Sunil Sethi: People in the IPL's glass houses

At a superficial level, the Lalit Modi-Shashi Tharoor bang-up is a good illustration of the saying, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. More substantially, it’s a moral epic about new India’s Age of Greed. Everything about the slanging match reeks of big bucks. From the total worth of IPL, “the world’s fastest-growing sports league”, valued at $4.1 billion to the swank and swagger of its chairman Lalit Modi, and allegations of fixed and freeloading franchisees, mega-bribes and mafia threats, the story adds up to the idea of how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And enmeshed in it, a youthfully sexy minister, who has gone from being the Congress party’s prize trophy in Kerala to an embarrassment in the premier league. On the face of it, what could Lalit Modi and Shashi Tharoor possibly have in common except Twitter traumas? One is the scion of an old industrial family who has established, by hook and by crook, a hugely wealthy empire made up of condensed cricket, movie star glamour and big-ticket investment; and the other a smooth-talking former UN diplomat with literary ambitions who lobs jokes more fitting in the pages of St Stephen’s undergrad magazine Kooler Talk than in the strait-laced precincts of the ruling party and South Block.

It could be argued that what the two men share is vaunting ambition but there is something else: their arrogance that they can get away with it, given the power they wield. Conflicting interests and the stench of funny money infect the whole business. If Tharoor’s close companion Sunanda Pushkar was an investor in Kochi IPL, surely it was his business and hers to let it be known that they were good chums. And for her to now argue, once the lid is blown off, that her Rs 70 crore shareholding in the consortium wasn’t a freebie but sweat equity, doesn’t wash. Surely, the minister, experienced in navigating the intrigue-ridden corridors of international diplomacy, should know the difference between “mentoring” and offering “expert advice” to a business enterprise, and tacitly promoting a partner in a consortium who may or may not be his fiancee but is widely perceived as his arm candy.

By hurling the first stone, Lalit Modi has opened up the ownership structure of Kochi IPL to further investigation and public scrutiny. But what about the other nine franchises? And he sits in a glass house, too. Tharoor and Kochi IPL franchisees have hit back with stinging accusations — bribes, mafia threats and Modi’s investor relatives. A pretty South African model’s stay in India features too. This is all of a piece with Indian cricket’s murky past, covered in match-fixing scandals and reports of IPL’s top sports stars, some of whom are said to charge appearance fees at parties after matches. The daily skulduggery and dirt-digging of the current scandal could have a positive fallout if the occupants of the biggest glass house of Indian cricket, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), came clean.

Too much about the functioning of the councils that run Indian cricket — the BCCI and the IPL — is secretive and unexplained. The control of a game that is both national entertainment and a phenomenal money-spinner is vice-like. Instead of an ostrich-like behaviour and dilatory tactics, Shashak Manohar, head of the BCCI, should take the lead and order an inquiry into the ownership and financial antecedents of not just the Kochi IPL but all franchises. Why can’t the BCCI commission an independent auditor to make its own accounts public? Why should it not explain what the bidding process for IPL franchises is, who the bidders are and why, as in the case of Kochi IPL, were there delays that led to the Modi-Tharoor face-off and the squalid revelations?

If people in glass houses throw stones then they will soon be covered in shattered glass themselves.