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Case study

Dalmiya sues Bindra. Dalmiya sues Aggarwal. Dalmiya sues Amul. Dalmiya sues the Telegraph. Dalmiya sues Scyld Berry. Bindra sues Dalmiya. Aggarwal sues Dalmiya. Javed Akthar sues Bacher. Salim Malik sues I don't remember who.

If law firms traded on the stock exchange, this would be the time to buy into them, big time?

Or would it? Funnily enough, while each successive day brings fresh headlines on the lines of Blank sues Blank, not a single one of those cases have been actually filed. And -- if you'll pardon me using a dirty word -- I'll bet big money they never will be.

It reminds me of this phone call that startled me awake, after a particularly late night, one morning almost a year ago. It was my mom on the line, and her first question, which jolted me out of my somnolence, was 'Are you in some trouble? Will you have to go to jail or something?'

I was, like, huh?

Turned out she had just read the morning papers. The headline read 'Lele sues Rediff'. And the typical middle class mindset had kicked into high gear.

That mindset can be summed up in two sentences: If a person goes to court, he is the wronged party, he is genuinely aggrieved, he wants to fight to clear his name of whatever muck has been thrown at it; and the person who has a case filed against him is guilty of unspeakable crimes, and will in due time get his just desserts, and his near and dear ones will have to schedule prison visits into their routine.

Mom, mind you, is not some illiterate villager. Far from it -- she in fact held down a senior position in the Telephones department until her retirement. But that merely underlines that this mindset is not restricted to the unlettered section of our society. And it is this very mindset that the bigwigs in cricket administration are preying on, today.

What they are doing, the Dalmiyas, Leles, and the rest, is exploiting what we can only call the headline writer's headache. Look at it from the point of view of a sub-editor who gets to handle a story, the lead line of which reads, for example: 'ICC chairman Jagmohan Dalmiya told told the media that he was contemplating taking legal action against Amul India Pvt Ltd over an advertising hoarding that, Dalmiya claimed, had damaged his reputation...'.

The sub-editor has to fit that story into a single column, or at best two column, space. So what headline can he give? 'Dalmiya contemplates legal action against Amul'?

That, set in anything more than the most miniscule of type, will span an entire front page. So that's out. So then, struggling against the constraints of space, he says, 'Dalmiya sues Amul'.

Just like sub-editors, that day months ago, had said 'Lele sues Rediff'.

Lele never did. Dalmiya never will. But both Dalmiya and Lele -- and Malik and Akthar and the rest of them -- have got what they were angling for. They've got the public thinking that they have been wronged, and are going to gird up their loins, roll up their shirtsleeves, and fight like hell. When the fact is that it is the last thing on their minds -- they, none of them, can even afford to go to court, because if they do, they too will have to get up there on the stands, take oath, and answer some very uncomfortable questions, produce records they would much rather stayed buried.

Funny, isn't it? Lele claimed that only a payment of Rs 5 crore would salvage his damaged reputation. Months later, Dalmiya talks of wanting to sue Amul -- and claims that the damage to his reputation is worth -- surprise, surprise -- Rs 5 crore! It's almost as if the BCCI has this blank form, with several paragraphs extolling the virtues of their officials and talking of the colossal loss of prestige and goodwill and reputation, and all they have to do is fill in the name of the official suing, and the person being sued.

Mercifully, courts don't like to be used as a platform for playing games. Which is why they have a little clause that says that if you want to sue someone for X amount, you have to deposit 10 per cent of that amount with the court when you file the case. So if a Dalmiya or a Lele want to file suit to the tune of Rs 5 crore, ten per cent of that figure has to be put down where their mouth is, and only then will the court entertain that case. And in the event the case is proved to be frivolous, that money is forfeit, together with all the other attendant penalties.

These guys very obviously don't want to put their money where their mouth is, for fear of losing. So they play on the sub-editor's headline-writing constraints, to create an impression in the public mind that is essentially false.

Isn't it about time these guys were told that the media will not publish any more stories on the 'contemplating filing a case' lines? In other words, isn't it time these guys were forced to put their money where their mouth is?

Strangely enough, only two cases have been actually filed -- and both are against the BCCI, and by the public.

The first is the Public Interest Litigation filed by Rahul Mehra and Shantanu Sharma against the board, alleging gross mismanagement. Which, last heard from, had been postponed to a date in early June, because apparently the Federal government, which has also been included in the litigation as one of the respondents, hasn't had "time to file a reply". Classic delaying tactics, these -- the litigation has been on file for months now, the contents are public knowledge, if you wanted to (or had a legitimate reply) you could have got it ready any time these past few months. But no, the government, and the board, would rather buy time and hope that somehow, this will go away.

The other case on record is a PIL filed by Kamineekant Mohanty of Cuttack, argues that since national coach Kapil Dev, and senior players Azharuddin, Mongia and Jadeja have been accused of illicit dealings, they should not play in the Asia Cup scheduled to begin in Dhaka on May 28.

Obviously, while BCCI members hope to create a lot of dust through media releases about contemplated lawsuits, the public is actually concerned enough to do something concrete. And this increased activism by the public, more even than the announcement of a CBI inquiry, is why the optimists among us believe that there is yet hope for Indian cricket. Revolution, and change, has always been sprearheaded by the public, never by governments and administrators.

Meanwhile, I wonder if another aspect of the ongoing scandal strikes you as funny? It's this -- for years now, the public and the media have been talking of match-fixing, betting, bribery and assorted skulduggery on the cricket field. And during this period, the administrators -- not just in India, but in every single cricket playing nation, has been denying these allegations and insisting that there is nothing wrong with the game.

And now? Now, an Inderjit Singh Bindra claims he knew of incidents of fixing dating back four years or more. It turns out that the ICC chief executive, David Richards, knew of Salim Malik's alleged involvement, and of the Mark Waugh-Shane Warne affair, for years now. It turns out that Bob Woolmer -- who, initially, claimed that the Cronje tapes were concocted by the Indian police and the media here -- claims to have known that Cronje and the South African team considered an offer to fix a match way back in 1996. And so on, and on, and on. Bacher claims to know that World Cup fixtures, and other games, were fixed.

Every day, another administrator comes up with another story, of things he knew way back when.

Makes you wonder if these blokes know what 'accessory after the fact' means.

To commit a crime invites punishment. But that punishment -- and this is a common feature of pretty much every system of jurisprudence, in any country you care to name -- applies equally to those who had knowledge of the crime and choose not to share that knowledge with the law-enforcement authorities; it applies to those who, by hiding their knowledge, aided and abetted the criminals.

Thus, they -- Bindra, Bacher, Woolmer, Richards, the whole lot of 'an expose a day' chappies -- are equally culpable, equally guilty, by reason of having had knowledge of crimes and chosing to hide it.

Which is why ordering a CBI inquiry into Indian cricketers, or a judicial inquiry into their South African and Pakistani counterparts, is only half the solution. If there has to be a clean-up -- complete, and comprehensive -- then what the game needs is a simultaneous inquiry into cricket administrations everywhere.

Very clearly, too many people in high places knew too much, and chose to hide that knowledge. The question is why -- why were they all, by reason of their silence, party to a colossal cover-up? What were they trying to hide, and why?

The supporters of the game deserve to get an answer to that one. The game itself deserves a thorough cleansing -- not just of the players, but of the administrators as well.

Prem Panicker