Australian computer scientist Dr Peter Vamplew submitted emphatically titled paper to ‘predatory’ journal and ‘nearly fell off chair’ when it was accepted
The paper, essentially consisting of just seven words, was originally written by American researchers David Mazières and Eddie Kohle in 2005.Photograph: Supplied
An open-access “predatory” academic journal has accepted a bogus research paper submitted by an Australian computer scientist titled Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List.
The paper, originally written by American researchers David Mazières and Eddie Kohle in 2005, consisted of the title’s seven words repeated over and over again. It also featured helpful diagrams.
Dr Peter Vamplew, a lecturer and researcher in computer science at Federation University in Victoria, submitted the paper to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology earlier this year after receiving dozens of unsolicited emails from the publication and other journals of dubious repute.
“There’s been this move to open-access publishing which has often meant essentially a user-pays system,” Vamplew said. “So you pay to have the paper published and it’s available to the public for free.”
An academic librarian at the University of Colorado, Jeffrey Beall, told Nature magazine last year that up to 10% of open-access journals were exploiting the model by charging a fee to proofread, peer-review and edit a research paper without actually carrying out the work.
“They’re predatory journals, preying on young, inexperienced researchers who unwittingly don’t realise they’re of questionable quality,” Vamplew said.
Vamplew said he submitted the paper expecting the journal’s editors would “read it, ignore it, and at best take me off their mailing list”.
Weeks later he received good news: “It was accepted for publication. I pretty much fell off my chair.”
In line with the highest academic standards, Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List had been subjected to rigorous, anonymous peer review.
“They told me to add some more recent references and do a bit of reformatting,” he said.
“But otherwise they said its suitability for the journal was excellent.”
Vamplew was required to pay a $150 fee to have the paper published, but he declined.
The scheme has earned Vamplew some online recognition, but sadly his main aim remains unfulfilled.
“They still haven’t taken me off their mailing list,” he said.
The editors of the journal have been contacted for comment.
It used to be India’s urban showpiece. Today, its sceptre and crown have fallen down and, in a phase of cynical destruction masquerading as “development”, Mumbai has become a metaphor for urban blight.
Consider these statistics. Rubbish could be its Mount Vesuvius. Some 7,000 metric tonnes of refuse is spewed out each day. Dumping grounds are choked, yet there is no government-mandated separation or recycling.
Around 7.5 million commuters cram themselves into local trains every day and the fledgling metro and monorail are unlikely to make a perceptible difference in the near future.
There are 700,000 cars on the road and the authorities indirectly encourage private vehicle ownership by adding flyovers and expressways, instead of building or speeding up mass rapid transit systems. Private vehicle numbers have grown by 57% in the past eight years, compared with a 23% increase in public buses.
There are around 700,000 cars on the roads of Mumbai causing untold congestion, air and noise pollution. Their number has grown by 57% over the past eight years.Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP
Toxic nitric oxide and nitrogen oxide levels stand at 252 microgrammes per cubic metre (mcg/m3) more than three times the safe limit of 80 mcg/m3. Protests against sound pollution fall on deaf ears.
There’s less than 0.03 acres of open space per 1,000 people. The global norm is four; London has a profligate 12.
There are 12.7 million people jammed into the 480 sq km that comprise today’s Greater Mumbai, that’s 20,680 people per sq km. We are the world’s eighth most-populated city – and dying to prove it.
As a consequence, every sixth Mumbaikar lives in a slum. The premium on land was exacerbated by the Rent Control Act of 1947, which wasn’t amended till 1999. Too little, too late. Real estate prices are unreal. It’s cheaper to buy a flat in Manhattan than in Malabar Hill, and you can be sure that shoddy materials will shortchange you in Mumbai.
Considering that housing is the city’s biggest shortfall, it’s ironic that unbridled construction is indisputably its biggest problem. Many villains have been blamed for Mumbai’s descent into urban hell, from mafia dons to impoverished migrants, but for the past three decades the main culprit is the “politician-builder nexus”.
In 2005, the entire city was held hostage for three days. On 26 July, suburban Mumbai was lashed by 668 mm of rain in just 12 hours. Unwarned commuters and children in school buses were left high, but not dry, as roads and railway tracks disappeared. Slums and BMWs went under the deluge without discernment for their economic standing. It may have been the country’s financial capital, but in the photographs that followed, swaggering Mumbai didn’t look much different from a monsoon-marooned Bihar village.
For this humbling disaster, the finger pointed at that same culprit: the developer and his facilitator, the politician. There was nowhere for the rainwater to go. For decades the concrete army had been allowed to commandeer all open spaces, and illegal encroachments had done the rest. Public parks, verdant hills, salt-pans, school compounds, private garden plots, beaches, mangroves – nothing was spared.
The built environment in Mumbai had increased fourfold since 1925 – and at its fastest rate over the past 30 years – all at the cost of green cover and wetlands.
Around 7.5 million commuters cram themselves into local trains every day.Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images
The 2005 deluge brought to light the little-known fact that Mumbai had a river. The Mithi had been reduced to little more than a turgid drain, bubbling with the putrefactions of one of Asia’s largest slums, Dharavi. Why blame its desperate inhabitants when the authorities had built an airport runway and much of the swanky new business district of the Bandra Kurla complex over it?
The traumatising flood was a flash-point. Citizens rose against all the civic atrocities heaped upon them. Why must they suffer such acute and chronic brutalising when Mumbai was the biggest contributor to the national economy? It accounts for 33% of income-tax, 20% of central excise collections, 6.16% of GDP (the largest single contribution in India), 25% of industrial output, 40% of foreign trade and 70% of capital transactions.
Activists demanded it should be administered separately under a chief executive-like head, instead of politicians who siphoned off its wealth to their rural constituencies. The municipal commissioner should be answerable to the elected corporate leaders not, illogically, to the state chief minister. But all this sound and fury receded with the flood waters, and it was soon business as usual.
The unequal war between profiteering and civic wisdom was in unabashed evidence some 20 years before this great flood. An eagerly anticipated shot in the arm turned into a wound that still festers. The cotton mills, on which Mumbai’s original fame and fortunes were built, had been killed off by the prolonged strike of 1982 (and chronic neglect by their owners).
After nearly a decade of legal wrangling, especially over the laid-off workers’ dues, it was decided to redevelop the defunct land – an eye-popping 600 acres in prime south and central Bombay. Recreational spaces, public housing and private enterprise were each to get a one-third share of the total area.
The 27-storey personal residence of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani is named after Antilia, a mythical island in the Atlantic. It has three helicopter pads, underground parking for 160 cars and requires some 600 staff to run.Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty
But in 1991, the relevant Development Control rule 58 was unilaterally changed by the chief minister, making only “open” land in the mills eligible for the division. This left the lion’s share to the owners, their builder accomplices and, naturally, the obliging politicians. The city got a mere fifth of its desperately needed windfall.
Instead of the imaginative, integrated development plan drawn up by Charles Correa, the renowned Mumbai-based architect, the former mill-hub of Lalbaug-Parel is a soulless cram of skyscrapers, mall-to-mall carpeting and snarled traffic clashing with the tenements housing the dispossessed worker families.
The opportunity for Mumbai’s redemption was obscenely squandered. The greedy, selfish “development” has worsened, instead of alleviating, its two biggest headaches: housing and traffic.
Now, a new phoenix is projected to rise from the 800 acres of decrepit dockland along the city’s eastern shoreline, again in the prime south. Will the city finally get its life-saving leisure space and affordable housing? Or will it be one more land-grab hastening its death by “development”?
Arundhati Roy’s fans have been waiting for a follow-up to her Booker-prize winning debut novel since 1997. Meanwhile she has thrown herself into political activism – raising hackles among India’s growing bourgeoisie with fierce polemics against capitalism. A second novel is promised – but will she ever get it finished?
Arundhati Roy: ‘Most of what I’ve written is to do with being in solidarity with resistance movements.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
Like India and Walt Whitman, Arundhati Roy contains multitudes. She is, however, far from large. Small, delicately boned, a beguiling mixture of piercing dark eyes and bright easy smile, she is a warm presence. She turns 53 tomorrow and the grey tint to her curls lends depth to a still strikingly youthful face. Looking at her, it’s not hard to detect the author of the richly empathetic The God of Small Things, her debut, Booker-prize winning novel about family life in Kerala, that John Updike described as a “massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details”.
That was 17 years ago and photos from that period show a captivating figure, at once shy and fiercely proud, wary and utterly self-possessed. The book was a huge international hit and the publishing world readied itself to cash in on a phenomenal new talent, galvanised by the fact that so photogenic an author would be a dream to market.
But the follow-up novel didn’t arrive. Instead Roy directed her considerable energies towards political activism, most especially in India where, despite her success, she has remained. It was a path that has led her to express solidarity with groups – such as Kashmiri separatists and Maoist guerrillas – that are seen by many Indians, with some reason, as terrorists. As a result Roy has become a controversial figure, an outspoken heroine in certain radical quarters, but loathed by large sections of Indian society, not least Hindu nationalists.
She has also become a prolific essayist and polemicist. She currently has two extended, book-length essays out. One, entitled The Doctor and the Saint, is an examination of caste, a subject she explored in The God of Small Things, and it forms the long introduction to a new edition of BR Ambedkar’s classic work The Annihilation of Caste. Roy’s essay traces the difficult relationship between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. She portrays the neglected Ambedkar – born an “untouchable” – as the true hero of India’s poor, while Gandhi is controversially depicted as a self-dramatising defender of the status quo.
The other essay is called Capitalism: A Ghost Story. It’s written in a very different style from The Doctor and the Saint, which, for all its contentious opinions, is a carefully constructed argument. By contrast Capitalism reads like an extended rant, strident, intemperate, conspiratorial, and relentlessly one-eyed in its outlook. The shrill prose is hard to reconcile with the softly spoken middle-aged woman sitting opposite me in the Soho offices of her publishers.
New Delhi, March 2006: Roy attends a protest at the government’s lack of support for hundreds of women whose farmer husbands committed suicide because of failed crops.Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Her basic argument is that the reforms that liberated India’s economy in the early 1990s and thrust it into the global marketplace may have created a vibrant new middle class, but have been devastating for the country’s poor. She writes of the “800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us [the 300 million members of the middle class]”.
The poor in India are of course not a recent creation. It’s been said that India’s historic problem was the redistribution of poverty, whereas now the issue is the redistribution of wealth. As Roy makes clear, there are vast and intolerable inequalities in today’s India. But the implication of her words is that to make 300 million Indians richer, 800 million Indians have become poorer in real, rather than relative, terms. As she doesn’t supply any supporting evidence for this claim in the book, I ask her if that’s what she means.
“What happens,” she says, “is that statistically people keep playing games with the poverty line. It’s not that people get richer or poorer but they keep moving the line up and down redefining what poorer means.”
She then goes on to say that you only have to visit the suffering villages of India to see the terrible plight of the poor, in particular the mass suicides of farmers whose land has been destroyed by mineral exploitation and industrialisation. This may be true, but has the rapid growth in India’s middle class caused the poor to become poorer?
She continues talking about access to water, the drying up of land etc, until I push her once again on what seems to me a crucial matter of fact. “Well, I think so,” she says finally. “For example, just things like food grain intake has actually reduced.”
This is true, though there are various arguments put forward to explain the drop, including the increase in the consumption of other foods. But there is also compelling evidence to suggest that, while India has become a much wealthier country over the last couple of decades, a hefty percentage of its population continues to experience low employment, malnutrition andother major social deprivations. It’s just that Roy never really gets to grip with the evidence.
She prefers a scattergun approach in which she attacks everything from philanthropy and the “hegemony of the United States” to NGOs funded by Coca-Cola. You could easily get the idea, for example, that arms dealing was a function of capitalism – yet there is no mention of Russia (the biggest arms exporter) or China (the third biggest). Similarly she quotes Pablo Neruda’s poem attacking the Standard Oil Company but makes no mention that he was an unabashed cheerleader for Stalinism when he wrote it. When I ask her about the omission she says she’s written about Stalinism in another essay and doesn’t want to keep repeating herself.
It’s the sort of screed that will bring head-nodding agreement from her core anti-capitalist audience, but it will do little, or at least not enough, to persuade those who genuinely want to know whether or not the new India, for all its many flaws, is an improvement on the old.
Roy is kissed by supporters in 2002 after being released from Tihar Jail in New Delhi. She had been jailed during a campaign against a new dam.Photograph: MANISH SWARUP/AP
She’s used to this sort of criticism, and her answer is that it’s not a subject that she can be dispassionate about. Dry, academic analysis doesn’t alter the conditions of the poor, so someone needs to raise the temperature, invoke some much-needed shame and outrage.
But her detractors argue that Roy’s posturings do nothing to help the poor either. Her fellow novelist and essayist Aatish Taseer wrote in 2011 in the online cultural magazine the Nervous Breakdown: “I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty… The people who get her into the streets [ie in protest] are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions.”
Indeed Roy writes of the “aggressive, acquisitive ambition” of the middle class in Capitalism. Is Taseer on to something?
“Well look,” she replies, unflustered, “obviously mine is a very definite point of view and there are many people who disagree with me vehemently. The only thing I will say is that I’m not a lone operator. Most of what I’ve written is to do with being in solidarity with many resistance movements. I’m not at the front of it. I’m not preaching to the poor what they should be thinking. I’m learning from their arguments.”
Naturally Roy’s wealth exposes her to accusations of hypocrisy. She lives alone in the exclusive Jor Bagh district of New Delhi in a large apartment. Aren’t the acquisitively ambitious simply seeking to gain the material comforts she has in abundance?
“I don’t come from a privileged background, I just happened to write a book that sold a lot. My mother was literally dying. She had nothing. She left her drunk husband. She started a school. I left home at 16, I lived on the streets. I had nothing. Then I wrote a book. I lived for a long time, yes, with a man who had privileged parents but then that had nothing to do with me.”
This seems like a slightly romantic summary of her early life. She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in north-east India to a Syrian Christian, Mary, who is still alive. Her father, a Bengali Hindu, was an alcoholic who managed a tea plantation. The marriage ended when Roy was two years old. Her mother took her and her older brother to Tamil Nadu and then to Kerala, where her mother, who suffered from asthma, set up an independent school.
Roy was sent to boarding school where she gained a reputation as an indefatigable debater. From there she went to secretarial college, which she quit at 16, moving to Delhi to study at the architectural school. She lived with her boyfriend at the time in a slum, then after a spell in Goa, worked for the National Institute of Urban Affairs, where she met her husband, Pradip Krishen, a widowed former history professor and Oxford graduate from a wealthy background.
The couple made several documentaries and films together, in the first of which Roy played the female lead. But eventually she became dispirited with the elitist film world and spent more time writing, leading eventually to the publication of The God of Small Things in 1997. It was a literary sensation that went on to sell more than 6m copies worldwide.
In a vital sense, as Roy says, her background and material circumstances, whatever they are, should not be the means to assess her ideas. “I’ve never understood the logic that if you’re privileged you should take the point of view of the privileged and argue for more privilege.”
Yet in Capitalism she writes of being compromised by connections with the corrupting worlds of corporations: “But which of us sinners was going to cast off the first stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses.”
What does that mean? She breaks out into a big smile. “Yeah, I’ve also thought about that. I was just thinking, living off royalties from corporate publishing houses? In fact those corporate publishing houses are making money off me, and giving me 5%!”
She laughs at herself and says that perhaps she got that wrong. “The thing is no one is pure. I am certainly not a pure saint who lives in a loincloth and eats goat’s cheese and doesn’t have sex and says ‘I’m poor’”, she says in an obvious dig at Gandhi. “It’s crap.”
Moreover, she is no armchair revolutionary, cooped up in the safe confines of her apartment. She does go to dangerous places and she does make powerful enemies: Hindu nationalists, dam builders, mineral extractors, large corporations and the Indian military. And despite a great many threats, she is not easily intimidated.
But danger runs both ways. The picture Roy paints of India is of a vast military occupation, a colonial suppression enacted by the Indian state on its own people. She speaks of hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in secessionist Kashmir and the vicious paramilitary operations in central India against the Maoist or “Naxalite” guerrillas.
In Walking with the Comrades, her book about joining up with the Maoists, she wrote about a Congress politician called Mahendra Karma, whom she said was responsible for orchestrating a campaign of murder, rapes and displacement in the Bastar region. In May 2013 Maoist guerrillas killed Karma, stabbing him 78 times, and 24 other people, including 11 other Congress members, in a truly gruesome attack on a convoy. When asked to comment immediately after the assault, Roy refused to speak.
Incidents such as these have prompted the charge that she is a dilettante, a literary tourist who can beat a retreat whenever it suits her. If that’s true then it’s also a fact that India’s democracy is riven by nepotism and corruption and violence and it suits many who are getting rich to look the other way. The statements Roy makes are often provocative, naive and arguably counterproductive, but the presiding nationalistic silence is perhaps more worthy of condemnation.
And the issue on which India has learned to be most tight-lipped is that of caste. It’s a subject on which Roy has always been refreshingly vocal, quick to remind those who might wish to forget of the immovable social structure that underpins Indian society. InThe Doctor and the Saint she returns to the theme but this time she sets it against two different visions of reform: Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s.
Roy portrays Gandhi as ‘a backward-looking egomaniac’.Photograph: REX/REX
Gandhi wanted to abolish the designation of “Untouchables”, the lowest caste that is today referred to as Dalit. But Ambedkar wanted to get rid of the caste system in its entirety. Although she had always been suspicious of the Gandhi cult, she was largely ignorant of the dispute between Ambedkar and Gandhi before a publisher asked her to write an introduction to The Annihilation of Caste.
“I thought I’d just write three pages of politeness and give it to him,” she says. “Then I started to read and I was shocked by what I was reading and it turned into a huge thing.”
Gandhi emerges as a backward-looking egomaniac who had to be dragged into modernity by the more ambitious and radical Ambedkar. The respected historian Ramachandra Guha, who is in the middle of a two-part biography of Gandhi, has taken Roy to task for “selectively quoting Gandhi out of context [so] that she can paint him as a slow-moving reactionary”.
Guha, whose earlier work looked at forestry in northern India, has clashed with Roy before over her environmental advocacy, which he described as “self-indulgent” and “self-contradictory”. “Ms Roy’s tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill, hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis,” he wrote back in 2000.
She dismissed his criticism back then as “smug”. She says that she’s quoted Gandhi from 1893 to 1948, “across his adult life. Of course every quote has to be selective. I can’t quote the whole nine volumes.” She says that “it’s dishonest to suggest that Gandhi was an incrementalist or a man of his times”. And in any case, she adds, Guha is a Brahmin, the caste that is at the top of the social hierarchy – if you like, the ruling class.
It has been argued by some that it’s unfettered capitalism that has done most to undermine caste in India, but Roy notes that only a tiny percentage of marriages are cross-caste. She writes that the only way caste can be annihilated is if “those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism”. I quote her a statement from a well-known Indian writer and ask her to guess who it is. The author speaks of his Brahmin identity as being crucial in giving him a sense of “dignity” and through it the ambition not to settle for “some badly paid government job”.
She puts her hands over her face and says “Pankaj?”
Pankaj Mishra, who is now based in London, has built a formidable reputation as radical critic of imperialism, ever vigilant to the incidence of western racism both on a geopolitical and personal level. He was also the first publisher to champion The God of Small Things, when he worked for HarperCollins in India, and thus a longstanding friend of Roy’s. Is he on the revolutionary side of the argument?
“On this one, I don’t think so,” she says. “There are a lot of critiques about many Brahmins who at some point do want to mention that they are Brahmins. The issue is a very vexed one. Look at all the major politburo members, including the Maoists, they are usually Brahmins.”
You sense that one of the reasons Arundhati was drawn to reappraise Gandhi is the consensus he enjoys as an embodiment of decency and tolerance. She has recently caused a stir for downplaying another widely admired figure, Malala Yousafzai. After she gave a TV interview in which she suggested Malala was a pawn in game of global politics, the Pakistan writer Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote an article asking why it was that Malala bothered many on the left, citing Roy as an example.
Even Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel peace prize winner, has been the subject of criticism from Roy.Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
“I have no doubt she did something wonderful,” she says. “But that was not the point I was trying to make.” She says she wanted to draw attention to the fact that Dalit women are similarly mistreated in India but are never heard about. But that doesn’t make Malala a puppet. She stood up against male oppression. Isn’t that an unambiguously good thing?
“I don’t think you can isolate Malala and say ‘Oh this is wonderful.’” Why not? “I don’t think this world of prizes and awards is an innocent world. It is loaded and it’s precious to suggest it’s not.” She thinks Malala’s Nobel peace prize was an extension of the politically corrupt process that awarded one to Obama, whom she characterises as a warmonger, adding, “I’m not trying to take anything away from Malala.”
But of course she is.
I admire her willingness to confront sacred cows, but can’t help thinking that she sees dark conspiracies where sometimes nobler intentions lie. And in her rush to embrace the oppressed, she can blur the lines between victim and perpetrator.
Enough of the politics. What about fiction? There have been rumours going back to 2007 that she is writing a novel.
“I have been working on it for quite a few years,” she acknowledges. “If those characters are still hanging around in my house, swinging their legs and smoking their cigarette butts, they’re not going to go away, so there must be something there.”
Yet she says she put the novel aside to write The Doctor and the Saint. Writing non-fiction is for her a tense and urgent business. She has to get it out. “It’s like the body doesn’t have room for its organs,” she says, and reading her non-fiction one can see what she means.
She is a different person altogether when writing fiction, which she says she’s able to relax into. “I don’t mean because it’s easy to write but I trust its rhythms and I don’t have to get it out there. There’s no urgency. It’s like cooking, it takes its time. I rather like the idea of just living inside it and not coming out of it.”
That’s an idea that will torment all those millions who have been waiting so many years for her second novel. It may also trouble those critics of her polemical work who hope that she’ll return to fiction at the earliest opportunity. But if there is one thing that is certain about the multifaceted Roy, she will continue to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it.
Mihir Srivastava in Outlook India An IPL Game Of Spot, Bet And Fix How it all started
The IPL betting and match-fixing scam became public when the Pune and Kochi teams were disqualified
The Kochi team had already seen a controversy involving Shashi Tharoor and the now-deceased Sunanda Pushkar
The Tharoor row led to the exit of IPL founder-commissioner Lalit Modi and his row with BCCI chief N. Srinivasan
What we know now
The conduct of at least 12 players, including two Australians, invited the scrutiny of Justice Mukul Mudgal
Indians include five members of the 2011 World Cup-winning squad, two of whom are from the same IPL team
The owners of at least three IPL teams are believed to be involved in the match-fixing racket
Nearly 70 per cent of players are believed to be involved in betting on matches indirectly, if not directly
Given the high purchase costs, team owners and associates have an added incentive to pre-decide match results
***
Indian cricket finds itself on a barely playable wicket. Justice Mukul Mudgal might indirectly have a say on India’s World Cup 2015 squad if the apex court makes public names of top Indian cricketers mentioned in his report on the alleged betting and spot/match-fixing in season 6 of the Indian Premier League (IPL). Top sources say that the 38-page report (with 5,000 pages of annexures) names around a dozen names of former and current players, Indian and international, with their roles in the multi-billion dollar scandal. Players, administrators, politicians, film stars and corporate czars are all protagonists in this sordid drama. It seems like the first draft of a crime thriller. Although codewords like ‘Individual 2’ and ‘Individual 3’ have been bandied about, the fact is the report names five Indian players who were part of the World Cup-winning team of 2011. Talented and temperamental, they run cricket academies, invest in the hospitality industry and event management, even advertising firms. Their partners in these ventures are the same set of people who form the link between them and the bookies; some are bookies themselves. Moreover, they are Page 3 regulars. Take the case of a left-handed all-rounder. He broke down when questioned by Justice Mudgal. There wasn’t any dispute about his involvement, he was just begging that he be not named and pleaded for a life of dignity, says an insider, a cop involved in the investigation. Mercy, not justice, was also sought by a close friend of this cricketer, his teammate in the World Cup squad.A bowler known to pick fights on and off the cricket field, who spends more time in Mumbai, outside his home state. The ‘Individual 3’ mentioned in Justice Mudgal’s report is a Chennai Super Kings player. A prolific run-getter and a god-fearing man, he visits the Sai Baba temple in Shirdi regularly with two bookies by his side, and has the protection and patronage of top cricket administrators.The fourth is a celebrity fast bowler with a career punctuated by injuries, who was often too unwell to play for the country, but was always fit for the IPL. He, too, has the backing of powerful team-owners. The most significant name is of a top idol, whose incredibly short saga of rags to riches is as exemplary as his passion for speed. -----India 2011 World Cup team members: Dhoni, Sehwag, Gambhir, Tendulkar, Yuvraj, Raina, Kohli, Zaheer, Sreesanth, Harbhajan, Y Pathan, Munaf, Nehra, Chawla and Ashwin ---- The flaw, as pointed out over the years by wise men, is in the IPL itself. It had so much to offer to players, administrators, umpires, even commentators, that the whole venture had an unviable air about it. It wasn’t charity either, where the glitterati altruistically invested to lose money. Instead, it turned out to be a money-spinner. With marquee players being bought for millions of dollars, glitz on the ground and expensive after-match parties, intelligent guesses always pointed to dirty money. The first confirmation came when the Delhi police arrested three players—Sreesanth, Ajith Chandila and Ankeet Chavan—in 2013 for their role in spot-fixing and betting. Neeraj Kumar, the then Delhi police commissioner, refutes the charges that the cops let off the big fish. He confirms that many players were named by the bookies, but that he couldn’t have acted on mere accusations, without conclusive evidence. Rajasthan Royals owner Raj Kundra, he says, confessed to betting, but there was no corroborative evidence, and territorial jurisdiction was an issue. “The investigation was carried out objectively, was able to nail down large number of bookies and set off a chain reaction, with police in other metropolises also ending up investigating betting,” he says. One such investigator was G. Sampath Kumar of the Tamil Nadu police. He was suspended from his job last week on the charges of receiving Rs 55 lakh from a bookie, Uttam C. Jain alias Kitty.
Yellow fever A match involving Chennai Super Kings, now under a corruption-shaped cloud. (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook 01 December 2014)
A family member of one of the three players arrested by the Delhi police met Outlook in a coffee shop at Delhi’s Bengali market. The prosecuted three are just the tip of the iceberg, he says, and the submerged iceberg covers nearly the whole system. The IPL is but a gambling festival, he says, giving examples of how his relative was pulled into betting and match-fixing. “No player can escape the bookies. It’s not a choice,” he says. ---- Also Read
While the Delhi police couldn’t gather enough incriminating evidence against the ‘big fish’, Justice Mudgal is forthright about some of them. N. Srinivasan—the man who controls both the BCCI and the IPL—can be accused of blatant conflict of interest, says a senior lawyer and cricket administrator. “He’s both the umpire and the player,” he says.
A left-handed all-rounder broke down before Justice Mudgal. The guilty man begged not to be named.
The Mudgal report clearly says that Srinivasan was aware of betting and match-fixing, and he preferred to be a mute spectator. His son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, virtually ran Chennai Super Kings. In the nebulous role of a ‘principal’, he attended team meetings and was a regular companion of players on the ground. It’s clear he was anything but what India and CSK skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni told the Mudgal committee—a “mere cricket enthusiast”. Though lying to an apex court committee is considered perjury, Dhoni, also a vice-president of Srinivasan’s India Cements, has consistently batted for his team’s owner. Dhoni’s wife Sakshi was frequently spotted watching IPL matches with former Bollywood actor Vindoo Dara Singh, also an accused in the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal. In a sting operation by Zee News, Vindoo outlandishly claimed the match-fixing fiasco was actually the fallout of a fight between ncp (and former BCCI) chief Sharad Pawar and Srinivasan.
Apart from Meiyappan, the Mudgal report says IPL chief operating officer Sundar Raman had admitted doing nothing even after knowing that Raj Kundra was involved in betting. Furthermore, a third team (CSK and RR being the other two)—from the renowned stable of good times—is named in the clutch of outfits where the owners/their family members bet on their own team’s performance.
An eagle eye Justice Mukul Mudgal
Aditya Varma, secretary of the Bihar Cricket Association, treats the battle against corruption in cricket as a personal crusade, and has kept on the warpath in the face of both dire threats and propitiatory wads of cash. He presents a scenario: “If an owner bets, and lets his players, captain and the rest, know that he wants the team to get out on a specific score, say 120 runs, then it’s not betting, it’s match-fixing.” Varma says there are two categories of culprits—administrators and players. Not bookies, he says, as that’s their job. There are two ways, he says, in which betting/match-fixing takes place: when the match is fixed with the help of owners or administrators, and when players themselves take the initiative for spot-fixing. Bookies are known to live in the same hotel as the players, and interact freely with them during parties. “I will seek an investigation in the conduct of all teams and owners. The story is much murkier than it looks,” says Varma. As parts of the report have been made public, the government has responded with silence. The top politicians of the country have been, or are, cricket administrators—Arun Jaitley, Amit Shah, Sharad Pawar, Rajiv Shukla and Shashi Tharoor, to name a few. The politics of cricket has little to do with their party affiliations. The Narendra Modi government—seeking a global effort to retrieve billions of dollars of black money stashed in foreign banks—has chosen to ignore the cancer that is eating away Indian cricket. Union finance minister and former Delhi Cricket Association chief Arun Jaitley is mum too. Rajiv Shukla, former IPL chairman and a minister in the UPA cabinet, is anxious about the issue and is actively following the events, says a close friend. Some revered former players have also kept their counsel, perhaps because they are beneficiaries of the system. And Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography, Playing It My Way, is silent about these murky depths in cricket, though some of his close friends are under the scanner. In April this year, the SC had rejected the BCCI’s proposal to constitute a three-member committee to investigate the spot-fixing and betting charges, comprising ex-CBI director R.K. Raghavan, cricketer Ravi Shastri and former Calcutta High Court chief justice Jai Narain Patel. Raghavan is an affiliated member of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, headed by Srinivasan, Shastri is a salaried BCCI employee and Patel’s brother-in-law is Shivlal Yadav, the then interim board president for non-IPL affairs. The audacious guile that led to the proposal of the panel resurfaced in the belligerence with which the BCCI has made light of the Mudgal committee’s report even before it’s considered by the Supreme Court—belittling it as ‘invalid’, asking the Supreme Court to form another panel and reinstate Srinivasan as BCCI chief (though forced to step down on November 3, he has been effectively in charge through proxy), while the probe is being conducted. “The ball is now with the apex court, and chances of tampering is less,” says a former cricketer and BCCI office-bearer. With the ball swinging under favourable conditions, wickets might go down in a heap, taking with them reputations and hard-earned records.
