by James Astill
Sensing they were in trouble, the Kochi consortium had beseeched the BCCI to let them move to Ahmedabad in Gujarat even before the season had begun. But the board had refused, and now the Tuskers’ home games were playing to a half-empty stadium. Saddled with an annual cost of $33.33 million a year just to repay their franchise fee, the investors were anticipating huge losses.
Most had until recently known nothing about either Kerala or cricket: they had made their money in diamond trading, construction and manufacturing. This had been obvious when I met some of the Kochi investors at the player auction in Bangalore. ‘Ah, Murali is Murali!’ enthused one, Dhaval Shah, a Mumbai real estate tycoon, shortly after he had agreed to buy the great Sri Lankan bowler for $1.1 million. ‘He’s an off-spinner, right?’
I asked Shah whether he thought the consortium had paid too much for the franchise. A third of a billion dollars, their winning bid, seemed a little steep for something with no physical assets. But, of course, Shah said he was not remotely worried. ‘Because the IPL has a bit of everything for us,’ he said, ‘business, cricket, fun.’ I admired his insouciance.
The Kochi franchise looked doomed. Some, especially in the Kotla press box, predicted the IPL was too. Even Amrit, in his gloomier moments, seemed half-tempted by that idea. But I was pretty sure it was wrong. Even with its reduced viewership, the IPL was easily India’s most popular television show. By one estimate, the Mumbai–Delhi game at the Kotla had been watched by 40 million people.
Most, I am sure, did not find the game especially ‘monstrous!’, but they still watched it. In fact, as the IPL entered its fourth year, I sensed many Indians were taking a more measured view of the tournament. They weren’t quite so mad-keen on the IPL. But for a quiet evening at home in front of the television, it was easily entertaining enough. Strip away the hype, and the IPL was a cricket tournament that a lot of Indians considered to be quite enjoyable. Few thought it was great. It was lowest common denominator cricket. But given how many Indians like cricket, this was sufficient to make the tournament an enormous, cricket-changing success.
Yogesh Visht was perhaps a typical lukewarm IPL fan. He worked for Genpact, a big outsourcing company based in Gurgaon. I was introduced to him after asking Genpact’s boss, Pramod Bhasin, to introduce me to a random sample of youngish cricket fans in his employ. Pramod, one of India’s most genial and respected businessmen, said he would be delighted. He was a keen cricketer himself, a miserly left-arm spinner for Genpact’s cricket team, which had just won the Royal Stag Corporate Cricket Cup (named after another of Vijay Mallya’s whiskies).
Yogesh, a human resources manager, was known to his colleagues as a diehard cricket fan. A 32-year-old Brahmin, he lived with his wife, parents, four brothers, their wives and a pack of children in a large house on the edge of Gurgaon. We arranged to meet there one Sunday afternoon, to watch the Daredevils play Kochi on television.
He showed me to a smart front room with a television set and furniture still wrapped in shop plastic. The room was obviously rarely used. Yogesh and his brothers mostly watched TV in their bedrooms with their wives. Fortunately, Yogesh’s wife quite liked the IPL, which he said he watched most evenings after he got home from work. That was usually around 9pm, just in time to catch the second innings of the evening game.
Yogesh took great pride in his work at Genpact. His family was prosperous; it owned three nearby houses and a couple of shops in what had been its ancestral village, before Gurgaon subsumed it. But Yogesh was the first member of the family to have been to university and to work for a Western-style company.
‘Working at Genpact I’ve come to understand the importance of communications and standard of living,’ he said. ‘We definitely want to move out from this particular community.’ I liked Yogesh’s house a lot. It was a pleasant blend of rural and modern, comfortably modern, but with cows and buffalo nosing at the doorstep. But he seemed embarrassed by this. He wanted to move to a modern flat in the middle of Gurgaon, with better access to good schools. His parents, understandably, were resisting the idea.
Determinedly upwardly mobile, Yogesh talked about his interest in cricket as if it was another aspect of his career. His favourite player was Tendulkar, he said, ‘because of his focused approach, his effort. He’s been doing absolutely fine for India for 20 years. That kind of application, that energy and ability to concentrate, it can teach you a lot for your professional life also. It shows that if you put a lot of concentration on your targets, you can achieve anything.’
‘And what about his batting?’
Yogesh looked briefly nonplussed. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he wasn’t quite such a big cricket fan after all. It turned out that he mainly liked watching India play. ‘IPL is not like watching your country playing,’ he said. ‘When it is your country, you have more excitement. Even Test cricket is all right, so long as Sachin or Sehwag is batting. IPL is also enjoyable, but at a different level.’
In fact, Yogesh admitted, he increasingly found himself watching Hindi soaps when he came home from work, not the IPL. He said he was starting to find the league a bit boring. And I suddenly realised that, while we had been chatting, Yogesh hadn’t even switched the television on to watch the match. There was a power-cut, it turned out, and Yogesh was reluctant to turn on the back-up generator for the IPL.
The IPL wasn’t the only business showing signs of a slowdown. After a tearaway year in 2010, India’s growth rate was slowing. The moderation was gradual at first, and there was little reason to fear India’s great economic surge was coming to an end. Yet it was surprising, and its main cause, a drop in private investment, was worrying. India’s private companies were the most dynamic part of the economy, the real cheerleaders of the new India. So what was taming their animal spirits?
The coalition government, led by Congress, was part of the problem. To woo poor voters, it had been splurging on welfare payments, fuel subsidies and other blandishments. To pay for this, it had borrowed heavily from state-owned banks, crowding out private borrowing. Yet another reason for slowing investment was more dramatic, and Indian business was also to blame for it. This was the paralysing effect of a series of large corruption scandals.
The first of these was the meltdown in the IPL the previous year. But it was soon overshadowed by much bigger alleged scams. In late 2010 a government auditor accused the telecoms minister, Andimuthu Raja, of handing mobile phone licences to eight companies at ‘throwaway’ prices. It was estimated this had entailed a loss to the Indian treasury of $40 billion. The affair dominated Indian newspapers for weeks, sustained by a tantalising sub-scandal. The income tax department, it emerged, had been tapping the phone of a well-known Delhi lobbyist, Nira Radia, and some of its transcripts found their way into the newspapers. They suggested she had been trying to influence the government’s telecoms policy. Some of India’s most senior journalists were accused of assisting her. And Radia’s clients included some of India’s most exalted businessmen, including Ratan Tata, boss of that great Parsi company the Tata Group. Now the ‘mother of all scams’, as it was dubbed, seemed to have everything, a colossal theft carried out by a coterie of crooked politicians and businessmen, aided by pliant journalists. Radia and her journalist friends were not charged with any offence; Raja was forced to resign and imprisoned on corruption charges.
Like the IPL scandal, this scandal seemed deeply significant. Indian mobile telecoms were, alongside the outsourcing industry, the country’s biggest industrial success story. Every month 16 million new users were signing up to the networks. That the industry appeared to be as corrupt as any other Indian sector was therefore a blow to the very notion of the dynamic new India.
Smallers scandals followed. It emerged that politicians and army officers had been grabbing apartments in Mumbai built for war widows – forcing the Congress chief minister of Maharashtra to resign. A luxury new town near Mumbai, it was then alleged, was being partly built on land acquired from the government at a
knockdown price. This season of scams, as the newspapers called it, invited some uncomfortable national introspection. Indians had invested great pride in their buccaneering private companies – or ‘Indian Inc.’, as the newspapers called them. They looked to them to improve on the lamentable performance of India’s corrupt government. That is why they were seen in such a patriotic light, as national champions, delivering the growth that would raise India from the Third World. But the telecoms and many lesser scandals, also in mining, construction and even the revered IT industry, made it seem as if Indian business and government were not in contrast to each other, but in bed together.
Was India becoming an oligarchy, a democracy stage-managed by a corrupt super-elite? India’s growth spurt, it was becoming clear, had shaken up Indian business far less than many had been expected. About three-quarters of India’s GDP was controlled either by the state or by family-run firms that predated the economic reforms of 1991 (including among them about half the IPL’s team-owners).
Hounded by the media, the government was gripped by uncertainty. Senior officials, the traditional agents of high-level corruption, began asking their political masters for every order in writing. India’s administration was paralysed by the controversy. The daily business of granting licences and clearances, to allow businesses to make investments, was not getting done. No longer greased by corruption, the wheels of the Indian state were grinding to a halt.
Anti-corruption protests flared in many Indian cities. The most important, led by an aging Gandhian called Anna Hazare, took place in early April 2011, at an 18th-century observatory in central Delhi called Jantar Mantar. As the new-look Daredevils were meeting up at the Roshanara ground, Hazare, lying on a small dais at the observatory, launched a ‘fast unto death’. It was intended to force the government to adopt a new anti-corruption law.
The scene at Jantar Mantar was so archetypally Indian it felt like a film set. Gathered around the simple charpoy where Hazare lay weakly, a crowd of long-haired yogis, Gandhians in khadi, villagers in traditional dress and thousands of middle-class well-wishers had gathered to sing songs and chant slogans in support of his protest. Hazare held some eccentric views, including that officials convicted of corruption should be hanged. But in this febrile time, he had become a sainted figure in India. A thicket of television cameras pointed at his prostrate form, to provide 24-hour, India-wide coverage of his sacrifice. Behind the cameras, hawkers had set up food stalls from which, rather indelicately, a delicious smell of chana masala – a spicy hash of chick-peas and fried potatoes – wafted towards the dais.
Nothing suggests the theatricality of Indian public life so much as the fast unto death. Gandhi carried out at least half a dozen. And scores are still held, in both India and Pakistan, every year. Occasionally, they turn out grimly. An Indian poet, protesting against army atrocities in her insurgency-wracked state of Manipur, has been fasting for over a decade. She has been force-fed through a tube, by court order, throughout that time. But her case is unusual. Most political fasts are a well-understood performance. Not only does the hunger-striker not die, he or she may barely lose weight. In the pleasant confines of the Lahore high court, I once interviewed some Pakistani lawyers whose solemn undertaking to ‘fast until death’ amounted to skipping lunch.
But Hazare’s fast, televised across India, was generating a lot of political heat. By the time I showed up, three days in, it was easily the country’s biggest news story. Sympathy fasts and candle-lit vigils were being held in many cities. Bollywood stars and Kapil Dev had declared their support for Hazare.
The Congress-led government implored him to eat but, lying wan and hungry on his string-bed, he denounced it. Hazare objected especially to the fact that Sharad Pawar was sitting on a high-level anti-corruption committee. Pawar promptly resigned from it, but Hazare was unimpressed. ‘If one Pawar goes, another will come,’ he said.
In a roped-off area beside the dais, there were more hunger-strikers. They included a 24-year-old IT engineer from Chennai, who had flown up to join the protest the night before. He was called Ballaji, was very fat and looked extremely uncomfortable. ‘It’s my first fast unto death so I want to make sure I do it properly,’ he told me, adding that he had not even touched a drop of water all day.
‘But aren’t you allowed to drink water?’ I asked him. ‘Everyone else is, even Anna Hazare. Isn’t that right?’ I asked the other fasters.
They nodded vigorously.
‘Thank God!’ said Balaji, accepting a cup of water.
I asked him why he was protesting. ‘Everyone’s corrupt, all of us, and it has to end,’ he said. ‘When I drive my car badly and get stopped, I pay a bribe. If I want a birth certificate or a copy of my school certificate, I pay a bribe. Whenever I have any sort of dealing with the government, I pay a bribe.’ His father was a police inspector in Chennai and very proud of his stand, he added.
‘How long do you think you can you keep it up?’
‘I don’t know because this is my first time,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘But I’ve taken 20 days off work.’
Like cricket matches and Bollywood dramas, political protests have their special rhythms, and this one was speeding up. A troupe of drama students, men and women wearing black kurtas and jeans, marched faux aggressively through the crowd, shouting sardonic reworkings of Bollywood lyrics. ‘The country’s so corrupt, socha hai?’ (‘... have you thought of that?’) Small sub-protests were erupting in front of the television camera, with protesters shouting for world peace or free medical care. In the thick of this democratic tumult, unmoving and lost in thought, I spotted Ashis Nandy, the sociologist and cricket theorist.
He greeted me warmly and, unasked, gave voice to his reflections. ‘It’s deeply interesting. Spontaneous. There’s a mythic subconscious here that has lasted for thousands of years, a tradition of fasting and peaceful protest against cruel acts of authority. Even if the people don’t know it, the myth lives within them.’
I asked the professor if he had enjoyed the recently concluded World Cup and his pensive expression unfolded into one of pure joy. ‘Yes indeed. I watched it in Australia of all places. It was a very nice event. There was a lot of nationalistic fervour, but a lot of generosity too. Genuine feelings. I enjoyed a lot.’
‘But of course, you won’t be watching the IPL?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Of course, I’m not really interested. But I might, you know, switch it on.’
On the dais, a young man wearing a white salwar kurta began strumming a guitar and crooning the words to a patriotic Bollywood song. ‘Bharat humko jaan se pyara hai,’ he softly sang as the crowd murmured with emotion. ‘India is dearer to us than life itself.’
Viewed from the pavilion, a line of snowy Himalaya peaks soars above the Himachal Pradesh cricket ground, from deep mid-on to a fairly wide third man. It is in Dharamshala, home of the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan government-in-exile, and there is no lovelier place in India, or perhaps anywhere, to watch cricket. I was sitting alongside Anita Mathur, wife of Amrit, awaiting one of the last games of the Daredevils’ dismal season and watching the sunlight glinting on the spectral Himalayas, speechless with wonder.
The ground was the second home of Kings XI Punjab. And it was now rapidly filling with a boisterous crowd of 20,000 Punjabis, who had driven up from the plains. Most had no view of the mountains because of the stands behind them. Instead they were making do by ogling the cheerleaders, young white women wearing spangly white vests and leggings, who were warming up on their boundary-side podiums.
‘They have no idea what they’re doing,’ said Anita, watching the girls and the reception they were getting. It turned out she knew a thing or two about cheerleading, having been a cheerleader herself, while attending an American school in Liberia. ‘They’re hopeless,’ she said. ‘Like all the IPL cheerleaders. But the main thing that worries me is those girls really have no idea what’s going through the minds of those men.’
The IPL
’s cheerleaders were not from the higher echelons of their profession. Mallya’s experiment with the Washington Redskins’ troupe had been expensive and short-lived. Most were from South Africa or Eastern Europe, and were neither trained dancers nor especially beautiful. They were pure titillation: if an Indian woman performed in public as they did, she would certainly risk being called a prostitute. I wondered, as Anita and I watched the Kings XI girls warming up with their pompoms, whether the cheerleaders realised this. In the stark Himalayan light, before a semi-inebriated Punjabi crowd, they looked vulnerable and pathetic.
Punjab batted first, bringing Gilchrist and Paul Valthaty to the crease. Valthaty was the revelation of this IPL season. A 27-year-old journeyman from Mumbai, he had not yet played a single first-class game. He had previously drifted around the IPL, with a highest score of six. Kings XI was his third IPL team. But Gilchrist, his captain, had seen something in Valthaty, given him a chance to open the innings, and he had seized it. He had scored an explosive 120 against Chennai early on in the tournament, and was now vying with Tendulkar to be its top run-scorer. Largely due to his performances, Kings XI had an outside chance of making the semi-finals. But on this green-tinged pitch, the Delhi seamers were proving to be a handful.
Even Irfan was – he was bowling fast and bending the ball through the air like his old self. He looked a bowler transformed. Gilchrist played and missed at a couple of deliveries, then carted the last ball of Irfan’s opening over for four. ‘Grandiose!’ flashed up on the scoreboard, as the cheerleaders hopped up to dance.
Gilchrist was soon out, caught at mid-on off Morkel. Yet the flurry of wickets that the Delhi bowlers deserved didn’t come. Valthaty and the Australian Shaun Marsh clung on, rather flukily. Then they began flaying the Daredevils’ second-string bowlers all around the small ground.
They put on a hundred and, though Delhi came back at the end, with Irfan getting three well-deserved wickets, Punjab’s final score of 170 looked good on this pitch. The Daredevils had only twice chased so many runs all season, their star batsman Sehwag was out injured, and the swinging ball would be even harder to follow under floodlights. The light was now rapidly fading, casting the distant Himalayas in a pink glow.
