CBI, cricket & crorepathis

By V. Krishna Ananth

FOR ONCE, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been ``honest'' about admitting its inability to put together any evidence that could be sustained in a court of law to establish that some of the cricket matches were rigged by a punter-bookie- player nexus. In this sense, the agency has been spared the embarrassment it was put to by the courts in some of the cases it was ``ordered'' to investigate - the Jain hawala transactions for instance - in the recent past.

It is a matter for debate whether the CBI could have, after a preliminary probe into the match-fixing issue, put its foot down and refused to present a ``detailed'' report and conveyed to the political masters that since the evidence it could muster was insufficient to take the investigation to its logical end - prosecution - it would be better for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the cricket enthusiasts to deal with the problem.

Instead, the CBI decided to publish the proceedings of the enquiry and called it a report. The report, at least most of it, contains mere narratives of what transpired between the investigating officials and those called for questioning. And this is lending itself to a public debate where inferences are sought to be drawn about the CBI having gathered information that go beyond the ambit of betting and match-fixing. And now, the CBI is reported to be seeking a mandate to probe the link between match-fixing and the underworld.

A section of the media, for instance, even went to the extent of stating, with a sense of certainty, that a stubborn Mohammed Azharuddin ``admitted'' to having fixed matches immediately after the sleuths presented before him ``evidence'' of his links with members of the Dawood gang. There is nothing at all, in its report, of the CBI managing to crack Azharuddin in the way it was suggested in the media. Interestingly, while those in the media attributed this ``information'' to ``sources'' within the CBI and went about publishing stories about the underworld links of the former India captain, the CBI spokesman maintained a stoic silence; there was neither a denial nor a confirmation.

All that the CBI's report has to say on this is as follows: ``Azharuddin has also stated during his examination that Abu Salem had rung him up on a couple of occasions to fix matches but he had refused.'' The CBI report also cites a statement before its sleuths by Ali Irani, (the Indian team's physiotherapist) that Azharuddin once told him that ``he was `doing' matches for Anees Ibrahim and hence, he cannot do with anyone else.''

The point at issue here is why did the CBI sleuths refrain from enquiring further into these leads; if the statement by Ali Irani (that Azharuddin had confided to him of his Anees Ibrahim connection) as also the former captain's own admission that Abu Salem had approached him on a couple of occasions to fix matches are true, it was imperative for the CBI to investigate further. After all, the agency could have obtained printouts of telephone calls. That such leads were not followed up (or the silence by the CBI officials if they were followed up and they did not find anything to that effect) by the CBI raises questions about the seriousness with which the investigation was conducted. And by not making it a point to present the facts as they were, (whether there was any truth in the reports that the CBI had in its files a photograph of Azharuddin with Tiger Memom and that this led him to confess), the CBI has allowed its name to be used by the vendors of an extremely dangerous brand of nationalism and patriotism.

If the manner in which Azharuddin himself tried to take refuge behind his religious identity (when his name came up first in the match- fixing controversy) on an earlier occasion was simply absurd, the manner in which a Dawood connection is sought to be established in the media (and by extension in all public discussions on the affair) is equally dangerous. It is certainly not the case here that Azharuddin or for that matter the others in the list - Ajay Jadeja, Ajay Sharma, Nayan Mongia and Manoj Prabhakar - must be let off the hook; instead, all those who watched the game with so much passion (whether at the stadia or on television) are within their rights to know if they were deceived by the heroes. And if Mr. K. Madhavan, appointed by the BCCI to look beyond the CBI's inquest, has found anything substantive, it should serve the purpose.

After all, anyone with even some idea of the business of betting will agree that there is a lot more to the game than the techniques displayed by the cricketers on the field; that there are a set of men to whom the game is important for reasons different from the cricket buffs; the bookies and the punters look forward to a test match or a one day international the same way they would to horse-racing.

It is also common knowledge that betting (during cricket matches) does not always involve the final outcome of the match; for such kind of rigging means a whole lot of players would have to be part of the conspiracy and hence is not possible all the time. Instead, the punters here were masters in what is known as spread betting; bets are placed on aspects of the game such as who will be in the eleven, whether there will be a change in the batting order, whether a particular bowler will manage a maiden in the next over, and whether a change of bowler was in the offing. Bets are also placed on the individual scores of batsmen.

Under the laws of the land, it will take a lot more information to see the case to its logical end. But then, judicial remedy is not the only course, particularly when the issue is amoral behaviour; passing on ``information'' of the kind that is sought by the punters is certainly not moral. And when heroes of a particular kind are known to have indulged in such acts, they need to be ostracised. However, the middle class and the elite should intervene rather than let an organisation like the Shiv Sena take over the space.

The problem with the Shiv Sena kind of reaction is that it seeks to turn instances of amoral behaviour by a set of men into a debate on patriotism and national honour. And stories about the underworld links begin to feed such attempts by the Shiv Sena to serve the designs of an ideological platform that seeks to reduce the basis of Indian nationalism to religious denominations.

But then, there has hardly been any sense of revulsion, at least in an organised manner, against the developments at the level of the civil society. The reasons for this are not far to seek. While, at one level, public perception about the political system is shaped by the fact that there is ``information'' about corruption among members of the political class and yet none among them gets sent up for trial, at another level, the ordinary citizen too is getting drawn into the vortex, thanks to `Kaun Banega Crorepathi' and its several clones.

There is no way out other than the creation of a cultural milieu that shuns those who accumulate wealth by unfair means and civil society must show a contempt for instances of vulgar display of such ill-gotten wealth. This certainly is not possible in a society whose intelligentsia itself is caught in the trap of getting-rich- as-quickly-as-possible and where Governments come out with programmes to legitimise such ill-gotten wealth - the VDIS for instance! This is the context in which the match-fixing scandal has broken out; this, indeed, is the tragedy.

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