The porkers at the five-star trough have taken a strategic time-out from feeding. They’ve raised their snouts from superior swill, the better to bite the hand that fed them. The real spectacle of the last fortnight wasn’t the sorry cricket served up by IPL 3.0, nor even Lalit Modi’s fall from grace, but the sight of supple stakeholder pigs turning on a dime. News channels that gloried in partnering IPL franchises, Modi’s henchmen at the BCCI, the hitherto house-trained members of the IPL’s governing council, have rediscovered reporting, re-grown spines and unearthed scruples; these pigs have wings.

The seamless transition from being Modi’s creatures to becoming his critics and the willingness of journalists, commentators and anchors to buy into this new narrative of Wicked Modi and the Duped Establishment tell us something about the damage that the IPL has done to Indian cricket.

Notice that every criticism of Modi is qualified by praise for his creation. The IPL, we’re told, is a great ‘property’ and the way to fix the mess is to have the BCCI or the governing council or the tycoons who own the franchises take over its governance.

It’s worth pointing out that the WWF is a great television property too. It is also wrestling as showbiz and, ultimately, as charade. I don’t mean to imply that the IPL’s matches were fixed; there’s no evidence to suggest that. Dhoni’s victory celebration in the semi-final match against the the Deccan Chargers and Tendulkar’s willingness to play with an injured hand testify to a genuinely competitive tournament.

But once you define Twenty20 cricket and the IPL as a form of showbiz — the cheerleaders, the gold-trim uniforms, the filmstar owners, the mid-over commercials, the commercial crassness of the strategic time-out, the stadiums wall-papered with advertising — its main justification becomes the money that makes it a gilded marvel. When the buzz about a game becomes its success in monetizing everything from post-match parties (where guests pay 40,000 rupees a pop to mingle with tired players) to sponsored sixes, what you’re seeing is cricket’s transformation from one sort of heavenly body into another: from a sun that burns with its own fire to a planet that preens in the reflected glory of money.

And is money a bad thing in an era of professional sport? The short answer is no: more money in cricket is a good thing provided that the process of professionalization is responsibly managed. That means making changes conservatively and, crucially, resisting the impulse to trade in the integrity of the game for revenue.

Take football: television channels have been campaigning for decades to divide football into four quarters instead of two halves to make more time for commercials. But football’s administrators have consistently refused on the ground that this would change the nature of the contest. And this despite the fact that football with its continuous flow has no natural interruptions for commercials unlike cricket which gives the broadcaster a commercial break at the end of every over. And yet India’s cricket authorities allow television channels to air commercials that encroach upon actual play and, in this edition of the IPL, to run commercials between the individual deliveries of a single over.

Forget other sports; look at the difference between Set Max’s telecast of the IPL and Channel 9’s coverage of cricket in Australia. Channel 9 is technically innovative, happy to sell individual bits of cricketing merchandise like signed bats and team photos, but respectful of the rhythms of the game. Set Max chops the natural unit of cricket, an over, into little bits, shrinks the screen to allow ads along the margins in the course of play and introduces the zooming, distorting perspectives of an overhead ‘spider-cam’ notable mainly for its trick of making live cricket look and feel like a video game.

Can you imagine Fifa placing its biggest bets on seven-a-side football? Or the USPGA hustling the Augusta National Golf Club into scrapping the Masters and replacing it with a six hole Pro-Am tournament, which then becomes the centre-piece of America’s golfing calendar? Or the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club deciding that it would woo a mass audience of young teens and daytime soap watchers by making Wimbledon a single set tournament played on astro turf by players dressed in gold lamé shorts?

Of course you can’t. But you don’t have to stretch your imagination in the case of cricket because that is, in fact, what the BCCI has done to the game. The IPL under Modi made it clear that it wanted larger ‘windows’ in cricket’s calendar for this mickey-mouse version of the game and the BCCI was happy to let the Indian team’s test match calendar shrink into near-nothingness. (I wanted to laugh when Pataudi said that the IPL’s revenues would help prop up test cricket: you can’t help test cricket when you don’t play test matches.) We can’t put this down to Modi vs the Good Guys: there are no good guys in the BCCI; the whole cricketing establishment, starting with Sharad Pawar, was complicit in this Disneyfication of cricket.

It’s worth remembering that international tennis and golf attend closely to the bottom line, the market and the natural appetite of players for money: Wimbledon’s winners will make a million pounds each this year and Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson don’t play golf for love. The difference between the establishments of tennis, football and golf on the one hand and the Indian cricket establishment on the other is that the first three have an understanding of their sports that transcends money while the BCCI doesn’t. They’re acutely aware of the fact that history and continuity are critical to a game’s sense of itself, that without them, in the long term, there’s no game left to sell.

Modi and Pawar and Dalmiya are all operators of one sort or another; it’s unfair, almost, to expect them to love the game for itself. But here’s the really bad news: the people who you would expect to have this transcendent sense of the game were so coopted by this carnival of greed and vulgarity that they did nothing to prevent the IPL from becoming monstrous. Sunil Gavaskar and Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, charter immortals both, served on the IPL’s governing council and never once raised the alarm or asked an inconvenient question. By Pataudi’s own admission in a television interview, he was so taken with the IPL’s success that he and the other governing council members ignored conflicts of interest, allegations of corruption and murmurings about Modi.

In effect, Modi used Pataudi and Gavaskar; he used them in much the same way as the proprietor of a dodgy business might cajole famous men on to his board of directors. By serving as mantelpiece ornaments and seeing and saying nothing, they made the IPL respectable. In the course of his interview with Barkha Dutt, Pataudi was disarmingly frank about having been asleep at the wheel and he regretted, more than once, his inaction. His contrition might have sounded more persuasive if it had been accompanied by his resignation. A governing council that exercises no oversight should either dissolve itself or be dismissed.

It has become something of an orthodoxy in newly liberalized India to maintain that the government ought not to step in to sort out a mess like the IPL because State intervention makes bad things worse. This is often true, but given the complicity of everyone in Indian cricket in the IPL’s murk — from coopted immortals to sham-honorary administrators to gelded commentators — a process of reform from within is unlikely. Pigs don’t fly in this dimension.

Instead of taking over the BCCI, the government of India should appoint a Grand Inquisitor whose sole purpose ought to be to terrorize the BCCI into purging itself and its spawn, the IPL, of evil. At worst this might result in a constructive downsizing of the IPL; at best, if the GI is properly inept, the patient might die. For right-thinking people who love cricket, this has to count as a win-win solution.