Cover Story: Are the Indians Guilty?

Oriental cunning once gave cricket the leg glance, courtesy Ranji, the man who "never played a Christian stroke in his life". Now too it's unChristian attributes that the east has brought to the game -- intrigue, corruption, vice, moral turpitude.

The illegal bookmakers are Indian. The match-fixing syndicates are Indian. The middlemen are Indian. Even the cell-phone companies are Indian. Yet those who are recipients of what are euphemistically called "forecasting fees" are either South African (Hansie Cronje) or Australian (Shane Warne and Mark Waugh) or unnamed English cricketers. The closest one gets is to accusations against Pakistanis.

BINDRA SAYS
"Virtually every match played in the world is fixed. Cricketers from all countries are involved. Dalmiya is in the grip of mafia and sharks. Hansie has become a hero by confessing. If Dalmiya confesses, he will be a bigger hero."

DALMIYA SAYS
"Have Bindra and the others disclosed the names they say they have? They should help. They should whisper it in the ears of the police. This is the limit. Don't take it to a stage where if someone's son is playing cricket, you label it a chor ka game."

What of the Indians? Are they the only ones batting for the angels? Does cricket's shame lack the visa to cross the Radcliffe Line? There are two views on this. The first is that of the establishment -- cricketers who deny they can spell the word bet, administrators as smooth as the gel they use to slick back their hair, sundry beneficiaries of the money-making machine that is the game -- these are the men who see no evil, hear no evil and speak evil strictly off the record.

The second view is that of the ordinary cricket fan. It breaks his heart to believe his cricketers are guilty. It challenges his mind to believe they are not. To question national icons would surely be a strange thing, even sacriligeous. These, however, are strange times. For Indian cricket they are also distressing times. As a once honourable game finds itself losing that much more of its dignity; even veterans' matches are under a cloud, the logic of wrongdoing points in one direction -- India.

PHONE GATE

Even for good friends, Mohammed Azharuddin and Ajay Sharma talk far too often when India plays cricket. Sharma, under surveillance for being linked to bookies, left the country recently. During the India-South Africa series there were a number of calls from Sharma's cell phone (9811177049) to Azhar's phones in India (0984-8031962) and in Sharjah (00971506508649).
Ajay Calls Azhar
ťMarch 8, 2000, day before Cochin one-dayer vs South Africa: Two calls lasting 9 min 15 sec in all.
ťMarch 10, two days before Jamshedpur one-dayer: Two calls lasting 2 min 34 sec.
ťMarch 13, two days before Faridabad one-dayer: Three calls lasting 2 min 52 sec.
ťMarch 16, day before Vadodara one-dayer: One call lasting 3 min 20 sec.
ťMarch 19, day of Nagpur one-dayer: A call lasting 2 min 21 sec.
ťMarch 21, day before India-SA match at Sharjah: Five calls lasting 3 min 43 sec.
ťMarch 23, day of Pakistan-India clash: Eight calls lasting 4 min 50 sec.
ťMarch 26, day before India-Pakistan encounter: Seven calls lasting 1 min 39 sec.

In a week that saw such despair, cricket authorities, even national authorities acted with a disdain unbecoming of the custodians of treasure; and indeed cricket is seen as one. The two men who, collectively, converted the cricket board from a club of amateurs into a corporation wedded to (crony) capitalism bickered in public. At the time when Indian cricket looked to its leaders, it found them wanting; and how.

In the days before people realised she had a clinical problem, Parveen Babi went to town giving interviews about how Amitabh Bachchan was the kingpin of the world's biggest crime syndicate. It was hilarious -- but it made great copy.
In the past week, India's cricket officialdom has made a similar spectacle of itself. The dramatis personae are I.S. Bindra and Jagmohan Dalmiya; and it's Bindra who's playing Parveen Babi. It began with former BCCI president Bindra's press conference at a five-star hotel in Delhi, where he spoke in a manner his supporters try and explain as "emotional". The thrust of Bindra's argument was that "virtually every match in international cricket is fixed in one form or the other". His most vicious line was reserved for Dalmiya, the ICC chairman who was Bindra's partner in the '80s in the rampant commercialisation of the game. Now the friend-turned-foe was, to Bindra, "in the grip of mafia and sharks". He even promised to name names and indict individual players and officials (he has named P.M. Rungta) after the ICC's meeting in London in early May.

THE AZHAR ASSAULT

THEY SAY: That he is linked to the bookie-fixer mafia through Sharad Shetty (aka Anna), a lieutenant of Dawood Ibrahim who apparently presented him a Mercedes in Dubai and a bungalow. As captain he is supposed to have cemented ties with the bookie nexus and played according to a pre-decided match script. Ajay Sharma, former Test cricketer, is supposed to be his "agent" in Delhi.

BUT: The man is planning to sue his detractors. Why does his name keep cropping up? "I don't know. They seem to be determined. It's almost like they're following a 'blame it on Azhar theme'." As for the business about his Mercedes, he denies any wrongdoing, pointing out that the Customs Department regulates imports and charges the due duty. So where is there a problem? "There is no truth in the allegations. They don't even have their facts right."

The following day A.C. Muthiah, BCCI chief, called Bindra's allegations "defamatory". Dalmiya himself sniggered at "the biggest joke". Ajit Wadekar, till recently chief selector, was sanctimony personified: "I don't believe that the Indian players are capable of fixing matches. These things cannot be done by our players."
This battle of personalities suits the BCCI and the man who remote controls it, Dalmiya, fine. It deflects attention from the basic issue: the perception that not only are Indian cricketers linked to betting rings and fixing syndicates but officials are hand in glove with them.

Rashid Latif, the former Pakisani wicket-keeper and the man who exposed the bookie-player nexus in his country and beyond, has no doubts on this score. "The Chandrachud inquiry was a complete cover-up," he says, "By that time the Indian board already knew about the involvement of some of its players."
So why are the BCCI and its masters doing precious little? Dalmiya doesn't want to rock the boat, using the Indian cricketers as cannon fodder in his mission to spread the cricket bounty from Canada to Kenya to, perhaps next, the Cayman Islands.

The private arrangements with local organisers, the payback from TV rights for each of these petty tournaments enrich certain officials. There are enough hints and insinuations to this effect in a public-interest petition filed by Rahul Mehra and Shantanu Sharma, two investigative cricket lovers, and admitted by the Delhi High Court on April 20.
With the officials fixing private deals, the players -- fatigued, bored or plain greedy -- decide to do their fixing on the field. It is a symbiotic relationship that keeps everybody happy, that prevents Muthiah from seeking a CBI probe, that has Union Sports Minister S.S. Dhindsa convening meaningless meetings with BCCI officials and cricketers to discuss the "current state of the game" and "achieve higher standards".

Even a man as rectitudinous as Arun Jaitley, Delhi and District Cricket Association president, tells the BCCI to "help" the Delhi Police in the Cronje case -- and shies away from what is truly needed: a scrutiny of the Indian dressing room.

On the evening of April 19, a slightly nervous, shifty-eyed and moustachioed man slunk up to the Gulf Air counter at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport. He produced his ticket, snatched his boarding card and climbed on to the flight to Muscat. In a few hours, he would take the connecting plane to London.

Ajay Sharma was gone. The law was as usual lumbering -- and late.
In the three or four days before his departure, calls to Sharma's Vasant Kunj residence in south Delhi were fruitless if varied. India Today was told, successively, that Sharma had:

ť left for London,
ť was about to leave for London,
ťhad left for Jammu,
ť was about to leave for Jammu.

Even on April 20, the morning after he had left, the charade was kept up. At Sharma's apartment, his wife, Sanjana, told India Today he had gone to visit his "ailing grandmother in a village near Jammu", a village with "no telephones". Half an hour later, A. Wadhera, Sharma's colleague in the personnel department of the Central Warehousing Corporation (CWC), confirmed he had "left for London yesterday".

Who is Ajay Sharma and why does he hold the key to Indian cricket's skeleton-packed closet? Some may remember him as a cricketer who made his debut for the country in 1988, the start of an indifferent career spanning 31 one-dayers and a solitary Test. A quiet, reserved chap, Sharma did nothing of note in the Indian dressing room. About the only investment he made was to strike a friendship with an equally shy colleague just a year his senior, Mohammed Azharuddin. It was an investment that was to prove a gold mine.

His prodigious scoring for the Delhi team, which he captained till recently, had won Sharma the nickname of "Ranji king". This past week he earned himself a new sobriquet -- "cricketer-bookie king", in the words of a Delhi Police officer. Azharuddin's "close friend" -- to quote a DDCA official, "Azhar's agent in Delhi" -- Sharma was the respectable interface between the genteel world of cricketers and the shady realm of bookies. A police officer investigating him calls him "arguably the biggest cricketer-bookie we have had in a long, long while". Apparently, "he fixed deals and liaised with cricketers, including Azharuddin, of which we have proof".

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	May 1, 2000