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A district judge in West Bengal recently sentenced 20 men to life imprisonment for murders committed 29 years ago. Accused and victims were humble folk; but the appeal hearings can drag on for another 20 years. As that sympathetic civil servant, Penderel Moon, observed, far from being protected by English law, Indians “had perverted it and been perverted by it.”
Thanks to this double perversion, justice is never swift and seldom effective, which largely explains the scandals in which the Indian Premier League and Board of Control for Cricket in India (each being responsible for the other’s actions) are enmeshed. However idealistic a view one takes of human nature, no society keeps to the straight and narrow without the compulsion of a deterrent. But India’s “network of the rich, famous and influential” (to borrow Lalit Modi’s father’s admiring term for his son’s cronies) hold the judicial process and its supposedly awesome paraphernalia of police, courtroom, lawyers, witnesses, judges and penalties in contempt.
This is not to criticize the T20 series as such. Or to belittle the importance of generating wealth. If sharp operators are making money in their name, cricketers, too, are earning as never before. New sports facilities are sprouting up. The media is in a frenzy. It’s a bonanza for the entertainment, hospitality and advertising industries. Millions of people are entranced by the razzmatazz of the greatest show on earth. The government rakes in enough revenue to finance its social welfare programmes. The partying and dancing girls may outrage prudes but are no more vulgar than Bollywood’s suggestive cavorting that audiences lap up. Revealingly, this tamasha started with a Twitter tweet, signifying the elite’s hi-tech cosmopolitanism.
It must also be admitted that much that is talked about censoriously is not strictly illegal. No law forbids a franchise holder’s friends and relatives from acquiring shares. Mauritius is a legitimate tax haven and respectable investments, like the abortive $846-million Tata-Singapore International Airlines bid for a domestic airline, also choose that route. All fliers know that a ticket’s face value rarely matches the price paid. The BCCI is entitled to suspend its own rules to benefit its own executives. Sweat equity does exist, though it doesn’t quite mean a cut or bribe.
Why then grumble about the IPL tournament? Because this titillating mix of money, politics, sleaze and sex in the name of sport is all that globalization means for the New Class that has emerged from the swathes of socialist cotton wool that suppressed our true instincts all these years. Because cutting corners, making a fast buck (as the Americans say), is transforming India into another banana republic sucked into the international underworld whose governance will be up for grabs unless the rot is arrested. The licence-permit raj was blamed on shortages created by socialism. But the distribution of contracts, mining rights and spectrum licences demonstrates that the problems of scarcity are also the problems of plenty.
Recalling Tehelka’s revelations and American complaints that the officials sent to collect Rajiv Gandhi’s Cray computer demanded a cut, one wonders about the biggest-ever Indo-US defence deal now being finalized. Or the Commonwealth Games. For every jailed Madhu Koda, hundreds must be lording it over you and me. All this is of a piece with usual business and political practice. Salman Khurshid’s claim that no sweat equity was paid by squeaky clean franchise holders is like a Bollywood star stumbling over the word ‘benami’ in a television programme because, unbelievably, she didn’t know the pronunciation or meaning.
Transparency International’s 2006 global corruption report calculated that it would take India’s 670 judges 350 years to clear a monumental backlog of more than 30,000 cases in the Supreme Court and over three million lower down. P.D. Dinakaran’s defiance hasn’t enhanced the judiciary’s reputation. Transparency International’s report probably erred on the side of conservatism when claiming that one out of three Indians who go to court have to resort to bribery. The figure might even be three out of three if built-in gratification or lawyers’ insistence on cash payment are included. “The pleaders have no regard for truth” was Charles Metcalfe’s harsh summing up. With extensive administrative experience behind him before acting as governor-general (1835-36), he saw the courts as “scenes of great corruption” with the judge sitting “in the midst of a general conspiracy”. “Everyone is labouring to deceive him and to thwart his desire for justice.”
Like Warren Hastings and Macaulay, Metcalfe was convinced that the English system’s formal courts, Bar, codes of law and rules of evidence had proved disastrous here. “All the injustice of former oppressors, Asiatic and European, appeared as a blessing when compared with the justice of the Supreme Court” was Macaulay’s devastating indictment. For Moon, courts were “a sham and a mockery in which police, witnesses, lawyers and judges all played their part in producing or using evidence which they knew to be quite false”. Courts had become the means of “harassing, imprisoning and even hanging one’s enemies”. Echoing their scepticism, Jaipal Reddy says the Supreme Court’s collegium system is riddled with nepotism and corruption. But it’s the best we have until the rural courts and fast-track tribunals planned under the Gram Nyayalaya Act make at least the lower judiciary less of an obstruction to justice.
A parliamentary investigation reeks of political opportunism. Commissions of inquiry only shelve problems. Institutional innovations like an independent investigation arm, tax return checks and proper audit would be at the mercy of the same flawed human agencies unless backed meaningfully by the law. Looking for an expert’s prescription, I turned to the Cricinfo cricket website and found its executive editor, Jayaditya Gupta, invoking a vision paper (“The cricket board in the 21st century”) that the BCCI circulated in December 2005 in its quest for “a transparent method” of selling television rights. The board is no nearer finding it five years later. Nor will it ever, unless the law forces it to under pain of punishment.
Outbursts of political indignation and visibly frantic activity by the tax enforcement agencies will not disclose more than we know about, say, the mystery of Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala, the former army captain who impersonated the prime minister on the telephone to extract Rs 60 lakhs from the State Bank of India. Nagarwala took his secret to the grave or, rather, the vultures; the police officer investigating the case was run over by a police car and killed. One head will surely roll this time, but the galaxy of politicians, tycoons, operators, stars and cricketers cannot all be polished off.
An aside: the affair should have bowled out the Tebbit test. Readers will recall the gnashing of immigrant teeth in Britain when Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers, decreed that loyalty was evident from which team people cheered. What loyalty can teams that belong to Preity Zinta or Mukesh Ambani command? Or expensively-bought global players advertising Indian Cement or the Deccan Chronicle? Loyalty in this context recalls a diehard Protestant saying during the communal-political disturbances in Belfast that Catholics were not loyal to the Crown but the half-crown, as the two-and-a-half shilling coin was called in those days. Bookies will say the incentive remains the same. Off-field antics probably add to the excitement. People are impressed by an individual’s ability to flout the law and get away with it.
Even if the IPL introduces a “fit and proper person test” like the English Premier League on which it was modelled, it will command little respect without the ultimate sanction of the law. As the reversal of the Jessica Lal murder verdict showed, that is not beyond India’s competence. A strong and impartial judiciary is a nation’s backbone. Nothing composes the mind of the “network of the rich, famous and influential” so much as the prospect of prison.
