Newsmaker: Lalit Modi

Ever ready for the power play

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How do you describe a man who created a sports league from scratch that was rated a couple of years later by international entities at over $3 billion? You might think of some of the choicest superlatives, but in the case of Lalit Modi, the adjectives often used are sharp, brash, ruthless, ambitious, arrogant. You get the idea. More such descriptors will be used of the 50-year-old scion of the well-known business family founded by Gujar Mal Modi, for the Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) has now elected the exile as its president, an act seen as an exercise in bad faith by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, or BCCI. The association has been suspended, and cricketing matters of the state will be run by a hand-picked committee.

For many, such a turn of events would have been singular in their careers. Not for Modi. He is cricket’s Mr Controversy. His election as president of RCA, even as he has been living in London since 2010, was almost a certainty after the return of Vasundhara Raje as chief minister of Rajasthan in December last year. In 2005, Modi was first elected to the same post, ousting the long-entrenched Rungtas who had controlled the association for 32 years. It was Raje, in her first stint as chief minister, who supported Modi and paved the way for him by enacting a legislation that allowed RCA to change the electoral college from around 65 individuals to 32 district representatives. Modi won over the districts and beat Kishore Rungta to the top post.

The importance of his political backer can be gauged from the fact that in 2009, with Raje no longer in power, he was defeated by a bureaucrat, Sanjay Dixit, who was supported by the new chief minister, Ashok Gehlot. In a sense, it wasn't bravado that made Modi tell the media in London on Wednesday that it was a matter of 10 days before the government in India changed and “so we never know how soon I will be back".  

His return will irk the ambitious men who rule over the cricket world, for long the bastion of power purveyers. But for a short while, he reached a height that few cricket administrators in India have enjoyed. He created and micromanaged IPL as a high-drama live entertainment, cannily recognising that if the world’s best players could be tempted by big bucks to play in the league, television and mega sponsors would find it impossible not to be involved. Like its Armani-suited, chain-smoking, big-mouthed creator, IPL too became a metaphor for grit and glitz that hid an underbelly of dark deals and unsavoury activities. It was his penchant for indiscreet comments, a habit he carried into his exile, that ousted him. After his tweet about the new Kochi franchise led to the resignation of Union Minister Shashi Tharoor, whose friend and later to be wife, Sunanda Pushkar, held sweat equity in the franchise, things unravelled rapidly for Modi. BCCI charged him with misconduct and indiscipline and sacked him as IPL commissioner, leaving him to beat a humiliating retreat to the British capital.

Modi understands political power and he understands sports, or more precisely, sports as a business. Though he was, and remains, president and managing director of the $5-billion Modi Enterprises and executive director of Godfrey Philips India, he was the first to realise sports could be a paying proposition. He came up with Modi Entertainment Network, which distributed ESPN programming during the days of cable networks, laying the ground for the huge role of television in cricket’s, and BCCI’s, financial spurt in India. In 2009, Business Standard had named Modi as one of the “Game Changers of the Decade”.

Modi has been a pugnacious man throughout his life. He married Minal Sagrani, nine years his senior, against his family’s wishes, brazened through a police case of cocaine trafficking and kidnapping during his college years in the United States in the 1980s and relentlessly dogged BCCI in public and in courts. Is his second stint at power play at hand?