Tweet a Whistle

Are you as mystified and puzzled by this entire Shashi Tharoor – Lalit Modi drama playing out on the TV screens as me? It is now into its fifth day and the matter has assumed such proportions that shoving aside the Women’s Reservation Bill, the Union Budget, Price Rise and the Dantewada massacre, the Opposition has deemed it fit to adjourn parliamentary proceedings over. The controversy ridden Mr.Tharoor found the Lok Sabha quite unlike Twitter where he holds forth without any interference from any pesky followers (you have to be Chetan Bhagat to perhaps have pesky followers on twitter). He was shouted and hounded and now it seems nothing short of his blood or the Prime Minister’s appearance will bring our legislature back to normalcy. Lalit Modi on the other hand has been displaced from his comfortable seating at Koel Poorie’s garish feathery red couch into the slightly uncomfortable embrace of Income Tax officials who, in a sudden awakening of Rip Van Winklesque proportions, have unearthed that there might be some hanky-panky with the way a lot of our IPL franchisees are owned.

So why if I may ask are we subjected to such craziness just the week after Sania and Shoaib? To me this is a classic case of ‘blow the horn and ask for details’ later. The last few days all I have seen in both the newspapers and the TV stations are loud tickers, headlines and allegations (That’s how the Times of India writes the word, italicized – it emphasizes that at the end of the day all they publish in their broadsheet are just allegations). Disappointingly, even the Indian Express, that beacon of investigative and uncomfortable journalism, has only been half heartedly reproducing the same text and claims and counter claims. As always, TV news anchors, specially those who wear indignation and self-righteousness on their face every night at 9pm have been quick to take sides and loudly proclaim conflict of interest and impropriety.

So all we know is that Kochi won the bid, Modi says that Sunanda Pushkar and others own ‘free equity’ in the franchise, the media takes over and says that Sunanda was the one we photographed Tharoor going around with and as per our grapevine the two are close ‘personal’ friends, Modi says Tharoor asked not to question the ownership, media says that means the Minister used a woman for proxy and benefited from the franchise win and that all that talk of mentoring the franchise for Kerela was a hogwash, Tharoor denies, IPL Kochi denies, Rs 75 crs are calculated and the opposition wants a CBI enquiry. In between all this, the BCCI, completely caught unawares by a storm rapidly engulfing them, censure Modi on Day 1 and then in their own time tested way start dealing with the affair completely non-transparently and off the record. The self righteous news anchor says Tharoor cant hide behind self-righteousness (a bit rich coming from him, don’t you think?), another anchor says the Minister should have known that getting involved in the bid would expose him to such questions and so we all await the next act of the drama.

Much like the Times of India, all I hear are allegations and insinuations along with calls for the Minister to resign. So let’s take it step by step. Tharoor encouraged the Kochi franchise we all know, he himself admitted as much on the day of the bid. The franchise has given what they call ‘Sweat Equity’ (and I must admit it is time that journos open up Google and read up what Sweat equity means), not just to Pushkar but to a host of other individuals along with Rendezvous Sports themselves in consideration of management and other services. We also know that Tharoor knows the lady in question, they have been publically seen and he has never sought to deny his close personal ties. These are all the facts that we know. The rest are the allegations, which if we talk only of Tharoor, boil down to this. The Minister used his influence, either as an MP or as a member of the Union Government, to influence the sale of the franchise to Kochi and in lieu of the same, the franchise allotted ‘free equity’ to his proxy which, given the value of the bid made by the franchise comes to a cool Rs 75 crs. So let’s take the debatable questions here –

a) a) Can a franchisee offer free or sweat equity to its owners/ members? Yes, as per law they are legally permitted to do so. In fact the ESOPs offered by the companies to their many employees are also an indirect form of sweat equity where labour is rewarded with ownership.

b) b) Should franchise ownership have been declared openly by Modi? Yes, because it is in everyone’s interests to know who owns and has a pie in the IPL but also No, if Modi as an IPL governing council member was bound to confidentiality by the franchise agreement.

c) c) Is Sunanda Pushkar a proxy for Tharoor? Maybe or maybe not. There is no definite answer to this question because it is a matter of perception. Had she been a Rabri Devi to a Laloo Yadav, the answer would have been an unequivocal yes. But if the lady has a professional background that can be proven (which is itself subject to unclear answers), then the yes get a bit diluted. Make up your mind on that. The only doubt I have, is if Tharoor was so clever as to outwit Modi and get Kochi a franchise over all others, then why would he be stupid enough to get his consideration allotted to a woman who could so easily have been discovered by the media and others? I can agree that he is politically naïve, but is he so plain dumb?

d) d) The key question though is – Did Tharoor subvert a fair bidding process and get Kochi a deal over other deserving winners? And this I believe is the crux of the argument. All other allegations of consideration, sweat equity, influence peddling and seeking to keep the details under wraps stem from this one basic point. Did the Minister in any way use his office or rank to bulldoze the BCCI to allot his people a franchise over the Adanis and Videocon? The answer may lie in the silence that surrounds this question. Modi, for all his noise and claims, has not even once brought this up. Surprisingly, the media has not asked this as well, choosing to focus on Sunanda Pushkar and the Rs 75 crs. It is easy to understand the silence though isn’t it? The moment Modi says that the bidding was subverted, the entire structure of the IPL comes crashing down on both his and BCCI’s head. For what that means then is that the IPL Commissioner and the game’s governing body allowed ‘auction fixing’ instead of raising a noise or postponing it all together. (They did postpone it earlier though when the BCCI believed that Modi had set too strong a set of conditions to allow fair bidding for the new franchises, and perhaps therein lies the answer to this story). You can see why Modi will never say this and why the BCCI will always maintain that the auction was an honest affair. Circumstantially then it is evident that the allegation of influencing and subverting a ‘sealed bid’ auction, certified as fair and proclaimed as a success by both Modi and BCCI, being guided and fixed by the junior Minister for Foreign Affairs is a bit thin as of now.

The only charge which then holds is that of someone holding consideration on his behalf. If the auction was not subverted, and if Sunanda is indeed a marketing dodo in her own capacity (would the media have raised this question if she was not a half attractive woman who was purportedly ‘seeing’ a publically visible Minister?), then what pray is the consideration for? Blessings?

Mentorship? Perhaps future insurance for government benefits? But then should it not have been given to someone in the state government from whom all the clearances and ‘benefits’ will be required? Can you think of an answer to this question?

The other charge that remains is of being associated with supposedly ‘fishy’ people and exposing oneself to conflict of interest. Since when have we started pillorying any Indian public face for being connected with people perceived to be ‘fishy’? Or have we ever questioned any politician for the conflict of interest that arises that when they get into sport bodies? Last I saw, all of them were going along fine. Media anchors and owners have conflicts of interests, giving prime time slots to their blood relatives – we never question them or bring them down.

Of course I could be wrong and Tharoor could be as neck deep in muck as Harshad Mehta, but I wonder why our newspapers and news channels don’t get away from ‘allegation’ reporting to perceptive and analytical reporting.

As for Lalit Modi, he clearly has bitten much more than he can chew and is now living on borrowed time. The one entity you do not want to confront head on is the Indian government and this is Modi’s second attempt at that after his run in with the Home Minister over the holding of IPL II in an election bound India last year. I have a suspicion that the script has not played out entirely the way Modi wanted it to and that he did not anticipate that his own neck and finances would end up on the chopping block before Tharoor’s. I also wonder whether many in the BCCI will finally see this as a chance to ease him out of the IPL or atleast cut him to size.

The Congress may be embarrassed, Tharoor maybe nervous, the Opposition belligerent but the only entity that has been harmed by this entire Modi triggered affair is the IPL. Questions will be asked and comparisons drawn with the Stanford sleaze. The tournament is estimated to contribute almost 40% of the revenues to the BCCI in the current year. No one wants a golden goose to be strangled, least of all some of India’s leading politicians who sit in the IPL governing council. Tharoor may survive if Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi can summon the patience, Modi it seems is a whistle blowing liability the BCCI can ill afford.

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