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COVER
STORY: CRICKET
All
Out
With
Azharuddin confessing to the CBI the lid is off on cricket's biggest scandal.
As the net widens can the game's credibility be restored?
By
Sayantan Chakravarty and Sharda
Ugra
Even
for a government babu's office, it was a long, uncomfortable moment. There
they sat, 10 interrogators all cramped into one room, taking notes, cross
referencing their memories and shuffling through papers. With them sat
a man who was slowly, in front of their eyes, collapsing into himself.
He wore a green and yellow T-shirt that screamed sunshine but chose to
cover his eyes with dark glasses. His hands, the ones they called among
the safest in the world, were locked into one another but his life's work,
his very life, was slipping through those fingers.
 |
| Rogues'
Gallery: Ajay Sharma, Ajay Jadeja, Azharuddin, Nayan Mongia and Manoj
Prabhakar |
Mohammed
Azharuddin, former India captain and darling of millions, found himself
in front of the officers of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
and a mountain of evidence, and could only say, "Haan, maine match
banaaya tha (Yes, I had fixed the match)." The CBI team investigating
Indian cricket's greatest scandal knew that the sport's code of silence
had been broken. Had Azhar glanced over at a calendar on the wall he would
have winced at the irony. His former captain Kapil Dev stared down at
him from the calendar, holding aloft the Prudential Cup of 1983, frozen
under the headline "Defining Moments of the Century Gone By."
The CBI's
prosaically titled Report into Matchfixing and Related Malpractices,
a hefty 162-page tome, is a defining moment all in itself. At the CBI
office that day, Azhar was far from the slouching, loose-limbed athlete
of the cricket field. The investigators, led by the soft-spoken 50-year-old
Joint Director Ravindra Nath Sawani, are not sentimental men. They may
not have liked what they saw but they knew it was what their case needed.
It had taken
the CBI two months of painstaking work to get to the point where a big
name like Azhar crumbled. The investigations began in a blaze of publicity,
but for the first 45 days the CBI did only the grunt work: combing through
phone records, collecting information about cricketers' assets across
the country and rounding up more than 200 bookies to get to the bare bones
of the illegal gambling. The CBI used software specially developed in-house
to link "suspicious" phone numbers and run through 20,000 pages
of telephone printouts, both for cell phones and land lines. "It
was more to confront the players, and bookies with some form of evidence,
and make them talk," says Sawani.
The first
stroke of good fortune for the CBI came in the form of Hansie Cronje's
testimony to the King's Commission in Cape Town, when on June 15, the
former South African captain stated that Azhar had introduced him to a
Delhi based "diamond merchant" called Mukesh Gupta in Kanpur
in 1996, who paid Cronje $40,000 (Rs 18.5 lakh) for information. A 40-year-old
banker-turned-realtor-turned-jeweller went underground after the news
broke, but the CBI then turned its attention to his family. The investigators
told the Guptas that if Mukesh did not come out of hiding, his 70-year-old
father could be taken in for questioning. The pressure worked and on the
evening of June 28, Gupta himself walked into the CBI offices and was
grilled for three hours. "Talking to Gupta was like discovering a
gold mine," CBI Director R.K. Raghavan told INDIA TODAY. At the same
time, CBI detectives went to Kanpur to check if Gupta had stayed at the
Landmark Hotel when he was introduced to Cronje; they discovered he had,
and what's more had occupied the room next to Azhar's. When confronted
with this evidence, Gupta corroborated Cronje's statement that Azhar had
introduced him to the South African.
Among the
207 bookies, 19 cricketers and several cricket board officials cross-examined
by the CBI, Gupta provided more clinching evidence and dramatic details
on his links with the "fixer" cricketers, punters and fellow
bookies than others. It was Gupta who turned the CBI's attention to former
cricketer Ajay Sharma-Gupta who met nine foreign players and offered them
money to provide "information".
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How
can Non-Performing Assets of companies be cleared? By recovering what
you can, writes INDIA TODAY Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in
