Apportioning guilt

THE MADHAVAN REPORT, which was commissioned by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to assess the CBI's report on cricket match-fixing, does not contain many surprises. In its central conclusions, the Madhavan report is not very different from the one that resulted from the preliminary inquiry initiated by the investigating agency. Both reports have apportioned guilt in a similar manner amongst those cricketers who were accused of fixing matches for money. As the CBI did, the BCCI-appointed sleuth, Mr. K. Madhavan, has found that the evidence on former captain Mohammed Azharuddin's involvement in match- fixing is the strongest. Others such as Ajay Jadeja and Manoj Prabhakar have been described as having a ``nexus'' with bookmakers. This is not unexpected. The CBI's report was the result of a massive and coordinated investigation into the match-fixing phenomenon. Mr. Madhavan's inquiry was much more limited. Although it was commissioned to assess the CBI's conclusions, it was always unlikely that there would be a great divergence between the two reports.

It is now up to the BCCI to decide the scale of the punishment to those implicated in different ways in the Madhavan report. The former CBI Joint Director has refused, and quite correctly, to go into the punishment question on the ground that this is a matter for the cricket administration. The BCCI has chosen to give those cricketers implicated in the Madhavan report a second hearing on the ground that they have a right to represent their case before any punishment is meted out. But with the BCCI president, Mr. A.C. Muthiah, hinting, more than once in recent times, that a life ban could be slapped on the guilty, there is widespread speculation that, even if some others are let off somewhat lightly, Azharuddin may never play the game again.

To determine the quantum of punishment is the BCCI's business alone, but it would do well to keep a couple of things in mind before doing so. First, that neither the CBI's report nor Mr. Madhavan's conclusions constitute hard or incontrovertible proof of someone's guilt or another's innocence. One reason why the CBI did not proceed with a chargesheet against the cricketers was the sheer lack of evidence - that is, of the kind that would stand in court. Second, before punishing the cricketers themselves, the game's administrators must realise that the match-fixing phenomenon would not have become as prevalent had they cracked down on it much earlier. The CBI's report itself virtually damned the BCCI for being ``negligent in not preventing match-fixing and related malpractices in cricket in spite of clear signals of the malaise''. The cricket probes have indeed left us with a peculiar situation where those accused of negligence sit in judgment on those accused of match-fixing.

There is tremendous pressure on the BCCI - from the Government and from an unforgiving public - to see that the harshest punishments are meted out to those implicated in the reports. The Board would do well not to succumb to such pressures and examine the question of punishment in an objective and dispassionate manner. In the match-fixing game, cricketers are but one part of a network that includes bookmakers, betting syndicates and, as we have now learnt, the mafia or underworld. The CBI's report had drawn attention to the links between the mafia and the game and this dangerous nexus is something that needs to be probed much more deeply. Penalising a few cricketers may be necessary, even advisable. But the match-fixing phenomenon goes deeper and it is important to remember that the mafia-controlled betting syndicates were the ones which really manipulated the game.

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Section  : Opinion
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