The next innings

Those two impetuous outsiders,Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi,may have in the course of their dramatic falling-out created a brilliant opportunity. The countrys attention has turned to the murkiness that surrounds the Indian Premier League,and,in the wake of Tharoors inglorious exit,calls have come from his supporters and detractors alike to make it worthwhile by cleaning the entire smelly Augean Stables over which Lalit Modi has till now presided with his commissioners gilded mop and broom. But,while any investigation will naturally start with Modi,his close associates,and the nature of their business interests in the league which he was supposed to supervise,it would be a betrayal of public hopes if it were to stop there.

Even a minute of watching the IPL reveals that it has refined cricket-capitalism into an art. No act remains unendorsed,nothing stays unsold,no event un-monetised,in a manner unmatched by any other sporting league anywhere else in the world. That,of course,is not illegal or even immoral. But it does mean that the IPLs vast audience is in no doubt that there are vast amounts of money involved. These columns have long warned of how the opaque nature of most transactions in Indian cricket,and how that lack of transparency automatically creates near-monopolies,nepotism and crony capitalism topped off with a hefty dollop of political involvement. It must be established who owns what teams. Because behind the fevered discussions of which stakeholder is fronting for whom lies the cold and unpleasant fact that such benami transactions can represent fraud and money laundering on a massive scale: the defrauding not just of the income tax department,but sometimes of minority stakeholders in completely unrelated corporations. So we are talking of a variety of serious offences.

Nor can it be anything less than comprehensive. After all,the IPL,the brash,label-obsessed teenager of Indian sport,is nevertheless very much the child of its parent,the Board of Control for Cricket in India,which is accountable for the way it runs the sport. Remember,the BCCIs secretary N. Srinivasan quite openly owns the Chennai IPL franchise. The connections between the BCCI,the state cricket associations that are subordinate to it,and politicians,including many major figures in the UPA,are well-known. This tangle of connections rules out disinterested administration as an option. The conflicts of interest,the overlapping and contrasting motivations that it engenders do cricket no service.