The iceberg formula

As more muck emerges from the Modi-Tharoor brouhaha, many people are asking this question: can cricket survive this kind of blatant skulduggery, cronyism and sleaze?

It’s the wrong question to ask in the Indian context. India is the global headquarters of crony capitalism, and adding cricket to the equation does not make things any different.

Let’s face it. We have many laws on our statute book, but no Indian businessman has succeeded by sticking to the straight and narrow. We read the rulebooks to see how we can get around them. The Indian Premier League (IPL) has gloriously stuck to the script of mixing business, politics, dubious practices, favouritism and funny money to hit the big time. Since success is its own justification, muck-raking will not do much to dent it.

It is best to see the IPL as an iceberg. What you see — entertaining, slam-bang cricket — is only 10% of the reality. Below the surface there is a terrific marketing machine, a giant funding funnel, and extraordinary political and lobbying muscle that makes it all work. The cricketainment works because the subterranean machinery delivers — and not the other way around.

So people who ask what will happen to cricket, saintly cricket, because of those ‘sinners’ in IPL are barking up the wrong tree. Take any one element out of the IPL equation and what you would have is a moderately chugging enterprise. You only have to look at how hockey and football are faring to know what would happen to cricket without the funny money fuelling it.

If the IPL has gatecrashed into the top five sports business franchises in the world it’s because it has put its crony capitalism network to good use. And if we find a Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) fighting its own offspring — the IPL and Lalit Modi — it’s because the latter have been too successful, and not because they have used rough and ready methods to get there. Everyone wants to hop onto the gravy train.

This is also the reason why the bloodletting won’t go too far, whatever may be Modi’s fate in the short-run. There is simply too much at stake for too many people for anyone to really want to destroy the IPL.

The iceberg structure of the IPL is, in fact, the real Indian success formula, whether you are a politician, a businessman, a criminal or even a religious organisation. What differentiates one from the other is what they choose to put on show above the water’s surface. In IPL’s case cricket is the icing, while the tricky business goes on underneath.

This is true for any business. For example, you may see a real estate business at eye level. But its success depends on inputs like political lobbying, financial legerdemain, and an arm’s length relationship with bureaucratic sleazeballs and criminal elements.

If you are Dawood Ibrahim, what you see is a criminal on top. But Dawood and Chhota Rajan are also running multinational businesses — some legit, others illegit — and private law enforcement agencies whose writ runs with sections of the business, bureaucracy and ordinary people.

Businessmen who sometimes cannot sort out their less-than-legal businesses ask the underworld dons for help — and they get it at a price.

As for politicians, they cannot get elected without an underlying business to support them — whether it is land speculation or commissions on contracts or a media empire.

The iceberg model is what keeps the government running, too — though government being government, it can legalise its own wrongdoings.

For example, the UPA government fudges its budget accounts by pretending that some kinds of borrowings aren’t borrowing (oil bonds). It prints notes to pay off its debt, but when Pakistan does the same at its expense and dumps lookalike currency notes in India we call it economic subversion or terrorism. Both counterfeits and excess currency printing cause economic damage, but we choose to call only the former illegal.

The unwritten law of success in India is that you need to be part of a club to succeed. The club will try to keep unwelcome outsiders from helping themselves to easy money — till the outsider can demonstrate he has as much power as the club members. The late Dhirubhai Ambani was considered an interloper by Marwari stockbrokers in Mumbai when he first started playing the markets.

They tried to destroy him by ganging up against his trades; it was only when he comprehensively defeated them at their own game that he was accepted grudgingly into the club. He went on to create the country’s equity cult. This is what the Kochi IPL team should have known before it decided to do its own gatecrashing. Now that it has, it can rest assured that it will gain grudging acceptance.

The bottomline is this: while success is the result of hard work, hypersuccess needs different methods. Look below the surface and behind every successful big businessman you will find a robber baron. And vice-versa.