessly of the money to be made in the tournament. ‘Why is the IPL so associated with money? It’s because we have always kept talking about money,’ the IPL’s CEO, Sundar Raman, told me. ‘Does this happen in the English Premier League? Do people talk endlessly about what such and such club is worth or player is paid? No. They talk about team loyalty and fan following and traditional rivalries. And the IPL will eventually move towards all of that.’

  The identity of the new team-owners encouraged more money talk. They included some of India’s richest businessmen, the most conspicuous beneficiaries of the boom times. Until the mid-1990s India was reckoned to have only two billionaires, together controlling around 1 per cent of GDP. By 2008 it had over 40 and they controlled more than a fifth of the country’s output.

  In a venal age, many of these tycoons had become popular celebrities, embraced by India’s bullish middle class. This gave Modi another selling-point for his nascent tournament. India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, bought the Mumbai franchise for $111.9 million through his Reliance Industries conglomerate. Vijay Mallya, an airline and brewing magnate, paid $111.6 million for a team in his home town of Bangalore. The Hyderabad team went to a big media group, Deccan Chronicle Ltd, and the Chennai one to India Cements, a company controlled by the BCCI treasurer, N. Srinivasan. GMR Group, a construction firm, bought a franchise in Delhi.

  Shahrukh Khan – aka King Khan – one of Bollywood’s leading lights for two decades, acquired the Kolkata team for $75 million, in pa
rtnership with the husband of one of his co-stars, Juhi Chawla. Another Bollywood starlet, Preity Zinta, bought a side in Mohali in a consortium that also included her boyfriend Ness Wadia, a member of one of India’s oldest Parsi business families. The only foreign investors were a consortium led by a British sports-media entrepreneur, called Manoj Badale, who had briefly owned the Leicestershire county side; it picked up a franchise for Modi’s old stamping ground, Jaipur, for $67 million. The consortium also included Lachlan Murdoch, son of Rupert, and Suresh Chellaram, Modi’s Nigeria-based brother-in-law.

  These were powerful people and Modi naturally took the credit for bringing them in. ‘All of them, every one of them, from Mukesh Ambani to Vijay Mallya to GMR group, to the Deccan, to Shahrukh, I approached,’ he told me. ‘Preity, Ness, everyone was personally approached by me, and sat with me. I mean they had no idea what the hell this was, no one else went to them. It was all done directly by me, one on one. Everyone was a friend of mine. No one else was going to come.’

  Yet the investors were getting a good deal. In the early years of the tournament, they would collect around $10 million a year from television revenues alone, sufficient to cover the annual repayment costs of a $100 million franchise. With additional revenue from tickets, ground sponsorship and merchandising, Modi estimated the franchise owners should not lose more than a couple of million dollars a year, including their franchise fees. ‘I gave everyone an assurance,’ Modi recalled. ‘I said, “Guys, you’re signing ten-year contracts. This could either be a dud or it could be big. If it’s a dud I guarantee we’ll walk away from it ourselves after a year or two. So that’s the maximum downside.”’