By Harish Gupta
Faced with its two troublesome contessas, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, and the raging controversy created by their surreptitious involvement with Lalit Modi, the ruling BJP earlier last week seemed to be choosing as strategy to make light of the allegations.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in particular, passed the endurance test with great aplomb by giving messages to all and sundry, including wishing Iceland on her National Day, and became the star of the government-sponsored yoga session Sunday, the International Yoga Day. Yet his lips were zipped on l’affaire Lalit Modi though its echoes resounded in every corner of the media and politics.
It was clear that expediency was dictating the government’s response. With the monsoon session of Parliament due as close as next month and the reform bills holding the key to faster growth crying for getting passed, giving up on yet another opportunity can be very costly. Instead, the government is deflecting attention to the legalities of the allegations. If Swaraj had, way back in July last year, indirectly told the British government to let Lalit have the necessary travel papers for a trip away from the country where he was almost in asylum, it was, as Modi’s ministers argued, out of “humanitarian” grounds.
That the Prime Minister too wasn’t in favour of much fuss over Swaraj’s action was evident from the fact that he cleared her trip to the US as the country’s representative at the International Yoga Day observance in New York.
But that could hardly mean business as usual for Swaraj, as the conflict of interest in her case was glaring! Her husband and her bar-at-law daughter have served Lalit Modi as counsel for 20 years and six years respectively, so the minister mother helping out, in a gingerly fashion, the client of the family is anything but par for the course.
As far as Vasundhara Raje is concerned, the technicalities behind which the BJP is sheltering are even more tattered. It appears that her MP son Dushyant Singh had got into a sweetheart deal through his Niyant Heritage Hotels Private Limited with Lalit Modi’s companies in 2008 and 2009, when Raje was just out of power. It was during her earlier term as Chief Minister between 2003 and 2008 that she changed the voting rules of the Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) by transferring voting rights from individual members to elected representatives of the cricket associations of the state’s 33 districts.
Lalit Modi became the Tsar of RCA by one stroke of Raje’s pen. The favour was repaid, or so it seems, when Lalit Modi invested in Niyant Heritage Hotels. After the secret was out, Dushyant brazened it out by claiming that he had done no wrong. The UPA was in power in the state and at the Centre and did nothing and rather RBI cleared the deal.
Still it remains enigmatic that it is Lalit Modi who has dragged Raje into the controversy, claiming in an interview that it is she who recommended him when he applied to the UK government for an immigrant visa.
The recommendation is accompanied by a confidentiality agreement that does not carry any signature. BJP is latching on to it as proof that Raje kept her nose clean, nor did she back Lalit Modi on the sly. But the party has swallowed its embarrassment over the sheer fact that it had no clue whatsoever on the Dushyant-Lalit cosy nexus. It’s no secret that Lalit had fallen out with Raje much before she returned to power in 2013 with a massive mandate.
Similarly, it is highly unlikely that the Prime Minister had a sniff of what was happening on the floor below him in South Block where the external affairs ministry is housed. I have no doubt that if he had got a hang of it Swaraj’s plot would have backfired on her a long time back.
Now, with the party right down to the wire on a make or break election in Bihar, and the equally critical bills on uniform goods and services tax and land acquisition waiting to be made into laws, it is far too late in the day to act against her. Forget acting against the Jaipur sultana.
But I am sure the mine called Lalit Modi hasn’t fully exploded yet. More things about him should now come to light to examine the murky underbelly of a gentleman’s game that has degenerated into a cash machine for not only betting operators (known as bookies, they’re often small fry) but the big daddies of the business — politicians and underworld bosses.
An early indication of this came with the 1999-2000 India-South Africa match fixing scandal that claimed the reputation and career of two national captains, Hansie Cronje of South Africa and Mohammed Azharuddin of India, besides raising the suspicion that those cricketers who threw a game or suddenly bowled a no-ball were actually puppets on a string held by, among others, the dreaded ‘D Company’ of fugitive terrorist Dawood Ibrahim.
The 2013 IPL spot-fixing and betting case got even more skeletons tumbling out of the cupboard. It raised deeper questions far more intricate than, say, why N Srinivasan should continue as BCCI president after his son-in-law came under scanner for his role in spot-fixing. The nexus will be out if a thorough probe is ordered on how IPL teams were first awarded, how a bitter battle led to the ouster of Shashi Tharoor of the Union ministry, why the Adanis lost the race to get an IPL team and what kind of mind-boggling monies are involved. Perhaps that’s why politicians across all political parties grab positions in the controlling boards of cricket, and their quid pro quo with a character like Lalit Modi?
There has been no conclusive investigation till now into the connection between cricket betting and money. But its epicentre is no doubt India and Pakistan. When Australian cricketers Mark Waugh and Shane Warne were on a tour of Sri Lanka in 1995, they were paid handsome amounts in exchange of information on pitch and weather by “John”, an Indian bookmaker. But that is chicken feed compared to the huge money that sloshes around in this subcontinent every time there is an ODI or IPL match played anywhere in the world.
With the financial greed of politicians knowing no bounds, is it the lure of this torrent of cash flow which is drawing them close to the world of Lalit Modi? Not impossible, in the land of the Mahabharata, the epic in which the king wagers not only his kingdom but his wife in a game of dice.
