A bird’s eye view of the increasingly murky controversy over the Indian Premier League (IPL) suggests that very rich and very powerful people in India have heir hands in each others’ pants. They are either jerking off/shagging one another or robbing one another or both. Some may even have been jerking off/shagging and robbing simultaneously, which takes an enormous amount of dexterity. So give it up for such dexterous people.
For those of you who do not know what the IPL is here is a quick primer. It is a league that administers a new form of cricket which allows two competing teams to play just 20 overs each and finishes in three hours. Nationwide teams, which consist of Indian and international players bought through an auction, engage in an annual series of matches which lead to a final. Introduced three years ago this form of cricket has become a virulent rage in South Asia and around the world and is said to be the fastest growing sporting franchise in the world, whose evaluation could be in excess of a billion dollars.
In the past three years it has become the most exciting sports/entertainment event in the subcontinent and elsewhere with fetching American and Indian cheerleaders on the sidelines teasing and titillating the predominantly youthful crowds with their pompoms and gyrations. Young cricketers, having been paid large sums of money, play the game with unbridled gusto. All this is over in three hours after which satisfied fans go home, while the team members, game administrators, wealthy team owners and mostly beautiful guests go partying all night. There is so much adrenalin flowing at these parties that it inevitably leads to many different forbidden pleasures. All of which should be welcomed unreservedly.
The man widely credited for the IPL success story is a brash entrepreneur called Lalit Kumar Modi, who is the IPL chairman and commissioner. He is one of the new generation of Indian businessmen who flaunt their wealth and success in your face, make no apology about their work-hard-and-play-even-harder lifestyle and reflexively disregard if there is any egregious or unintentional violation of rules and norms along the way.
There is so much money in the IPL spectacle that inevitably greedy politicians, movie stars and other assorted entrepreneurs have jumped into the fray. All of this would have been a happy augury for a new, upbeat India except that it increasingly seems as if the whole enterprise may be an underground parking lot for unaccounted and perhaps even criminally accumulated cash.
India’s income tax and other enforcement officials are engaged in nationwide raids, searches and seizures from not just the IPL headquarters in Mumbai but various team offices. Tantalizing leaks from the raiding officials speak of “incriminating” evidence being found against some of those involved. Modi himself, who till two weeks ago seemed infallible and invincible, is under siege with tax officials subjecting him to extended questioning lasting several hours.
The IPL controversy has already claimed its first political victim in the resignation of India’s junior foreign minister Shashi Tharoor, who “mentored” a winning consortium consisting of a professional woman with whom he is in a relationship. Now the controversy threatens to take in its sweep other more powerful political names with implications for the political stability for the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Overall it paints a pretty sordid picture of India that is also battling some potentially serious existential challenges from the disenfranchised and dispossessed millions whose aspirations and lives have been hijacked by violent anti-state Maoist guerillas.
Cynical Indians, and that is a vast number, believe all the tax raids, extended questioning and sanctimonious fulminations will eventually produce nothing since those involved are some of the very people who are running the country’s political order.
I can only give you a larger picture which, as I said at the top of this post, it seems as if the rich and the powerful were caught with their hands in one another’s pants and panties. Figuratively speaking, of course.