The wickets fell in spectacular succession. Chennai Super Kings were 3-3 in less than two overs. A moment of high drama that would have drawn shrieks of excitement was instead greeted with a strained enthusiasm. Our cheers sounded forced, and the excitement of the commentators rang false. The weeks of relentless IPL corruption coverage had taken their toll.
Prayaag Akbar recently skewered the ‘Betrayed Billion’ rhetoric, arguing, “Most of this nation, I think, sees this tournament for what it is: a giant carnival of capitalism, one that comes with a little cricket attached.” A view I heartily endorsed just days ago. I hadn’t grasped that it was the cricket that made the carnival. Robbed of its integrity, the IPL had turned into a dull pantomime, an empty exercise whose outcome no longer signified.
“IPL finals look fixed. MI were predicted to win. The way dolly catches are being given by CSK it looks too silly for words,” tweeted Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, and was immediately accused of ‘slander’. But she was just saying what the rest of suspected. That CSK received the Fair Play award would’ve been amusing if we weren’t already beyond cheap irony. We recognise shamelessness when we see it. There was more of the same on display the today’s papers when the news of BCCI chief N Srinivasan’s refusal to resign made front page headlines — the Mumbai Indians victory relegated to the status of a sidebar.
I still think ‘betrayal’ is the wrong word to describe our response to spot-fixing. What we feel is a tired disillusionment. The IPL scandal may signify little in itself, but coming in the wake of a string of corruption scandals, it confirms our greater sense of having been scammed by the alluring but empty promise of rising India.
The IPL was not just a cricket league but a symbol of our post-liberalisation aspirations. As a 2010 wire story breathlessly put it:
The Indian Premier League (IPL) has become an emblem of India’s aspiration to be a recognised world power in all, if not, most spheres. In a country of 1.2 billion people, most of whom are bonkers about cricket, the IPL is a symbol of everything they want India to become-a true global power. There is something about IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi that suggests a reservoir of pressurised energy waiting to bypass Indian cricket’s myopic administrators, the nepotism, corruption, vested interests, personal fiefdoms and incompetence.
We were the proud owners of the biggest and richest cricketing spectacle on earth. The very same foreign players who whined about our food, facilities, and pitches were now begging to play in our league, willing to betray their own national teams for our money.
We felt powerful and important then. Now the IPL makes us feel cheap and grubby. The scandals confirmed what we’ve discovered over recent years: that the glitz and glamour of new India is just lipstick on the old pig of corruption. So rapt were we by the prospect of plenitude that we failed to realise that our rising salaries — and the foreign vacations, cars, and smartphones they could buy — were mere sops that disguised the escalating level of grand larceny.
“A study by KPMG says that $462 billion went out in illicit financial flows from India, of which 68 percent went after the liberalisation in 1991. Thus the abolition of control, licenses and discretionary powers accompanies an increase in illicit funds. The three illicit sources were tax evasion, crime and corruption,” notes SL Rao. The pig is now fatter than ever. Old, third world India with its entrenched hierarchies and sources of ill-gotten wealth continues to reign supreme, tainting all that we love most, including cricket.
This unwelcome truth used to make us mad — back when we were cheering on Anna Hazare — now it just makes us drearily sad.
One way to preserve optimism is to go willfully blind like Chester Twigg, the NRI who brought his 8-year old from Singapore to watch the final. He “banished every newspaper and blocked out all news channels” so his son won’t read or hear anything that may dent his passion for the game. Asked if he would have still made the trip had the scandal come to light before he bought the tickets, Twigg said, “I guess, yes. Probably because I desperately want to believe that not too many players in this great game are involved.”
We can, if we choose, play our allotted role: forgive, forget and cheer on. In the weeks to come, lots of heads will roll, mostly of small-timers but with a few A-list names to maintain appearances. N Srinivasan now, Manmohan Singh later. We can pretend that all these scandals — be it spot-fixing or Coalgate — are just glitches in the system; they represent the failure of individuals and not the system itself. After all, we too want to desperately believe.
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