The serpent in the garden

The IPL is representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism and Indian society

Ramachandra Guha

June 1, 2013

I detest wearing a tie, and do so only when forced. One such occasion was a formal dinner at All Souls College, Oxford, where opposite me was an Israeli scholar who had just got a job at the University, and was extremely anxious to show how well he knew its ways and mores. He dropped some names, and spoke of his familiarity with the manuscripts collection at "Bodley" (the Bodleian Library). In between his boasts he kept scrutinising my tie. Then, when he could contain his curiosity no more, he walked across the table, took my tie in his hand, looked at it ever more closely, and asked: "Is this Magdalene?"

I did not answer. How could I? For the tie signalled not membership of a great old Oxford College, but of a rather more obscure institution, the Friends Union Cricket Club in Bangalore. I joined the club in 1963, aged five, because my uncle, a legendary one-handed cricketer named N Duraiswamy, played for it. I would go along with him for practice, stand by the side of the net, and at the end of the day be allowed to bowl a few balls from 12 yards or thereabouts. By the time I was ten I was helping lay the mat and nail it to the ground. When I reached my teens I was bowling from where everyone else did.

As a boy and young man, I was an episodic member of the Friends Union Cricket Club. In those years I was based in North India, and came south for my summer and winter holidays. In 1994 I moved to Bangalore for good. In the past two decades, I have watched FUCC win the First Division Championship three times, and seen a series of young players graduate from club cricket to representing the state in the Ranji Trophy. My club has produced two India internationals and at least fifteen Karnataka players, all of whom I have known personally and/or watched play.

Largely because of Duraiswami - who has been captain or manager for forty years now - FUCC enjoys a reputation that is high both in cricketing and ethical terms. No cricketer of the club has ever tried to use influence to gain state selection. Where other clubs sometimes adjust games to make sure they do not get relegated, FUCC does not resort to this. FUCC cricketers do not come late for practice, and never abuse the umpire. And they play some terrific cricket too.

FUCC was one of a dozen clubs that provided the spine of Karnataka cricket. The others included Jawahars, Crescents, BUCC, Swastic, Bangalore Cricketers, and City Cricketers. The men who ran those clubs were likewise personally honest as well as fantastically knowledgeable about the game. The cricketers they produced won Karnataka six Ranji Trophy titles, and won India many Tests and one-day internationals too.

This year I mark the 50th anniversary of my membership of the Friends Union Cricket Club. In this time, FUCC has commanded my primary cricketing loyalty; followed by my state, Karnataka, and only then by India. Six years ago, however, a new club and a new format entered my city and my life. I was faced with a complicated decision - should I now add a fresh allegiance, to the Royal Challengers Bangalore?

I decided I would not, mostly because I disliked the promoter. In cricketing terms, Vijay Mallya was the Other of Duraiswami. He had never played cricket, nor watched much cricket either. He had no knowledge of its techniques or its history. He had come into the sport on a massive ego trip, to partake of the glamour and celebrity he saw associated with it. He would buy his way into Indian cricket. And so he did.

It was principally because Mallya was so lacking in the dedicated selflessness of the cricketing coaches and managers I knew, that I decided the RCB would not be my team. So, although I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association and have free entry into its grounds, I continued to reserve that privilege for Ranji Trophy and Test matches alone.

The KSCA Stadium is named for its former president, M Chinnaswamy, who was one of Duraiswami's heroes. When I was growing up, Durai would tell me of how Chinnaswamy supervised the building of the stadium, brick by brick. This great lover of cricket abandoned his lucrative law practice for months on end, monitoring the design, the procurement of materials, and the construction, with no cost over-runs and absolutely no commissions either.

	The behaviour of Messrs Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan cannot shock or surprise me, but I have been distressed at the way in which some respected cricket commmentators have become apologists for the IPL and its management

In other ways too Chinnaswamy was exemplary. Never, in all the years he served the KSCA, did he try to manipulate a single selection. Later, when he became president of the BCCI, he met the challenge of Kerry Packer by increasing the fees per Test match tenfold. It was while he ran Indian cricket that our players were for the first time treated with dignity and paid a decent wage.

I wonder what Chinnaswamy would have made of his grasping, greedy, successors as presidents of BCCI. I wonder, too, what he would have made of a man who can't pay his own employees having a free run of the stadium that Chinnaswamy so lovingly built. This past April, the Bengaluru edition of the Hindu carried a front-page story on an summons that the Special Court for Economic Offences had issued to Mallya, who owed the Income Tax Department some Rs75 crores, or about $13.3 million, which he had not paid despite repeated reminders. The police, often waiving the rules for the powerful, told the court that they were too busy to execute the summons.

But let me not single out Mallya here. The truth is that almost all the owners of IPL teams (seven out of nine, by one estimate) are being investigated by one government agency or another, in one country or another, for economic offences of one kind or another. Since this is a shady operation run by shady characters, Indian companies known for their professionalism, entrepreneurial innovation, and technical excellence have stayed away from the IPL altogether. Here is a question for those who still think the tournament is worth defending - why is it that companies like the Tatas, the Mahindras, or Infosys have not promoted an IPL team? (Editor's note - Tata Consultancy Services sponsor Rajasthan Royals.)

To this writer, that the IPL was corrupt from top to bottom (and side to side) was clear from the start - which is why I have never exercised my right of free entry for its matches in Bengaluru. But as I watched the tournament unfold, I saw also that it was deeply divisive in a sociological sense. It was a tamasha for the rich and upwardly mobile living in the cities of southern and western India. Rural and small town India were largely left out, as were the most populous states. That Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, both of whom have excellent Ranji Trophy records, had no IPL team between them, while Maharashtra had two, was symptomatic of the tournament's identification with the powerful and the moneyed. The entire structure of the IPL was a denial of the rights of equal citizenship that a truly "national" game should promote.

The IPL is representative of the worst sides of Indian capitalism and Indian society. Corrupt and cronyist, it has also promoted chamchagiri and compliance. The behaviour of Messrs Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan cannot shock or surprise me, but I have been distressed at the way in which some respected cricket commmentators have become apologists for the IPL and its management. Theirs is a betrayal that has wounded the image of cricket in India, and beyond. George Orwell once said: "A writer should never be a loyal member of a political party." Likewise, for his credibility and even his sanity, a cricket writer/commentator should keep a safe distance from those who run the game in his country.

What is to be done now? The vested interests are asking for such token measures as the legalisation of betting and the resignation of the odd official. In truth, far more radical steps are called for. The IPL should be disbanded. The Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, played between state sides, should be upgraded, making it the flagship Twenty20 tournament in the country. Then the clubs and state associations that have run our domestic game reasonably well for the past 80 years would be given back their authority, and the crooks and the moneybags turfed out altogether.

Even now, in every city and town in India, there are selfless cricket coaches and administrators active, nurturing young talent, supervising matches and leagues. The way to save Indian cricket is to allow these modern-day equivalents of Duraiswami and M Chinnaswamy to take charge once more.

Time to explode the myth that the private sector is always better

Steve Richards in The Independent

The deeply embedded assumption that a slick, efficient, agile, selfless private sector delivers high-quality services for the public is being challenged once more in darkly comic circumstances. Those inadvertent egalitarians from the security firm G4S have failed to recruit enough security officers so it seems anyone will be able to wander in to watch the 100 metres final. Or at least that would have been the case if the public sector had not come to the rescue in the form of the army.

What an emblematic story of changing times. From the late 1970s until 2008, the fashionable orthodoxy insisted that the public sector alone was the problem. Advocates of the orthodoxy took a knock or two when the banking crisis cast light on parts of the pampered, sheltered and partially corrupt financial sector. Now we get a glimpse of incompetence and greed in another part of the private sector. As light is shed wider and deeper, we keep our fingers crossed that the public sector can rescue the Olympics from chaos.

The pattern is familiar but has been obscured until the arrival of this accessibly vivid example, an Olympic Games staged in a city paranoid about security without many security officers. For decades, private companies were hired on lucrative contracts for projects that the state could never allow to fail. If the companies delivered what was required, they earned a fortune. If they failed, the taxpayer found the money to meet the losses and those responsible for the cock-up often moved on to new highly paid jobs.

The lesson should have been learnt when Labour's disastrous Public Private Partnership for the London Underground collapsed, as this was another highly accessible example of lawyers, accountants and private companies making a fortune and failing to deliver. The Underground could never close, so all involved knew that in the event of failure, the Government or the Mayor of London would be forced to intervene. Boris Johnson described the arrangement at the time as "a colossal waste of money".

He was right, but that has not stopped his colleagues in Government looking to contract out to the private sector at every available opportunity. Andrew Lansley had hoped to make the NHS a great new playground for companies seeking an easy profit. He still might do so. Expect Michael Gove's so-called free schools to become profit-making enterprises if the Conservatives win the next election, and perhaps the academies, too. Maybe there will be a G4S-sponsored school.

G4S already runs prisons and some of the police operations that are being increasingly contracted out to private companies. The welfare-to-work contract secured by another company, much hailed by gullible ministers when the deal was announced as an example of efficiency and effectiveness, is already under critical scrutiny.

A fortnight ago, I argued that we are living through a slow British revolution partly as a result of the financial crisis and the exposure of reckless, unaccountable leadership from the City. The era of light regulation that allowed some bankers without much obvious talent to make a fortune is over. Now, slowly, the assumption held from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron that the delivery of public services should lie with the private sector is being overturned, too.

As is always the case in British revolutions, the change is being driven by startling events and not by political leadership. The Coalition still burns with an ideological zeal formed in the 1980s, the Conservative wing at one with Orange Book Liberal Democrats in their indiscriminate hunger for a smaller state and their undying faith in the private sector.

At the top of both parties, there are crusading advocates of an outdated vision that places too much faith in the likes of G4S and not enough in the potential dependability of a more efficient and accountable public sector.

This is not to argue that the public sector is perfect. Parts of it are complacently inefficient and paralysed by a sense of undeserved entitlement. The Coalition deserves some credit for seeking to increase transparency and accountability in an often over-managed and wasteful sector. In the case of the Olympics debacle and other equivalent deals, part of the culpability lies with government departments that negotiate on behalf of the taxpayer.

Last week, The Independent revealed that there had been no penalty clause in the G4S contract. On Tuesday, its unimpressive chief executive told the Home Affairs Committee that the company still expected to collect £57m for its contribution to the Olympic Games, an expectation that brings to mind once more that damning, ubiquitous phrase from the old Britain: "rewards for failure".

Who draws up these contracts? Which ministers sign them off? Why is their instinct always to outsource when there is now a mountain of evidence that failure follows?

Instead of focusing on the arduously unglamorous task of making the public sector more efficient and adaptable, ministers, like their New Labour predecessors, prefer still the deceptive swagger of the incompetent entrepreneur. The gullibility is more extraordinary now we finally get to know more about these supposed geniuses. Senior bankers earning millions stutter hesitantly when questioned by unthreatening MPs on select committees, incapable of articulating a case. Nick Buckles from G4S was so thrown by the Home Affairs Committee that he lapsed into a debate about whether the few security guards he had managed to hire spoke "fluent English", claiming not to know what such a term might mean. One of the great revelations since Britain's slow revolution began in 2008 is how many unimpressive mediocrities had risen in the unquestioning, unaccountable darkness that, until recently, acted as a protective layer for parts of the private sector.

But in the end look who is ultimately held to account. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, was called to the Commons twice this week to answer questions about what went wrong. She will be back in September. A government can outsource but it will still be held responsible, quite rightly, for the delivery of public services.

So political survival should motivate ministers in future to draw up much tighter deals with companies and to focus more on improving the public sector rather than expensively by-passing it. The voters have had enough of these abuses and yet, trapped by the past, some ministers show an ideological inclination to be abused for a little longer.