LONG READ: SHAH’S PLAYGROUND: BJP’S CONTROL OF CRICKET IN INDIA
Sharda Ugra
{ONE}
HOURS BEFORE the fourth cricket Test match between India and Australia for the Border–Gavaskar Trophy, on 9 March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived at the Narendra Modi Stadium, in Ahmedabad, alongside his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese. Chants of “Modi, Modi” resounded through the stadium. The two took a lap around the ground in a golf cart fashioned into a golden chariot, waving to the half-full stands. They sat on a dais and watched a dance performance. They presented caps to their respective captains and shook hands with the players, but only of their own teams.
To many, the event resembled a political rally rather than the typical cricket match. “As the copious banners around the stadium make clear, the political leaders are a much bigger deal this day than the tiny cricketers assembled for their entertainment and positioning,” a commentator noted in the Sydney Morning Herald. “For the first time in living memory, the teams have been shunted to the nets for their warm-ups, in order to clear the stage for Modi and Albanese.” The Gujarati newspaper Divya Bhaskar reported that about eighty thousand tickets had been bought by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Present on the occasion was Jay Shah, the secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India—the richest and most powerful body in the cricketing world. Shah’s claim to this top position has come not from any significant cricket experience or prowess but from being the son of the second most powerful man in India today, the union home minister, Amit Shah. Today, in the BCCI, the younger Shah stands in for Modi, the BJP and the Indian government. Until recently, he tended to stay obscured in his father’s shadow. But, this year, he was front and centre of ceremonies, presenting Modi with a picture of Modi.
The Narendra Modi Stadium—built on the site of the old Motera stadium, which was demolished in 2015—is vast and magnificent, with a river running across its northern flank. This is the biggest cricket stadium in the world, though its reported capacity is nebulous. A Gujarat Cricket Association plaque at one end of the stadium states its seating capacity as 110,000 people, while another plaque elsewhere says that it is 130,000. But it is not merely a sports stadium; it is also a stage for a wider political project, one in which everything is destroyed and rebuilt in Modi’s image.
Modi was elected president of the GCA in 2009, with Amit Shah as his vice-president. The same year, Jay Shah was appointed as an executive board member of the Central Board of Cricket Ahmedabad—an affiliate of the GCA. Modi was serving his third term as chief minister at the time, his first term marked by the 2002 communal violence which killed more than two thousand people, mostly Muslims. Amit Shah had been his lieutenant even then.
A senior BCCI official told me that Modi had asked about the money spent on the Motera stadium when he was GCA president. When he found out that the ground was used for about twenty days of cricket, the official recalled him saying, “It has to be used for other purposes and other games … you can’t just block land for this only.” After Modi became the prime minister, in 2014, Amit Shah took over as GCA president. By this time, Jay Shah had been appointed the body’s joint secretary. The stadium was rebuilt by February 2020, at an estimated cost of Rs 800 crore.
The first event held at the new stadium was not sporting related: it hosted the Namaste Trump rally, on 24 February 2020, with crowds packing the stands, even as COVID-19 cases in India began to grow, to felicitate the US president at the time, Donald Trump. The stadium was named after Modi the following year. “The basic thing is to do cricket, professionally,” a former GCA official told me. “But now you’re doing these types of functions.” He was miffed about the Modi–Albanese distraction before the match. “The BCCI should now try to organise events, become an event management company,” he said. “Then players will come, and they will dance on the stage and the umpire will judge them.”
The Narendra Modi Stadium has hosted the most important matches in Indian cricket in the last three years, including two Tests and five T20s against England, in February and March 2021—the first cricket tour to India since the COVID-19 pandemic began. It hosted the finals of the Indian Premier League this year. As the ICC Men’s World Cup gets underway, later this year, the BCCI, under Jay Shah, has ensured that the biggest matches are allotted to the stadium, which will host both the opening match, on 5 October, and the final, on 19 November. It will also offer the most sought-after ticket in the global game: India versus Pakistan, on 14 October. After the World Cup, the stadium—inside what is now being called the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Sports Complex—is expected to be the centrepiece of a bid for the 2036 Summer Olympics by the neighbouring cities of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. Motera and the Narendra Modi Stadium fall under the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency, currently represented by Amit Shah.
The stadium is a feather in the Modi–Shah cap. It is an apt metaphor for the administration of Indian cricket today. Most commentators have expressed awe at its grandeur, its blue, orange and yellow palette, its vast outfield, its four spacious dressing rooms, its rating as a green building and how it empties out in half an hour. Everything is shining and glorious until you discover Gate 2.
Gate 2 was the point of entry and exit for my friend, who had a Rs 2,000 tickets, for an IPL match this year. The route through the gate, from Ashram Road into the stadium, was around a kilometre and a half long—and very narrow. It is wedged between a housing colony drain on one side, and walls and barricades on the other, to stop people from wandering through the exclusive GCA clubhouse. As my friend shepherded his children out after the match towards Gate 2, they had to shuffle along very slowly, with people packed in on all sides. The claustrophobia sent a cold finger of fear down his spine. “Anything could have happened,” he told me. He worried about a possible stampede-like situation, especially “at the World Cup, with the crowd.”
Meanwhile, Gate 1 is a short, brisk walk onto a large ramp towards the pavilion end of the stadium for the pricey stands and its 76 fancy corporate boxes. The two ramps, the GCA says, can get more than a hundred thousand people out of the stadium in no time. It took my friend almost two hours to leave the stadium complex that night. “I decided I would never go there again,” he said.
Gate 1 is Indian cricket as will be shown on TV to the world during the upcoming World Cup. Gate 2 is what Indian cricket is beneath the trapdoor of the glitzy stage. Awash in corruption, apart from its two most publicised, protected properties—the Indian men’s team and the IPL—the BCCI’s money is not properly accounted. While it has its deepest connections at the top, its core is hollowed out by abuse and exploitation of domestic players across age and gender. Its fan base and mammoth television audience give it currency and clout, but the BCCI continues to give the average fan the worst spectator experience in world cricket. Drunk on its wealth generated over a decade and a half, with the new muscle of its proximity to the BJP regime, the BCCI pays no attention to the acid in its groundwater.
{TWO}
CRICKET ARRIVED on Indian shores with colonialism in the eighteenth century. It then became an urban, middle-class pursuit before it eventually evolved into the mass sporting industry that it is today. The game draws players and spectators from a wide swathe of regional and class differences, making it one of modern India’s most dynamic phenomena. According to the Broadcast Audience Research Council, about 715 million viewers tuned in to watch cricket content on television in 2018. They accounted for ninety-three percent of the country’s 766 million sports-watchers. This television audience for cricket—more than the combined population of all the other full members of the International Cricket Council and twice the population of the United States—is the driving force behind the BCCI’s financial strength.
After India’s miracle victory in the 1983 World Cup, cricket’s growth story has run parallel to liberalisation. It sold aspiration, dreams and colas, using satellite television as its year-round launch and re-launch vehicle. Through the 1990s, live television took the sport to India’s vast hinterland, its leading cricketers emerging in a stream from smaller towns and cities, led by Mumbai’s Sachin Tendulkar, the Pied Piper of the era.
Tendulkar was one of the first two modern Indian athletes—the tennis star Leander Paes being the other—to overtly project their Indianness, wearing a tricolour on his helmet. His status as one of the game’s greatest batsmen gave rise to a new kind of vocabulary around Indian cricket and its fandom. This was a cheerful, upbeat nationalism, not overtly aggressive or confrontational as we know it today. It could be supportive of a national team regardless of their on-field success. In a fast globalising world, cricket, like Bollywood, was championed as a key part of India’s national identity.
The advent of the IPL made the finances of Indian cricket the loudest conversation in the room. Over the last fifteen years, the loyalty and enthusiasm of Indian cricket fans has been supplemented by a strong dose of jingoism evident in television advertising, marketing and commentary. All this is bolstered by the weight of the wallet in the boardroom. The BCCI’s net worth, as of 2021–22, is Rs 23,159 crore.
An examination of the numbers, however, does not reveal much. A lot of public attention is given to million-dollar rights and sponsorship deals, or the crores paid to star players as wages. Almost ninety percent of the BCCI’s 1,041 registered domestic players do not play in the IPL. Most of them are on ad hoc wages, unconnected to either performance or a share of the BCCI’s revenues. The 38 state associations hoover up seventy percent of the BCCI’s earnings and have uncontrolled powers over how and when these are to be dispensed.
Down the ranks, across women’s, district and junior cricket, selection in exchange for cash or sexual favours is an unkept secret. A sexual harassment case by a minor against a cricket official is taken no note of at the very top, other than homilies. In what is a clear restraint-of-trade violation, non-contracted male players are not allowed to compete in other overseas franchise leagues. Now, the BCCI is even contemplating that its male players “cool off” for a few years after retirement before being given a no-objection certificate to play in any other franchise leagues, whose numbers are growing every year. Rather than moving towards professionalising its operations, the BCCI has retreated into administration through autocracy and handouts.
While the BCCI’s arrogance has been moored around money, it has also benefited from cross-party political connections—the organisation has usually featured politicians from both sides of the aisle. What is now at play, however, is something different. In what already was a monopsony, an oligarch has taken over the cartel. We are witnessing for the first time in the BCCI the gradual solidification of the soft power of not politicians as a lot but of a single political party.
In the past, the BCCI prided itself on trying to keep government reach or intervention at bay. The cricket administrator Amrit Mathur tells an interesting India–Pakistan cricket story in his recently released book Pitchside. A day before the Indian team was to leave for Pakistan on its historic 2004 tour, Mathur heard Jagmohan Dalmiya, the BCCI president at the time, take a brief call from a “very senior” minister in the union government. “The minister wanted the BCCI to cancel the tour citing security concerns,” Mathur writes. Mathur heard Dalmiya’s “clear, firm” reply. “I am the president of the BCCI and the BCCI wants the cricket to go ahead,” Dalmiya said. “You are the government; if you don’t want the tour, please go ahead and order its cancellation.” This was one example of the separation of the church of Indian cricket from the state.
“Whoever the politicians were, there was no involvement in the direct administration of the game,” a veteran cricket administrator told me. “They never politicised the scene, they never brought any political outfit into the administration—this is across the board, across parties. They never brought their political background into the working of any institution.”
The BCCI’s financial power and cultural reach in this millennium has only meant that the BJP, flush with the biggest electoral mandate of the last four decades and its government control over nearly every institution, would want to lay claim over it. There are BJP heavyweights in charge of Indian football, badminton, wrestling and tennis, and at the top of the Indian Olympic Association, but it is cricket that gives it its larger pan-Indian, pop-cultural platform—bigger even than Bollywood.
The BCCI functions under a highly centralised, unchallenged administrative structure, with power vested at the top. This in itself is not unusual. It has been a consistent feature for powerful BCCI officials of the past as well. But there are two major differences today. In most cases, previous BCCI leaders did not have unquestioned access to wealth of the kind the board owns today. And, in the IPL era, those that did were not under the control of the government. Jay Shah is the only one to tick both boxes.
Shah has complete charge over the only golden goose in Indian sport—financially independent and ostensibly requiring nothing of the government but its approvals for overseas travel and cheap land to build stadia. It has meant the BCCI keeps itself outside regulatory scrutiny and even sporting legislation and is not counted in the list of “national sporting federations” who require annual government recognition by the sports ministry. It is this financial support and cricket’s mass base that permit the BCCI to hold itself up as the best-run Indian sporting organisation—in what is fundamentally a zero-competition race, with nothing to measure its governance standards against in the country.
THE BCCI WAS FOUNDED in 1929—it is older, it reminds us, than independent India. The organisation has been run by maharajas, businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats, all competing outside the cricket field and yet aligned for a common cause to protect the board’s interests as their own. The board governs all things cricket in India, overseeing four teams that represent the country on the international cricket stage: the senior and under-19 men’s and women’s national teams. Its strength as an operating system is its ability, over the last three decades, to expand its capabilities and resources into organising over fifteen hundred matches every year across age groups, at more than fifty venues spread around the country.
Once the BCCI’s leading officials in the 1990s and early aughts—the Kolkata businessman Jagmohan Dalmiya and the Chandigarh bureaucrat Inderjit Singh Bindra being the prime movers—discovered the route to monetise Indian cricketing fandom into television rights value, everything changed. The BCCI went from sleeping giant, to a regional rallying power and, now, in the last decade, to a global bully.
From the mid-1990s until 2008, the BCCI earned the majority of its revenues through the sale of television, multimedia and, more recently, digital rights for the men’s team. In 2006, Nimbus paid $612 million for the terrestrial, broadband and internet rights for the Indian team’s matches, featuring 22 Tests and 55 one-day internationals over four years.
The arrival of the IPL, in 2008, fundamentally altered the landscape of media-rights negotiations for the BCCI. The IPL is today widely accepted as cricket’s biggest disruptor event in the twenty-first century, which changed not just Indian cricket but the global cricket economy and the nature of the game. Lalit Modi, the BCCI vice-president from 2005 to 2010, was the driving force behind the league, inspired by US city franchise leagues.
For the first time, the BCCI offered up for sale eight city franchise teams to take part in the domestic T20 club competition—independent of the BCCI’s competition structures and its domestic teams. Each franchise would receive a share of the media-rights fees and use it to select and run their own teams with a mix of Indian and international cricketers and support staff. The league was to be held over six weeks on a home-and-away basis at the end of the Indian domestic season, in April.
The eight franchises were purchased by a mix of Bollywood stars, Indian business houses and previously lesser known consortiums at sums between $111.6 million (Mumbai Indians, owned by Reliance Industries) and $76 million (Rajasthan Royals, by a consortium led by Emerging Media). Lalit Modi, as the executive head of the league, appointed himself IPL commissioner, in keeping with US practice.
Each team had a salary cap of $5 million (Rs 20 crore at the time) with which to pick their teams through a first-of-its-kind auction of cricketers. MS Dhoni became the first IPL millionaire through the auction with a bid of $1.5 million. In 2010, 11 Pakistani cricketers who were in the IPL auction were not bid for and have disappeared from the IPL auctions ever since, without any explanation from either the IPL or the BCCI.
The auction salary cap was raised in 2010 to $7 million per team, switching to Rs 60 crore in 2014. It was Rs 95 crore per team at the last auction in December 2022. Over the last 15 seasons, these six weeks of cricket have become the most lucrative gig for any player in the world. Sam Curran of England earns $2.25 million (Rs 18.5crore) a season, while the highest earning Indian player is KL Rahul, who earns $2.2 million (Rs 17 crore). In India, the priority for every young male cricketer now is to work towards not his state team or even India colours but an IPL contract. The highest paid “uncapped” Indian player—a player who has not yet represented his country—in the December 2022 auction was the Uttar Pradesh fast bowler Shivam Mavi, who earned Rs 6 crore.
Two new IPL franchise entrants, Ahmedabad and Lucknow, sold for a total of $1.6 billion (Rs 12,200 crore), entered the competition in 2022. The third-highest bid for both teams came from the Adani Group at Rs 5,100 crore. The Ahmedabad bid went to the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. The BCCI immediately handed over its letter of intent to the winners of the Lucknow franchise, the RGSP Group led by Sanjiv Goenka, but it took four months before CVC was given the clearance, following investigations into its associations with betting companies.
The significant difference between the US franchise leagues and the IPL is that, in the United States, it is the franchises and not the sport’s national governing bodies, that own the leagues whereas, in the IPL, the BCCI has not ceded full financial or management control of the league to the franchise owners in any kind of manner. In an informal conversation at his Kolkata office a few seasons in, Dalmiya told me he had been opposed to the IPL as it was to mark the “corporate takeover” of the BCCI. This is yet to happen.
Outside of the creation and the execution of the IPL—for which Lalit Modi takes and deserves credit—it has required little marketing genius to bring money into Indian cricket. In 2017, Star India paid $2.55 billion for IPL’s television and digital rights for a five-year period. In 2022, the BCCI collected $6.2 billion for IPL’s media rights selling television and digital between Viacom18 and Disney Star from 2023 to 2027. This year, Viacom18 won both television and digital rights for all BCCI matches at Rs 67.8 crore per game until 2028.
The BCCI has used numbers like these as a weapon and a shield—a weapon to bludgeon its way through the global game and a shield to deflect any questions asked about how the game is being run at home. But to conflate IPL earnings with the financial health of the majority of Indian cricketing incomes is incorrect and uninformed, because the vast percentage of the BCCI’s wealth is untraceable once in the hands of its state associations, the majority of it unaudited. The organisation has argued that, because it is a private society and does not use government funds, it should be left alone and exempt from the Right to Information Act.
I asked Neeraj Kumar, a former police commissioner of Delhi who once led the BCCI’s Anti-Corruption Unit, what the situation around the BCCI looked like to him from a law-enforcement perspective. “It is organised white-collar crime,” Kumar said. “How their money is distributed, the conspiracy of silence, the lack of transparency.” Kumar’s memoir A Cop In Cricket is a scathing indictment of what corruption in cricket is meant to be outside of illegal betting and spot-fixing. The situation, according to him, is “Sab maze karo, koi bolo mat”—everyone enjoy, no one say anything—“till something comes up. When we openly say we have made Rs 4,000 crore as media rights from the IPL, the public has the right to know where and how the money is being spent.”
IN 2013, the BCCI was hit by a big corruption scandal after the Delhi Police arrested three cricketers for allegedly colluding with bookies to predetermine key passages of play in an IPL match. The BCCI’s initial disciplinary committee findings in the case had been deemed “illegal” by the Bombay High Court, and the BCCI—whose president at the time, N Srinivasan, also owned the successful IPL team Chennai Super Kings—opted to contest the Bombay High Court decision. The protracted legal battle led to the Supreme Court setting up two committees. The first, led by the former high court judge Mukul Mudgal, was asked to look into the specific IPL corruption scandal and suggest remedies. The second, under the former chief justice of India RM Lodha, was tasked to investigate the functioning of the BCCI and to recommend reform measures around its administration.
The Lodha committee recommendations, approved by the Supreme Court in July 2016, changed the BCCI’s constitution. It sought to alter the board’s electoral college, address issues of conflict of interest, professionalise day-to-day management and detach it from honorary office-bearers, imposing age and tenure restrictions on them. Two months before this, Anurag Thakur, a BJP member of parliament, had been elected BCCI president, taking over from Shashank Manohar. The tussle between the BCCI and the Supreme Court intensified in the following months. The BCCI focussed its objections on the age restrictions, which meant that many state officials would lose their positions, as well as the imposition of a tenure cap of upto three terms. In its September 2016 annual general meeting, the BCCI defied the Lodha recommendations and picked a five-member panel instead of three for the selection of players in the various teams. By October, the BCCI had missed the deadline to implement the reforms, citing “practical difficulties.” The Supreme Court debarred the BCCI from distributing funds until it had implemented the orders.
Finally, in January 2017, the court sacked Thakur and the BCCI secretary, Ajay Shirke, for refusing to implement the reforms and put in place a four-member Committee of Administrators to carry out that role in their place. For 33 months, the CoA took charge of the BCCI with the aim of implementing the Lodha recommendations. Thakur is currently the union minister of youth affairs and sports, as well as of information and broadcasting.
The pushback against the Lodha reforms continued from all quarters, with Thakur joining hands with his old adversary, Srinivasan, and the BJP employing the party muscle and legal manpower needed to win back control of the board from the courts. From this melee emerged the younger faces of the former India captain Sourav Ganguly and Jay Shah. Ganguly was an extremely popular cricketing figure and was secretary of the Cricket Association of Bengal, while Shah was the secretary of the GCA.
At the BCCI’s 2019 annual general meeting, the BJP supported Shah’s elevation to the post of the board’s secretary, with the future Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, a former president of the Assam Cricket Association, camped at the Trident hotel in Mumbai and rallying the troops. Srinivasan proposed Brijesh Patel, a former Indian cricketer and the long-time head honcho at the Karnataka State Cricket Association, as a presidential candidate, offering Ganguly the posts of vice-president and head of the IPL governing council. Ganguly refused and retreated to his room. He knew that the optics and the numbers would fall his way. The push from the BJP loyalists, seeking to gather Ganguly in their fold before the 2021 assembly election in West Bengal, sealed the deal.
Shah and Ganguly, who had both already served two terms in their state associations, were ineligible to hold office, according to the Lodha committee’s recommendation on tenure. But the new rules were brazenly ignored and the old order prevailed. The BCCI filed a petition, in April 2020, asking the Supreme Court to allow amendments in the board’s constitution, and repeated delays in that hearing gave them time to settle into office. By the time the Supreme Court rewrote its own orders extending the tenures of board officials, in September 2022, Ganguly was gone and all executive posts had been removed, with Shah becoming the BCCI’s sole boss. Hemang Amin, who began his BCCI stint as the IPL’s chief operating officer, has been the faceless, voiceless acting CEO in the BCCI for the last three years.
The new BCCI constitution states that the board’s apex council is “primarily responsible for the governance of the affairs of the BCCI” and “has all the powers of the general body.” The apex council is made up of the five office-bearers, an additional councillor elected by the office-bearers, two player representatives (one male, one female) elected by the cricketers’ association and a representative from the office of the comptroller and auditor general. The BCCI has chosen to cherry-pick from the Lodha reforms and has given all powers to the apex council, with the office-bearers—or, rather, the most powerful office-bearer—calling the shots. The Lodha reforms’ intent to separate the BCCI’s day-to-day management from its governance—the professionals from the office-bearers—has diligently been swept aside.
In 2022, the former World Cup winner Roger Binny replaced Ganguly as president. A far more amenable personality than Ganguly, Binny disappeared into the background, giving Shah more prominence. Two of the other three office-bearers are BJP loyalists. The treasurer, Ashish Shelar, is a BJP MLA from Mumbai, while the joint secretary, Devajit Saikia, the advocate general of Assam and former secretary of the Assam Cricket Association, is known to be close to Himanta Biswa Sarma.
The odd man out is Rajeev Shukla, a Congress Rajya Sabha MP who is BCCI vice-president. Kirti Azad, Binny’s World Cup-winning teammate and a former selector, who is also an MP and now Trinamool Congress politician, offered an explanation for this bonhomie. “Well, I think they are united in corruption,” Azad told me. To him, Shukla is a reflection of the old BCCI, where political differences did not matter. “They are still together,” he said. “Look at Rajeev Shukla. He is a tamatar, sabji mein bhi hai salad mein bhi hai”—He is a tomato, he can be found in a vegetable curry, he can also be found in a salad. “I appreciate that man for being a tamatar,” Azad added. “Whichever government is there, whosoever is the president, he is always there.”
If there was any proof needed that the BJP and the ruling government had Indian cricket in an iron-clad grip it was to come from Binny. When his World Cup-winning teammates issued a statement in support of the wrestlers protesting against the Wrestling Federation of India president and BJP MP Brijbhushan Sharan Singh for sexual harassment, Binny was quick to distance himself. He told PTI that he was not a signatory to the statement because “I believe that the competent authorities are working on to resolve the issue. As a former cricketer, I believe that sports should not be mixed with politics.”
{THREE}
AT THE WORLD TEST championship final, held in London’s The Oval this June, Jay Shah was stopped at the entrance of the ICC hospitality area. He was carrying no credentials and the sponsors’ hostesses did not recognise him. Before the situation escalated into a “do you know who I am” moment, an ICC staffer spotted Shah and quickly escorted him to his seat. There, in the enclosure, people present at the scene watched the good and the great of Indian cricket shuffle up and genuflect—they included former cricketers, sponsors, media folk and other cricket officials.
Shah’s second term as BCCI secretary, starting in October 2022, was marked by many grandiose announcements—about media-rights deals, pay hikes and the promotion of Indian women’s cricket. There have also been many snafus, but most of these have been assiduously ignored. However, the long delayed release of the schedule of the Cricket World Cup, just a hundred days before the opening match, put his administrative capabilities under the global spotlight. World Cup schedules are usually decided a year in advance. A month after they made the announcement, there was furious back-pedalling by the BCCI administration in order to reschedule.
Media leaks informed the public that there was a need to shift the dates of the India–Pakistan match, originally scheduled for 15 October, which would lead to a cascading effect all along the rest of the event calendar. The delay, reports suggested, was because the day of the match clashed with Navratri, which Shah was later to dismiss. Instead, he claimed, two or three member countries were not in agreement with the dates. No reporter asked Shah whether the members who were raising objections now had signed off on them earlier, what their objections were or even who they were.
A BCCI representative at the WTC final had to face questions about the schedule delay, a reporter who was in the press box told me. His reply was a leaf out of the government’s template whataboutism response when asked uncomfortable questions. He retorted by asking why Cricket Australia was not being asked about refunding tickets after COVID-19 had afflicted the 2022 T20 World Cup.
With less than two months to go, the ICC finally released information about the new schedule and ticketing procedures in August, all signed off, for the first time, by “CEO Hemang Amin.” “The World Cup schedule was announced once all the stakeholders were on the same page and had the required clearances,” the BCCI replied to my question about the delays. “The stakeholders include the hosting parties, the Member Boards and the respective government agencies.”
Given Shah’s previous track record, the World Cup delay was not entirely surprising. During the Ganguly–Shah leadership, COVID-19 ripped through the IPL’s bio-bubble in 2021, resulting in the suspension of the tournament. Both the remainder of the IPL and the 2021 T20 World Cup were relocated to the United Arab Emirates. Compensation for domestic players after a cancelled 2020–21 domestic season was only announced in September 2021 and disbursed in January 2022. Meanwhile, the Indian women’s team has been without a head coach for over eight months this year. Despite assurances during the Indian wrestlers’ protests, the BCCI is yet to appoint a committee to deal with sexual harassment. There have been three changes in official kit sponsors within the last two years and three different jersey sponsors over five years. The BCCI has also reduced its base price in two deals: the Indian team’s official jersey and the home title sponsorships.
Part of Shah’s tenure has featured sustained hostility towards Pakistan cricket, even as he holds the presidency of the Asian Cricket Council, since January 2021. In October 2022, after being re-appointed BCCI secretary, one of Shah’s first announcements was that the 2023 Asia Cup, scheduled to be played in Pakistan, would be held at a neutral venue. “I am saying this as ACC President,” he clarified. “We can’t go there, they can’t come here. In the past also, the Asia Cup has been played at a neutral venue.” This was his first major statement as ACC president in over 22 months. The Pakistan Cricket Board lodged protests but eventually agreed to host a hybrid event. Only four of the 13 matches will be held in Pakistan, the rest in Sri Lanka, with the hosts only scheduled to play two games at home.
Shah will not be attending the formal PCB dinner in Lahore to kick off Asia Cup proceedings, with Binny and Shukla representing the BCCI. During the final of the 2022 Asia Cup, between Pakistan and Sri Lanka in Dubai, Shah was shown on television watching the match with other dignitaries, but the ACC president was not to be seen at the trophy ceremony.
Shah rarely works out of the BCCI’s Mumbai office, instead operating from his base in Ahmedabad. In the apex council meetings, online or in person, it is said that he takes everybody’s views and is respectful to all sides. “But, in the end,” one BCCI employee said, “he will do what he wants.” Information is kept under a tight lid, and there is perpetual grumbling and resentment across the board. In their many announcements and press releases, the BCCI states that “we authorise the office bearers to take a decision.” But, according to another board official I spoke to, “those decisions never come, or we are not told about them.” Most officials, he said, are “falling over themselves to say, ‘Wow, amazing, Jaybhai!’ in front of him.” But, when the enthusiasts leave the room, he added, the opinions are the opposite, “and I’m talking BJP people.”
When Ganguly was president, a BCCI staffer heard Shah instruct others to not pick up Ganguly’s phone. If Ganguly, speaking off the cuff, said a particular match or event would take place on a particular day, then it would have to be held the day before or after. The staffer added that most employees are nervous in Shah’s presence, looking over their shoulders, only talking to each other via WhatsApp. Shah does not want his media briefings recorded on video.
Today, nothing moves in the BCCI without Shah’s approval. “You’re waiting months to get things cleared,” another employee told me. This could be an invoice to approve the umpire’s hat-band sponsors or the 2023 World Cup schedule. “Imagine this happening in your office,” the BCCI staffer said. “Someone wants to borrow your stapler. You will have to write an email to your boss, asking if you can lend the stapler. Then you have to chase your boss around for months saying, ‘Sir, what about that stapler approval?’”
“No one says anything to contradict him because of his father, and all of them know that things are not going to change for the next five years,” a third BCCI employee said. At the ICC’s annual conference in Durban, members saw the unusual sight of the BCCI representative accompanied by bodyguards. Shah had on occasion two assistants at hand. “Someone is writing his email, someone is answering his phone,” a cricket official said. “He is like a kingdom unto himself.”
Meanwhile, efforts are underway to establish Shah’s identity as independent of his father’s influence. He is portrayed as a forward-thinking cricket administrator, a champion of women’s cricket with a genuine passion for the sport. BCCI’s public-relations agency, AdFactors, has a staffer dedicated to handling Shah’s media image. Shah did not respond to a list of questions sent to him.
In the ICC meetings, Shah “stops people and says, ‘No, no it is not done like that,’” the cricket official said. “He wants to be on every committee. He is treating everyone like he is the home minister of the ICC.” A former ICC official told me that earlier there used to be “a much better balance around the boardroom table, and it was a reflection of the calibre of the people at the time.” More than one member has described the current ICC as an “event management company.” In the words of the former ICC official, cricket’s global ruling body is “guided by whoever tells them what to do rather than doing what is right for the game, for the fans, for all its members.”
The delays around the World Cup organisation are proof of the ICC taking a backseat on its own event. “It is shocking” one member told me, “that the WC fixtures only came out only as recently as a couple of weeks ago. It is ludicrous. How do you expect a fan who wants to book and travel from somewhere else in the world make an experience out of his journey?”
In the past, heads of the ICC’s executive office clashed with BCCI officials around timelines, schedules and the quality of ground conditions for their events. The former ICC executive told me, “Of course we needed to stand up to the BCCI—so between the CEO and president or chairman, together with some people around the table they did what they had to do—and they challenged the BCCI and it was probably a better balance.”
What has skewed the balance is the BCCI’s seizure of a greater share of ICC revenues. It is being cited as Shah’s great global coup, whereas it is simply a continuation of a BCCI tactic set in motion by Srinivasan in 2013: aligning with England and Australia, the two other most profitable cricket boards, and pushing for a re-structuring of the ICC’s revenue share formula, and offering smaller nations handouts in exchange for their vote on the board table. The “Big Three proposal” was stalled for a few years, but was eventually pushed through, even as it saw pushback from some countries.
{FOUR}
IN THE LAST eighteen months, the announcement of every financial deal has come with great fanfare. The numbers astound and distract an audience already hypnotised by Indian cricket’s wealth. No questions are asked about where that money actually ends up once it has polished the IPL and the Indian national team—the BCCI’s two shiniest properties.
In June 2022, the BCCI announced a media rights deal for the IPL worth Rs 48,390.5 crore ($6.2 billion) for five years. Then, in July 2023, the ICC revised its revenue-distribution model among member nations, with the BCCI getting an even larger share. The ICC made no formal announcements about the real numbers but, in May 2023, the media reported that the BCCI will earn 38.4 percent—approximately $230 million, or Rs 1,863 crore—of the ICC’s annual earnings for the next four years. Other full member nations would receive single-digit percentages. The former ICC president Ehsan Mani told Forbes that the new model would be “giving the most money to the country that needs it the least.”
And here, in the country that needs it the least, even after accounting for the cost of running a colossal domestic cricket network with more than fifteen hundred matches every year, India’s cricketers find themselves at the back of the line when it comes to their share of the growing revenues. Even India’s wealthy double-income international stars, who reportedly earn eighteen percent of IPL revenues, are no match for the stars of the big international sporting leagues that IPL compares itself to in terms of per-match rights value and overall valuations. The Daily Telegraph noted that athletes in the three big US leagues—for baseball, basketball and American football—earned 48 percent of the leagues’ revenues, and that the wage bills of football clubs in the English Premier League account for 71 percent of revenues.
According to a cricket official in the IPL, of the around hundred and fifty Indians in the last IPL auction, 18 earned more than Rs 10 crore a season, with 76 others making more than Rs 1 crore. The Indian cricketers in the IPL, however, constitute fewer than eight percent of the entire Indian men’s cricket community. The majority of India’s domestic cricketers do not have these earnings. According to the Federation of International Cricketers Association’s 2022 men’s global professional employment report, there are 1,041 registered Indian men’s professional cricketers. (India does not recognise the FICA, and its only recognised players group, the Indian Cricketers Association, focusses solely on retired cricketers.) “The general public thinks Ranji Trophy cricketers make a lot of money, but nobody realises that it is not true,” a former BCCI administrator told me. “There is no security today for domestic cricketers. If he misses the season, his earning is zero.”
The BCCI’s numbers are not easy to track down either. The board stopped uploading its balance sheets to its website in 2017—in contravention of the Lodha recommendations. The head of a state association told me that the latest annual report, for 2021–22, was distributed to state association members the night before the BCCI’s annual general meeting on 18 October 2022. It was “like Christmas,” he said. The report was sent to the ICC as well, as a regulatory requirement. The BCCI sidestepped my request for the latest annual reports in the list of questions I sent them in July. When I reached out to an ICC representative, they responded that the report was “not ours to share.” I checked the website periodically for the results. At some point after 16 August, the BCCI website put out not the annual report but audited statements of the past five financial years. Newspaper reports about IPL earnings and other details from the audited accounts began to appear from 18 August. According to the 2021–22 BCCI balance sheet detailed in the document, the board’s net worth was Rs 23,159 crore, its annual income was Rs 4,360.56 crore and its total expenditure was Rs 1,668.96 crore.
The biggest chunk of its expenditure was Rs 840.23 crore, distributed among the 38 state associations. The second-largest expense item was Rs 629.11 crore, for “other cricketing activities,” which are explained as men’s senior and junior domestic tournaments, the National Cricket Academy, retainership fees for international players, gross domestic revenue share from the board’s income, consumption of cricket balls, medical treatment of players and umpires, and anti-doping curators, among others. A further Rs 30.25 crore is listed as having been spent on coaching.
For international player retainers and GRS, the sum allocated is Rs 124.11 crore. Retired player pensions account for an extra Rs 120.23 crore. Thus, the amount disbursed to both current and former members of the playing community stands at Rs 244.34 crore. Fees and daily allowance to players for men’s international tours and tournaments is Rs 59.13 crore. If we take just these figures, the disbursements constitute 6.5 percent of the BCCI’s total income of Rs 4,630.56 crore.
The revenue distribution labyrinth tells two stories: the lack of accountability from the states where the money is being regularly pumped and the strangely static BCCI player income for the majority of its players. As one of the most important sources and engines of the BCCI’s revenues, the cricketer, outside of the international stars and IPL big-ticket performers, receives a minimal share of the board’s wealth.
A domestic cricketer from an established Ranji Trophy team who has played regular first-class cricket in the IPL era sent me an Excel sheet of his match-fee earnings over his career, which has spanned more than a decade. On average, he made Rs 7.5 lakh a season. The most he had made from match fees in a year was less than Rs 14 lakh, while the least was under a lakh, for the cancelled 2020–21 season, in which domestic cricketers were given fifty percent of their match fees as compensation. In his first season, he made fifty thousand rupees more than he did in his latest season. In order to protect his identity, the figures here are rounded. Should exact sums be mentioned—mystifyingly, they vary from cricketer to cricketer—the cricketer believes he could be identified.
Even if one played every single domestic match and made it to every tournament final across formats in a single season, the cricketer said, they would have made no more than Rs 5 lakh more than he did—that, too, under the revised pay scale announced in September 2021. Raises in match fees have been slow and sporadic. When retainership contracts for international cricketers were introduced, in the 2004–05 season, the match fees for domestic cricketers participating in the Ranji Trophy increased from Rs 10,000 per day to Rs 16,000. When Zee announced its breakaway Indian Cricket League, in 2007, with a number of domestic cricketers jumping ship, the matchday fees went up to Rs 35,000 and the daily allowance increased from Rs 500 to Rs 1,500. The arrival of the IPL did not change the pay structure until 2021. A somewhat illusory pay hike was announced after fourteen years, a period during which the cost of living nearly doubled, under three different grades: Rs 60,000 per day for those who have played over forty matches, Rs 50,000 for those who have played between twenty and forty matches, or Rs 40,000 for those who have played fewer than forty matches.
“Even in an ordinary job, you will at least ask for a five to ten percent raise at least once every couple of years,” the domestic cricketer told me. “Early on, you’re happy, it’s spending money. You can buy a car earlier than your friend. But, when you’re a grown man with a wife and kid, to be earning the same amount” is not enough. A former India cricketer said that the match fees for domestic players should “at least account for inflation—ten percent every few years.”
If the match fees stayed the same for fourteen years, the BCCI’s gross revenue share—a portion of the board’s earnings is meant to be distributed among domestic cricketers—was a piece of bewildering accountancy. For example, if a cricketer played in 2016–17, a request for a GRS invoice with a random number could turn up in March 2019. This amount, the domestic cricketer told me, could be anywhere between Rs 75,000 and Rs 1.5 lakh per game. At best, he reckoned, the GRS could add around Rs 12 lakh to one’s earnings for the season. “We didn’t know how that amount was fixed,” he said. “It just came.” One season, however, he was asked to raise a GRS invoice for around seven thousand rupees. “I thought they’d missed a zero. I called another friend, an international cricketer, and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, mine is two hundred rupees less than yours.’”
Since 2004, the GRS has been BCCI’s most obstruse accounting trick, the result of the BCCI’s suddenly escalating earnings. Its origins lay in how the first BCCI player contracts came to be. On a 1997 tour of Sri Lanka, the Indian players, led by Anil Kumble and the tour manager, Ratnakar Shetty, explored the nuts and bolts of the Lankan cricketers’ graded payments system. They approached the BCCI to get Indian players on contracts, particularly as the board’s revenues from television rights were increasing rapidly. The first contract structure, pushed through in 2005, had a group of 25 leading India players who would be divided into three grades—with annual retainers of Rs 50 lakh, Rs 35 lakh and Rs 20 lakh, respectively—based on their performances. The playing eleven would be paid match fees of Rs 200,000 for a home test, Rs 240,000 for a Test abroad and Rs 185,000 for an ODI overseas. Other squad members earn half of the respective match fees.
Meanwhile, Cricket Australia was sharing 25 percent of all revenue, including tickets sales, with its players, international and domestic, working in collaboration with the Australian Cricketers Association. When the BCCI president at the time, Jagmohan Dalmiya, was asked what the BCCI’s gross revenue share would be for its players, he made sure to one-up the Australians and announced 26 percent. This figure, according to the former administrator, has remained the same ever since: 13 percent for international players, 10.4 percent for domestic cricketers and 2.6 percent in junior games.
However, the 26 percent does not translate directly to Rs 26 for every Rs 100 earned. Instead, this percentage represents a portion of the 30 percent of gross revenues that remains after 70 percent is channelled to the state associations. For every Rs 100 of revenue recorded by the BCCI, the GRS amounts to Rs 3.90 for all international cricketers, Rs 3.12 for all domestic cricketers and 78 paise for all juniors. And the pool that made up the Rs 100 in the first place has only kept shrinking.
After the IPL, as the BCCI’s gross revenue began to grow exponentially, the board, its office-bearers and electoral college of state association heads decided to redefine what constituted gross revenue. IPL earnings were immediately excluded from the GRS. As the ICC’s own media rights exploded, with the BCCI’s share rising, those earnings went out of the gross-revenue calculation too. Moreover, the BCCI’s production costs were also deducted from the GRS pool.
Players from two states associations confirmed to me that the last GRS earnings they received was for the 2017–18 season. A first-class cricketer said it had been “a few years” since he had received his GRS. Another said they had recently been “notified” that the next tranche was coming soon. It is evident that the BCCI accounts for GRS payments to states in its annual audits, but whether it reaches the players is not guaranteed. To my questions to the BCCI about this, the organisation responded, “There has been no deviation in the Gross Revenue Share and it remains a part of the player payment system. The information that it has been stopped is incorrect. There has been no change in the policy and the payments have been happening regularly. The GRS is paid to the players as per the decisions of the General Body.”
On 21 May 2017, Kumble, who was the India coach at the time, made a presentation that included a structural change to the player payment formula as well as to support-staff earnings. It was based on performance bonuses, for both international and domestic teams, as well as captains’ bonuses, as is the policy overseas. The aim was to bring Indian cricketers on par with their leading international counterparts with respect to a share of their board’s earnings and performance incentives, replacing the ad hoc policy of awards worth crores being handed out like largesse by a feudal board to its subjects. On 20 June, Kumble stepped down as coach after the Champions Trophy final, after rumours began circulating about differences with the captain, Virat Kohli, about his coaching methods.
In March 2018, according to the minutes of a CoA meeting, there was a resolution that “an earmarked fund called the new Player Revenue/ Compensation Equalisation Fund, (PR/ CEF) be created out of the consolidated surplus of the BCCI which fund be used for payment of players increased compensation/ payout.” Nothing has come of this.
One of Ganguly’s first announcements as BCCI president, on 29 October 2019, was the institution of “a contract system for first-class cricketers.” Asked about the possibility, a reporter told me that an office bearer said this was unlikely to happen since the players “are already making so much money, why should we give them more?” The promise of domestic contracts never came through. It is a telling comment of the BCCI’s worldview that it treats its playing community as commodities and the wealth generated by the players as its personal property.
“Whatever policies they make, there has to be some logic behind it,” a BCCI insider said. “Why do your international and domestic cricketers have two different grading systems? If you follow the BCCI grading for international cricketers, the grades are based on performances in the last season.” For domestic cricketers, however, “those who have played more than forty matches, they get Rs 60,000 a day no matter what. A newcomer who has played well for two seasons and is your star player for two seasons, because he has not even played twenty matches, he won’t be getting to Rs 50,000 a day. No one is there to ask these people. That’s why they get away with it.”
The reason domestic cricketers are at the back of the payout queue is because their salaries do not make for big news. Once the national stars are taken care of and the IPL continues to churn, the focus is well away from where the rest of the BCCI’s money ends up—particularly the 70 percent of its revenues that goes to the states.
THE BCCI ENCOMPASSES 38 active state associations and three non-playing members—the Cricket Club of India, the National Cricket Club of Kolkata and the Association of Universities—which collectively constitute its electoral college. Through their votes in the annual BCCI elections, state associations theoretically possess the authority to elect or remove the BCCI’s office-bearers. Historically, these elections were intense contests between prominent administrators, business figures, bureaucrats and politicians. However, more recently, they have transformed into placid platforms where individuals are often “unanimously” selected for office.
Keeping state associations happy used to be every BCCI’s president’s priority even two decades ago. This was done by awarding international matches, posts in the board’s dozens of committees—with generous allowances for attending meetings—and national-team managerships. But the arrival of television rights in the 1990s and the influx of IPL money have made the job simpler. No questions were raised either about the functioning of state associations or how their BCCI funds were spent. The state association’s share is not just about the quantum of money received by it, but in understanding how that money is used and how little of that information is public.
In 2015, the BCCI president, Shashank Manohar, asked the British firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu to conduct an audit of 27 state associations. “According to me, every association was paid an equal amount of money and, in spite of that, certain associations were in red,” he said. “It could not have been. So that is why I decided [to find out] what are these people doing with the money which has been paid to them.”
In his book The Commonwealth of Cricket: A Lifelong Love Affair with the Most Subtle and Sophisticated Game Known to Humankind, the historian Ramachandra Guha, who was on the CoA for four months, has written about meeting the Deloitte team. “The findings were so damaging, that they were suppressed,” he writes. “Invoking a confidentiality clause, Deloitte would not share the reports with us either; but they agreed to give an overview of what they found.” Guha took notes. “They had found all kinds of malfeasance in the state associations. Under ‘Cricketing Infrastructure,’ one association had bought as many as eighteen cars. Some maintained handwritten accounts … Flats had been bought for officials from BCCI funds. Reimbursements had been paid for travel on flights for routes which did not exist. In one case crops were still being grown on land transferred for the construction of a cricket stadium.”
The magazine Outlook reported that the associations left out of the audit exercise were Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. It also found that officials from the Jharkhand, Odisha, Assam, Gujarat and Goa associations did not cooperate fully with the auditors. Once the CoA’s term ended and BCCI officials took control of their board again, there was no desire to conduct a fresh audit.
The inclusion of a clutch of new teams into Indian cricket’s domestic framework, such as the seven north-eastern states and smaller union territories such as Puducherry and Chandigarh, has raised concerns about potential mismanagement of funds. Neeraj Kumar, the former head of the BCCI’s anti-corruption unit, dedicates a chapter of his memoir to the corruption issues surrounding the north-eastern states. He recounts instances such as the Arunachal Pradesh association conducting trials in Aligarh, illustrating how the eagerness to populate every new state’s junior teams with talented cricketers gave rise to a thriving racket for intermediaries. Families of young cricketers were coerced into giving money in exchange for assisting them in obtaining the necessary documents to prove their domicile and secure their participation. “The grant of full membership status to the north eastern states has unfortunately engendered a multicrore organised rackets involving middlemen, office bearers and coaches whose sole objective is to cheat youngster and their parents,” Kumar writes. He notes that a cricketer who represented India at the Under-19 World Cup is now both a professional player and kit supplier for his north-eastern team.
“To think that corruption in cricket means match and spot fixing alone is not to see the wood for the trees,” Kumar writes. “Fixing is a miniscule percentage of the large scale chicanery that cricket administrators indulge in. The handsome revenues earned by cricket in India are parcelled out where the money is mostly misappropriated.” The book lists a string of complaints made to the BCCI anti-corruption and security unit about money being extorted from young cricketers looking to play, somewhere, anywhere. “The state cricket associations, themselves dens of corruption and mismanagement, preside over district set ups where they appoint their own stooges … such nominees are usually relatives or employees of the big boss at the state association; they are placed in district only for their votes in state-level elections. No one knows whether state association share their grants they receive from BCCI every year with their district associations. If yes, how are they utilised, are there any accounts maintained? Is there any transparency in how coaching camps or selections are conducted? Who supervises them?”
It is not merely the newly minted cricket associations where there are rumours of cash for selection or financial impropriety. Junior cricket across the country is rife with cash-for-selection stories. At a recent meeting of the Mumbai Cricket Association, a warning went out to everyone down the line that complaints of the kind would be met with a swift and severe response, a member who was present at the meeting told me.
Until 1 August, there was no sign of the latest annual report or financial statements on the websites of the Cricket Association of Bengal, the Delhi and District Cricket Association, the Mumbai Cricket Association, the Gujarat Cricket Association and the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association. The MCA, the home association of the BCCI treasurer, last posted an annual report in 2017–18.
Kirti Azad wants to know why his home association, the blighted DDCA, cannot start its own academies with the money and grounds at its disposal. It is a question that applies to every state association that does not have one. “People in DDCA or in other associations are running their own academies and charging Rs 30–40k from a child every month,” he said. “In Delhi, every group has their own selector and they get their kids picked.” He said that the BCCI’s handouts to the state “are a mystery like the Bermuda triangle.”
The Cricket Association of Uttarakhand got official BCCI affiliation in August 2019 and, in less than four years, has racked up horrifying accounts of governance malpractice. A former co-convenor of women’s cricket for the CAU currently faces charges under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, having been accused of abuse by three minors. Its first treasurer, Prithvi Singh Negi, was removed when he made queries about the absence of accounts. Between 2019 and his dismissal, on 21 March 2021, Negi told me, he received no accounts of the CAU’s expenses. “No accounts were ever sent to me,” he said. “Instead, a false allegation was made that I don’t sign bills. My mandatory duty is that, when the bill comes on my table, I have to check the bills. And if there is a query or an objection, I have to say rectify this.” He added, “If a vendor’s PAN number is not on the invoice, I have to ask for it. I also need to see that who gave this vendor the work. Where did that come from? How has this person become a vendor?”
A month before Negi’s ouster, Wasim Jaffer resigned as the Uttarakhand coach, citing “interference and bias of selectors and secretary in the selection matters for non-deserving players.” After this, the CAU secretary, Mahim Verma, accused Jaffer of dividing the team with religious activities. Verma is the same official who has been charged with threatening an India under-19 player and trying to extort money from his father. In response to my questions about it, Verma responded that since the matter was subjudice he was not in a position to “divulge much into it, but so far as any allegations made against me regarding extorting money from players is incorrect and false in entirety and have been solely made to discredit my name and reputation.” The CAU is the same association whose Ranji Trophy cricketers were reportedly paid daily allowances of Rs 100 instead of Rs 1,500 and which ran up bills of Rs 35 lakh for bananas and Rs 22 lakh for water bottles.
On 3 August this year, the High Court of Uttarakhand listed a public-interest litigation complaining about “severe illegalities and irregularities in the working and management” of the CAU and its district associations. The PIL accused office-bearers and members of receiving kickbacks, misappropriating funds and ill-treating players. First-information reports have been filed against CAU officials and their associates for extortion in Dehradun, Gurgaon and Faridabad. “All the allegations made in the PIL are incorrect and devoid of any merit, such petitions filed are part of a sinister campaign against the association by some of the members of the association who are trying to damage the association and the growth of cricket in the state of Uttarakhand as they have lost the elections against the current office bearers of the association,” Verma said.
Seventy percent of the eye-watering sums of money that the BCCI keeps announcing is handed out to its states associations and often accounts for inexplicable or unaudited expenses, such as the CAU’s banana bill. In the CoA’s minutes, there is mention of a cogent fund-disbursement policy founded on the premise that the disbursement of BCCI funds to state associations should not be uniform but dependent on need, existing infrastructure and development programmes. The policy, meant to make states accountable to the BCCI, was summarily rejected at a BCCI special general meeting on 26 July 2017. Why would turkeys vote for Christmas? The states’ funding is the most fiercely protected of the BCCI’s money trails, guarded against either restructuring based on size of cricket demographic, need or independent assessment, and its beneficiaries remain invisible.
{FIVE}
IF THERE IS another “sunrise sector” in Indian cricket that is as full, if not more, of shadows as state associations, it is Jay Shah’s cause célèbre: women’s cricket. Following India’s final appearance in the 2017 Women’s World Cup, the women’s game has burst into wider public consciousness, and Shah wants to be seen as their torchbearer in the BCCI. In October 2022, within two weeks of being re-elected BCCI secretary, Shah announced equal match fees for India’s international men and women cricketers. It was followed by the Women’s Premier League, in March, in which BCCI offered salaries of the kind rarely seen in women’s team sports worldwide. In a detailed interview given to the Hindustan Times, Shah said he believed the pay parity was a “watershed moment in the history of Indian cricket” and that the WPL was the “second biggest cricket league in the world after IPL.” Based on WPL numbers—Rs 951 crore for a five-year media rights deal and player salaries higher than the 26-year-old WNBA—women’s cricket became a sunrise industry.
The stories outside the headline makers and their headline-making numbers are murky and frightening. This year, a special POCSO court in Dehradun heard a case against 65-year-old Narendra Shah, the CAU’s co-convenor of women’s cricket and secretary of the Chamoli District Cricket Association. A teenager accused him of sexual harassment, bullying and obscene phone calls. A conversation has been recorded. In the police complaint, the father of the complainant, who will turn 16 in September, said that Narendra Shah had been harassing her and touching her inappropriately for several years.
The FIR also accuses Narendra Shah of saying that the complainant would have to fulfil the physical needs of the CAU secretary, Mahim Verma, and the CAU member Dhiraj Bhandari, whose names he would often drop. It accuses Narendra of hurling casteist abuse towards the minor: “Tum log neech jati ke log ho, tumhe unchi jati ke logon ke saath rehne ka adhikar nahin hai, phir bhi main tumhe khila sakta hoon”—You belong to a lower caste and do not have the right to live with upper-caste people, but still I will give you the opportunity to play. Narendra was arrested briefly, but the police’s appeal for his remand was turned down by the magistrate, with Narendra citing ill health and a suicide attempt. This ruling is now being challenged. Narendra has been summoned before the court and has also been charged under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Verma, while refusing to comment on the matter because the case was subjudice, stated “as soon as the matter came to light, the Apex Council of CAU removed Mr. Narendra Shah from his position,” and that the matter was referred to an Internal Complaints Committee.
With the kind of wealth available in Indian cricket and the lack of safeguards, there is no estimating what a more accurate number of cricketers facing harassment by their superiors—coaches, selectors, officials—may be. Women cricketers who have left the game are able to draw a clearer picture, but on condition of revealing neither their names nor the states they represented.
One cricketer who represented her state for more than a decade was forced out of cricket for ignoring a coach who sought sexual favours from her in exchange for a spot in the playing eleven. The cricketer was picked for a series, told to prepare to play in a game the following day and then left out. This happened through the series, until, with one match to go, came the same instruction—be ready for tomorrow. At 10 pm the night before the last game, the coach called her to his room under a flimsy pretext. “We had heard about this guy but didn’t know what to believe,” she said.
The cricketer said there had been rumours and signs. During a state camp, before the series when the coach turned on her, a team of researchers had shown up at the ground to collect data about harassment in women’s sport. She recalled the coach’s reaction. “His face changed colour,” she said. “He alerted everyone that that you have to say nothing of this kind has happened—our association is very good, facilities are good.”
When the coach called for her that night, the cricketer switched off her mobile phone and put her room telephone off the hook. The next day, she sat out the game again and fell back into a frustrating cycle: playing for her district well enough to be picked for the state camp, “but not playing in matches—I just sat out, this happened for three years.” The head of her state’s women’s cricket committee was a man, also with a dubious reputation. “No one wants to come out and speak about it,” she said. “It’s not easy to fight this system, and then there’s your career. I kept quiet. I had a few years left I thought I should play.”
When she tried to find whether she could represent another state, she discovered, as do many young Indian junior cricketers, male or female, about another circle of corruption: not about sexual favours, but plain old cash for selection. “When I was trying to move to another state after getting an NOC from my own, I was told that it was Rs 5 lakh to play senior in another state. It’s about seven to ten lakhs today.” She added that her career feels incomplete, “I was waiting for WPL that it will be an opportunity for me but, when it came, I had to leave cricket. I feel very bad, but some things are not in the hands of players. We become helpless.”
Nothing of what stems from here is a twist of fate, where someone’s career is cut short by injury or a bad performance in a match where selectors were watching or the appearance of a talent greater than theirs. This, instead, is just an aspect of an institution whose former CEO Rahul Johri was let off on a sexual harassment charge but advised to attend gender sensitisation training.
When I asked the BCCI about the absence of an Internal Complaints Committee under the Prevention of Sexual Harrassment Act, which is a legal necessity, the response was generic. “The matter of adoption of the Posh Policy was taken as an agenda item in the special general meeting held on May 27, 2023, in Ahmedabad,” they wrote. “In the meeting, considering the sensitivity of the issue, it was decided that a committee comprising Mr. Devajit Saikia and Mr. Ashish Shelar be tasked with the responsibility of reviewing the draft POSH policy considering both of them are eminent lawyers by profession. Accordingly, the POSH policy has been sent to them for review and finalisation. They are currently in the process of finalising the POSH policy. It may be also be noted that BCCI is currently in the process of appointing the Internal Committee and the announcement regarding this will be made very soon.”
The sudden surge of women’s cricket in corrupt or badly functioning state associations has only made the positions of the minors entering junior cricket very vulnerable. The fact that the BCCI has not yet enacted a POSH-mandated committee of its own nor brings down the hammer on cases where its state-level officials are accused of harassment, intimidation and bullying continues to give the perpetrators greater power.
BETWEEN THE ANNOUNCEMENTS of the IPL deal and the updated distribution system of ICC revenues lay several alerts. Beyond media rights, all Team India sponsorship agreements seemed to be undergoing a “course correction.” From November 2022, there has been a noticeable reduction in the valuations of certain Indian cricket assets. With the BCCI’s sponsorships around team kit, team jersey and series title sponsorships, old partners are bailing out, and new short-term deals are being signed.
In the last five years, the Indian team has had three shirt sponsors. In March 2017, Oppo pledged Rs 1,079 crore for a five-year deal with the BCCI. In 2019, Oppo withdrew from the arrangement and was succeeded by Byju’s under the same terms. The education-technology firm Byju’s initially renewed and extended its contract, in June 2022, for an additional 18 months, but reversed its decision six months later, asking for an immediate out. Subsequently, the BCCI initiated a search for a new jersey sponsor, setting the base price at “a 40 percent discount”—Rs 358 crore—from Oppo’s winning bid in 2017, in which Oppo had reportedly committed to paying Rs 4.61 crore per match. Among the two bidders in 2022, Dream11, the biggest fantasy gaming platform in India, emerged as the BCCI’s official jersey sponsor, reportedly agreeing to the base price. This means that Dream11 will contribute Rs 3 crore for each match featuring India.
There have also been changes in the world of official kit and merchandise sponsors—that is, companies that design, manufacture and sell all manner of Team India jerseys. Indian cricket has seen three changes in two years, reported in detail in Signal’s sports business newsletter Playbook. In the second half of 2020, Nike, BCCI’s official kit sponsor since 2006, chose not to renew its annual Rs 370 crore ($50 million) contract. The board signed a three-year deal with MPL Sports, which had never before worked in sports apparel, in November 2020. After this agreement was terminated by the end of 2022, a company called Kewal Kiran Clothing Ltd, the manufacturer of Killer Jeans, stepped in for a five-month period. The new logo first appeared on the India cricketer Yuzvendra Chahal’s Twitter feed, with KKCL making a media announcement two matches after the Indian team had already played in shirts bearing their logos. In May 2023, Jay Shah chose to announce on his Twitter handle that Adidas had signed on as the BCCI’s official kit and merchandise sponsor, for a deal meant to run until March 2028. While figures are being kept confidential, reports in the Economic Times have stated that Adidas will be paying Rs 75 lakh per match, less than Nike’s Rs 88 lakh per match.
Another of the BCCI’s long-standing sponsors, PayTM, which holds the title rights for India’s home series, signed successive deals, for Rs 2.4 crore per match between 2015 and 2019, and then for Rs 3.8 crore per match between 2019 and 2023. Paytm pulled out of the deal nine months before it ended. The title rights were transferred to Mastercard between September 2022 and March 2023. On 2 August this year, the BCCI began looking for a new title sponsor, with a base price of Rs 2.4 crore per match, the same figure it agreed to eight years ago. On 25 August, it announced IDFC First as its new title sponsor for all men’s and women’s internationals, as well as for domestic and junior cricket. No figures were made public on the official announcement, but reports estimated it to be between Rs 4.2 crore and Rs 6.6 crore per international match.
While these fluctuating deals are very much part of a changing economic landscape, where previously cash-rich education and fin-tech start-ups are being forced to realign their investment strategies, the BCCI’s reduction of base prices and changing sponsorship commitments indicates two other factors: the market is adjusting what it sees as the real value of India’s international cricket as well as to the presence of a different kind of sponsor ready to put in serious financial commitment into Indian cricket. In the example of both MPL Sports and Dream11, we find in the two rival fantasy gaming companies a new species of cricketing cash barons. However, the government’s recent announcement of a 28-percent goods and services tax on esports and online gaming is expected to cut into their profits. The shiny new contracts are suddenly walking down uncertain routes.
“At this moment my gut feel is that BCCI is one incident away from possibly the most difficult scandal in its history,” a board official said. He was referring to issues around fixing scandals in state T20 leagues or around the presence of fantasy cricket in BCCI partnerships. These could once again, like the IPL corruption scandal, become an image-management exercise for Indian cricket. But the BCCI has pushed its way past that before, focussing on its national team and continuing to push the IPL. Today, while the surface of Indian cricket continues to gleam, it is the levels below the shining where there is a more rank festering—caused by politics, money, power, access and exploitation.
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