Cover Story: Match Fixing, Chandrachud Report: Good for Nothing

Betting, like drinking, is a common human weakness since the beginning of the world. There are copious references to those infirmities of human nature in all classics of the world. One cannot therefore rule out the possibility that some Indian players may be laying the flutter of a bet ... There is undoubtedly large- scale betting on cricket but that is a law and order problem ..."
-Justice Y.V. Chandrachud, in his report to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on allegations of betting and match-fixing in the game in India.

Inquiry commissions are in the habit of producing tomes that largely remain unread. By that yardstick, what Justice Chandrachud has produced is a remarkably slim document. Last week, as Hansiegate rocked the cricketing world, attention once again turned to the 94-page document that the former Supreme Court chief justice had prepared. Though more than two and a half years have elapsed since the report was submitted to the BCCI, the wise men who govern the game in India have chosen to keep the report under wraps. Even Home Minister L.K. Advani got into the act last week, when in an obvious act of overstepping -- the BCCI prides itself on being an autonomous body -- he stated that "there was no question of making pubic the Chandrachud Commission report".

ACB: O'REGAN REPORT
THE ORIGINAL OFFENCE

Just before South Africa's first one-day match without Hansie Cronje at Durban last Tuesday, Australian Cricket Board (ACB) President Dennis Rogers said he was "shocked and devastated" by Cronje's confession. There was a delicious irony in the statement. For the man he was condemning had confessed to an act similar to the one for which Australian cricketers Mark Waugh and Shane Warne had been indicted.
In February 1995, Waugh and Warne startled the Aussie cricket establishment by admitting that they had accepted payments of US$4,000 and US$5,000 for providing bookmakers with information on weather and the state of the pitch during the Australian tour of Sri Lanka the previous year. The ACB fined Waugh A$10,000 and Warne, A$8,000, but no one would have known about the incident had the story not been leaked out three years later.
The secrecy with which the ACB handled a potentially explosive incident came in for widespread public criticism. The uproar forced the ACB to appoint Rob O'Regan of the Queensland Bar to investigate the involvement of Australian players in betting or in fixing matches between January 1992 and December 1998. In his report, O'Regan said that no Australian cricketer had received payments from bookmakers but indicated that several had been approached with offers that they had rejected.
A panel instituted by the ICC in October 1999 -- comprising Lord Griffiths, Justice Albie Sachs and Sir Oliver Popplewell -- to review O'Regan's findings in Australia and Justice Y.V. Chandrachud's in India reported its dissatisfaction at the ACB's decision not to go public about Waugh and Warne. It also felt the fines imposed on the two Australian cricketers constituted too mild a penalty for an infraction of that magnitude.
But more importantly, the panel agreed with O'Regan that "touring players, especially young players touring overseas for the first time, have not been adequately prepared to deal with financial temptations to which they may be exposed". If the ACB and the ICC had wanted to admit to the existence of betting and match-fixing, they couldn't have been more explicit.

What exactly did Chandrachud write that ministers and the game's administrators would rather it remain a secret? Did he, as one ex-player did in another context, call those who ran cricket in the country "a bunch of jokers"? Did he call the players a "bunch of mercenaries"? Or did he, on the weight of the evidence in hand call those who pay to watch the game a "bunch of fools"?

Nothing of the sort. For the record, the Chandrachud Commission was set up on June 20, 1997 following allegations that some members of the Indian team were indulging in betting and were involved in the fixing of matches featuring the national team. Between the time the committee was constituted and November 17 the same year when its report was submitted, Chandrachud "interviewed" 27 players, past and present, several cricket administrators and a handful of journalists who have for long covered cricket. The BCCI also made available to the commission reports by managers of Indian teams that had undertaken tours between 1991 and 1995. Among the cricketers who met Chandrachud were Sachin Tendulkar, Mohammed Azharuddin, Nayan Mongia, Ajay Jadeja, Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Ajit Wadekar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Sanjay Manjrekar, Sandeep Patil and Manoj Prabhakar. If anyone should know about the ills plaguing the game in this country, this impressive line-up of Indian cricket for much of the '80s and early '90s should.

As secretary of the BCCI then, Jagmohan Dalmiya, now president of the International Cricket Council (ICC), had even given the retired judge a free hand. "Justice Chandrachud will have wide-ranging powers to conduct the inquiry ... he would be at liberty to summon any board official or cricketer as he would deem fit and necessary. The board will not spare anyone found guilty of match-fixing," he had then said.

But sceptics were quick to question the board's move. Legal experts wondered about the sanctity of the probe since the committee had neither legal sanction nor powers of enforcement. There were others who felt that with Parliament then being seized of the matter (one MP was said to have given a notice in the Rajya Sabha seeking a government probe into the scandal), there was some apprehension in BCCI circles about the damage from an official probe. The refrain was: an official probe would have exposed a lot in the BCCI closet. There is no such danger in an in-house probe.

As Chandrachud got down to work, it became clear that such fears were not unfounded. Even Manoj Prabhakar who ignited the controversy with his reckless statements in a magazine interview seemed to have developed cold feet before the committee. The inquiry report described the match in Colombo which Prabhakar had claimed was fixed actually never took place. Prabhakar had said Azharuddin and Aamir Sohail returned from the toss, both claiming that the other had won; Chandrachud said the two never captained their teams at the same time in any match anywhere. The allrounder's statement that a teammate had offered him Rs 25 lakh to tank a match against Pakistan had earned him front-page banners but before Chandrachud, he was amazingly subdued. "He said that his life will be in danger if he disclosed the names. I pleaded with him that he may disclose the names to me in confidence ... Faced with this situation, he changed his stance and said that he is afraid that he will be sued or prosecuted if he disclosed the names." Enough for the honourable justice to conclude that Prabhakar's allegations were "imaginary and unrealistic".

PCB: QAYYUM REPORT
STILL UNDER WRAPS

If the Hansie Cronje case has done anything in Pakistan, it has reignited the interest in the findings of the Justice Malik Muhammed Qayyum judicial commission into match-fixing and betting allegations against top Pakistan players like Wasim Akram, Saleem Malik, Mushtaq Ahmed and Ijaz Ahmed. Gathering dust in government offices since October, the 94-page report of the Lahore High Court judge is said to have recommended strong disciplinary action, including heavy fines and bans, on some of the players for alleged malpractices. But until the report is made public by the Pakistan Cricket Board, nothing can be said for certain.
Justice Qayyum has distanced himself from the media glare ever since the Nawaz Sharif government was overthrown on October 12 last year. He speaks no more on either his findings or the match-fixing issue, his only comments being that it is now up to the Government to decide what it wants to do with it. But before fading from the limelight, the judge had made comments in the national press about his findings, confirming that some of the players would face strict disciplinary action when and if his report was implemented.
Now, following the sensational Cronje disclosures, there is hope that sooner or later the PCB will be pressured either by the ICC, other member-boards or the media to make the Qayyum findings public. This could have wide-ranging implications for Pakistan cricket.
Rashid Latif and Aamir Sohail, on whose allegations an inquiry into the charges was based upon, believe that no one on the board has had the will to take action on the report. Ever since the match-fixing allegations first surfaced in Pakistan, government and cricket authorities have not gone public about the facts for fear that it could lead to the suspension of the Pakistan cricket team by the ICC and damage the image of the country. PCB Chairman General Tauqir Zia maintains that the board has not received the report from the Government as yet, but that seems highly unlikely.
"Pakistan was the only country to take the allegations seriously and conduct a full-scale judicial inquiry into the whole affair and none of the players who made the accusations was victimised," says Zia's predecessor Khalid Mehmood, in whose tenure the judicial inquiry was started. "It was a transparent inquiry and everyone who had any information to give on this issue was questioned by the commission."
According to Mehmood, the inquiry was conducted on the basis of an official notification, unlike the probes by Indian and Australian cricket boards. Which is why Qayyum sent his report to the Ministry of Sports. His contention is that the ball is now in the ministry's court and that there is only that much the board can do. Or will do.

-Waheed Khan

A perusal of the report would indicate that the learned judge spent a lot of time listening to the same tune. Current and former players all confessed to have heard of betting, some even of match-fixing, but neither they nor anyone in their circles had ever indulged in it. Listen to Azharuddin: "I don't think any match can be fixed ... I don't know if there is betting on cricket. But I know it for certain that none of my teammates bet."

Or Sachin Tendulkar: "I do not believe that matches can be fixed. In cricket, you never know what is in store for you. There is no prescribed syllabi in sport. In my knowledge, no match has ever been fixed ... A batsman who can deliberately get out would be a super technician. Between May 1996 and May 1997, we played 15 international matches for which each of us received about Rs 40 lakh from BCCI. No player would risk being dropped from the team for deliberate bad play."

Or Nayan Mongia: "Matches are not fixed at all. I think it is crazy that any player will bet to lose."

Ajay Jadeja: "When you are included in the team you only think of your performance and not of money. Cricket is a religion in India."

D.V. Subba Rao (team manager during the 1997 West Indies tour): "My experience belies the allegations. The talk of match-fixing and betting started only when we began to lose matches. There was no such talk when we were winning."

Not quite the truth. Sandeep Patil, a regular in the team from 1979 to 1986 and later coach, told the committee that he had seen "one of the leading players in the Indian team talking on a mobile phone for long periods from the balcony of the Lord's dressing room ... I also wrote to Mr Dalmiya that I suspected that two persons, one of them a player and the other closely connected with him, were leaking important information." Dalmiya presumably didn't think the issue was important enough to pursue.

Delhi's Sunil Dev was manager of the team that toured South Africa in 1996-97 and was among the game's administrators who deposed before Chandrachud. "Betting on cricket takes place heavily in India ... I cannot identify any particular player but I am certain that some members of the team lay bets and one can bet only to lose," he says. "It is easy to get run out or hit a lofted shot ...We may have lost matches because some of our players laid bets to lose."

Kapil Dev partially agrees. "There is large-scale betting on cricket. Fixing a match does not mean fixing all the players in the team. A couple of players are enough to fix a team. The evil of betting can be dealt with only by the police. I am of the opinion that that the board should set up a private agency to find out the assets of the players. That will give some clue whether players lay bets or agree to fix matches."

Earthy Haryanvi logic that either didn't occur to the men who run the game and are responsible for dragging the game to its current state or who deliberately avoided finding solutions to ensure their sway over the game's administration. The new BCCI president, A.C. Muthiah, says he wants to change things. "We are considering releasing the report. If necessary, we will refer the matter to the CBI for further action," he told India Today.

If that happens, another round of controversy is certain. "It will be a sad day," the Chandrachud report says, "if the common men and women on whose support the game has occupied its pride of place believe that bookies, not the chosen eleven play the game." Unfortunately, that day has already come.

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	April 24, 2000