As Cricket Grew in India, Corruption Followed

The Chennai Super Kings celebrated on April 25 after winning the finals of the Indian Premier League. Indian cricket is a $4 billion business.

By JIM YARDLEY
NYT

NEW DELHI — Founded three seasons ago, the Indian Premier League managed to make the sport of cricket sexy. India’s corporate titans bought teams, Bollywood stars infused matches with celebrity glamour and fans from Mumbai to Dubai to New Jersey followed the league on television as its value rose to more than $4 billion.

For many Indians, the league, known as the I.P.L., became a symbol of a newly dynamic and confident India that was expanding its influence in the world. Yet after weeks of allegations of graft and financial malfeasance, the resignation of a government minister and the suspension of the league’s charismatic commissioner, the league has become emblematic of something else: how much the old and often corrupt political and business elite still dominates the country.

“The great pity in India is that creations like the I.P.L. became a victim of their own success,” the editor in chief of the magazine India Today, Aroon Purie, wrote this month. “Where there is money involved, especially large sums, corruption is not far behind.”

Cricket may befuddle much of the world, but the sport is an obsession in India, which is one reason the cricket scandal — dubbed I.P.L. Gate by the Indian news media — has assumed such import. Government tax examiners have confiscated accounting records, and the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the sport’s regulatory body, is expected to hold a pivotal hearing in coming days for the league’s suspended commissioner, Lalit Kumar Modi.

(More here.)