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| May 15, 2000 | ||
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MATCH FIXING Bindra's startling charge gives a new twist to the match-fixing controversy By Sayantan Chakravarty
Or so it was at least on the night of April 30. Three days hence former BCCI boss I.S. Bindra will inform CNN that Prabhakar told him it was Kapil who offered him the money, and Prabhakar will impersonate the Invisible Man and not be seen, and Kapil will thunder and strike his desk and announce, "If he's got balls, he'll take calls," and Madan Lal will say things about Bindra that are not quite printable because he's in this mess too since Bindra tells CNN that in Barbados in 1997, when India were chasing 120 and lost, coach Madan told him "unhone match phek diya (They threw the match)". But that's then, this is now, and in the cool evening comfort of a businessman's house in Greater Kailash-II in Delhi, Kirti Azad is celebrating his wedding anniversary. Guests mill, gossip, coo, drink. At 10 p.m. or thereabouts, an invisible curtain draws and the theatre begins. Prabhakar, who is facing the door, suddenly ices over, and as a grimness settles on his face you know he's seen a familiar ghost. It's a white-teeth smiling and blood-red-T-shirt wearing Kapil. They don't smile or talk or shake hands, there is no false conviviality here. Prabhakar, like some character from a bad film, does his slink-into-the-corner act. He is a strange man, a lawyer's nightmare, for he loves to talk, wearing his notoriety like a halo. Three years ago he said someone offered him money during the 1994 Singer Cup, and he's spoken enough about match fixing to fill a TV mini-series in 14-hour-long parts. But he's guarded that someone's name like a virgin. This evening, he's talking. Smoke is hanging like an opaque curtain from the ceiling and as the night drags on, an India Today correspondent saunters up to Prabhakar and asks, "Who's the player who had made you the offer?" Prabhakar smiles the smile of a man who knows it's a question that's always coming. "It's not the player everyone thinks it is. He's a bigger name ..." And then his smile fades, his mouth hinges shut. "Oh, you mean it isn't Mohammed
Azharuddin?" the reporter asks. He gets no answer. "But why compare yourself with Kapil
Dev?" he is asked. "You mean, the offer ... it came
from Kapil, that's why he's avoiding you?" Was Prabhakar insinuating that Kapil was
deliberately bowling badly? On the phone he is ebullient, his voice
full of the bravura of a man who has opted to speak honestly when few else
have thought it a virtue. "Prabhakar told me that when Kapil offered
him the money he told him to forget it. Prabhakar then told his friends in
the team and said to them you are my witnesses. He also told Wadekar, who
said he would speak to the BCCI secretary." The heart of this story is the absence of the truth, cricket's continuing tryst with dishonesty. It's getting late in office, and we call for Prabhakar but his lawyer Nidhesh Gupta swears he's in Mumbai. In a world getting smaller, in a time of global communication, it's strange why that must translate into meaning he's untraceable. But a source close to him, men whose existence is off-the-record, confirms Bindra is spot on. Really? In Mumbai, a traceable Wadekar says, "So what if Bindra named us. That does not prove anything. Let Prabhakar speak and give names." Alice was a girl, what would she know
about curiouser and curiouser. When Bindra has finished telling CNN about
Kapil, he's not really finished. He says, "Once during my tenure as
BCCI chief, the management suspected that some Indian players had thrown a
Barbados match. The team manager then was Mr Madan Lal, the captain was Mr
Sachin Tendulkar." (To deviate for a precious moment, why would
anyone give CNN a scoop about cricket?) So we find Madan, at home, and dutifully Bindra's words are read out to him and he says, "I haven't talked to anyone yet, but now I will." And for a moment there's that pause of possibility, till he says he has no recollection of such a conversation, with Bindra or with anyone. "I never said that, I never spoke to him about the match, I don't know why these things keep on coming up, why he is dragging people in?" Madan is a proud man, a small man with a heart disproportionate to his size. When India loses, his ears smoke in fury. "But coaches do get upset, I am there to win games, but I never doubted my players' integrity." Tendulkar's? Kapil in the morning, always reachable on his cell phone, says tersely he doesn't "have time for such jokes". It's afternoon now and he's our last port of call. His BMW purrs to a stop, and he exits in a blue Polo shirt, walks into his office at Delhi's Bengali Market, positions himself just in front of a handwritten "God Bless You" message from Mother Teresa, uncomfortable that his sainthood is under scrutiny. As interviews go we make a testy beginning. First question and his face moulds into a scowl of incredulity, and he says, "Before I answer the question, after 20 years of sweat, ask yourself, should you really ask me this?" It is impolite, even heretical, to sit before a man whose heart we swore had the word India tattooed on it, and question his tardy bowling performance in that 1994 Singer Cup (an average of 38.00). He was old then, rust settling in the veins; he was too, like any player anywhere, anytime, allowed his moments of mediocrity. It is, goddammit, the very nature of sport. But the game has changed and every match holds the possibility of conspiracy; the rules have altered too, and no man's past heroism is enough of an armour. In a way Kapil knows that. Once such a query would have left a reporter with a bruised jaw; these days it's met with a rueful resignation. A friend calls to offer support and he
thanks him; a journalist calls and the lines on his face soften as he is
first charming, then turn rigid as he rages; another journalist calls and
this time he laughs, "Meine subse talak le liya (I have divorced
everyone)". He is a portrait of a man whose ordered world has lost
its moorings, sometimes rapping his phone on the table in angry
exclamation, sometimes leaning back in studied silence. Ask him a question
and he offers a rhetorical one in return: "Do I have to prove my
credibility to anyone in this country?" He believes the media is in a
feeding frenzy, as if only a corpse a day will satiate its appetite.
"Twenty years," he says, "20 years of blood and sweat gone
down the drain." If he is guilty, Robert De Niro has found a
successor, for he is a sublime actor; if he's innocent, then no acts of
contrition from us will suffice. -with Rohit Brijnath, Ashok Malik and Sheela Raval |
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Big
cats stake their territory by spraying. Gunfighters in the Wild West would
just walk down main street at noon, spit phlegmy tobacco and drawl,
"This town isn't big enough for both of us." With Kapil Dev and
Manoj Prabhakar, who've exchanged at last count perhaps one civil sentence
in the last 10 years, it's all a trifle more subtle. No one's rude enough
to spray, or insane enough to flash a sixgun. It's simple. Kapil walks
into a room to applause and Prabhakar slinks silently into a corner. In
the body language of these modern gunfighters is the message.