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By Sayantan Chakravarty

With the arrest of bookmaker Rajesh Kalra on April 7, Delhi Police blew the lid on a match-fixing scandal that stunned the cricket world as much as it has confused it. Over the following week Hansie Cronje, South Africa captain, has admitted to a vague guilt and resigned. The entire truth remains untold -- and is still far from seeing the light of day. Swirling in every cricket lover's mind is a series of questions. Some can be answered by the transcripts of the phone conversations Cronje had with his associates from the bookie-fixer realm. Others are still in the hazy area between speculation and unconfirmed or semi-confirmed information. The ultimate revelations are, of course, the job of a police agency. What is patently clear though is that the bookie-cricketer nexus is far s tronger than imagined. What follows is a sample of what Cronje said -- and much else that so far remained unsaid.

WHY WAS CRONJE'S PHONE TAPPED?
It's a date Ishwar Singh remembers well -- June 26, 1999. "It's easy to remember you see," he grins, "just six days after the World Cup final." It was the day Singh, 40, a cricket buff otherwise employed as inspector, anti-extortion cell, Crime Branch, Delhi Police, found himself handling a new case. The chairman and senior executives of the Apollo Tyres Group were receiving extortion threats. It was Singh's job to sift through his database of 150 extortion kingpins -- the cream of the south Asian underworld spread across India and the United Arab Emirates -- and trace the culprits. Singh had with him numbers of the mobile phones used by the extortionists. He matched them with the numbers staring at him from the computer screen. They belonged to the very phones being used to threaten Kishan Kumar, failed filmstar and member of the family that runs the T-Series Group. The extortion specialists had to be nailed. So, unknown to Kumar, his calls were kept under observation. His conversations were not taped but a record of the numbers he communicated with was kept and scrutinised.

By late February this year, Singh zeroed in on two numbers that were in regular touch with Kumar. One of the numbers (98110-58994) was that of Sanjeev Chawla, who runs a garments and cheap fashion accessories store called Toro on London's Oxford Street. Chawla, who moved to Britain in the early 1990s, was then in Delhi visiting his parents.

The other caller was Rajesh Kalra (98110-58142), Lipeescan printing press owner-cum-illegal bookmaker who was also Kumar's neighbour in Delhi's Greater Kailash area. Interestingly, it later turned out that Chawla and Kalra had exchanged phones and were using each other's numbers. Intrigued by the frequency of the calls and sensing "something big" Singh applied for permission to tap these phones.

The clearance came through in early March. The first call from Chawla to Kumar revealed nothing about an extortion threat but something quite different. "Matters have been settled with Hansie Cronje," Chawla told Kumar, "... there was big money to be made."

On March 14, Chawla's phone made contact with a guest at the Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi -- and Singh's ears pricked up. It was Chawla who spoke first, "Hi Hansie ..." Singh still can't believe it, "It was incredible. Within a couple of seconds the South African captain was responding like he'd known the caller (Chawla) for long."
Cricket's most inglorious conversation had begun.

WHAT WAS THE DEAL? AND WHO WERE THE DEALMAKERS?
According to a report published in an Australian newspaper, Cronje announced at a team meeting during the tour of India, "I've got some good news. I've been given a mobile phone we could make free calls on. A bloke just said, 'Call who you like'." Apparently, his mates cheered. Cronje had been given the roaming phone (98102-94943) by Chawla on March 15. It was used to contact him as he travelled the country.

There was, however, a fourth person who squared the circle. Both Chawla and Cronje spoke regularly to a mysterious figure in South Africa -- tentatively identified in some newspaper reports as Hamid "Banjo" Cassim, a Johannesburg businessman of Indian descent and apparently a good friend of Cronje. Cassim, or whoever was being spoken to, was referred to by Chawla as "Sir". Cronje spoke to him only in his native Afrikaans. This man is believed to be the recipient of the Cronje bribes and put them away in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

Obviously all negotiations centred on two things -- what course the match would take and the payment route. For instance, on March 14, on the eve of the match in Faridabad, Cronje agrees that Herschelle Gibbs will score less than 20. The next morning, he gets out for 19, having survived two chances in his short, 29-ball innings.

Not everything was as smooth. Chawla and Kalra quarrelled bitterly -- so Kalra has confessed -- after South Africa scored 301 in the first match in Kochi on March 9. It apparently altered the "match script" of "240-250 runs" and caused huge losses to the Kalra-Kumar bookie ring.

On March 15, Chawla took Aeroflot flight SU 550 to Moscow en route to London. On March 16, he called up Cronje again, assuring him "Sir" had been paid "60" (probably Rs 60 lakh). Unimpressed, Cronje complained his players were angry because of payment delays. Chawla promised to deposit "140" (probably Rs 1.4 crore). On March 18, a day before the Nagpur match, Cronje promised Chawla he'd open the bowling with off-spinner Derek Crookes. The next morning Crookes duly got the new ball.

The police have eight tapes of conversations between Cronje, Chawla, Kumar, Kalra and others on March 14, March 16 and March 18. Cronje and Chawla spoke to each other at least five times a day, including one call made at 6.34 on the morning of the Nagpur match of March 19.

Clinching evidence of their complicity comes in two forms. One, the telephone records of the Taj Presidency, Kochi, for March 8 show that two guests, Chawla and Cronje, made calls to the same number in South Africa. Two, at 7.40 p.m. on March 15, Cronje received a call from a Delhi number (6919472) registered in the name of Pravesh Dhawan of Lajpat Nagar. A few hours later, at 1.19 a.m., Chawla received a call from 6915267, registered in the name of Jatin Dhawan of the same Lajpat Nagar address.
So Cronje and Chawla were certainly part of the same circle.

HOW WIDESPREAD IS FIXING?
Avinash Sharma (Name changed on request), an NRI businessman currently visiting India, has an interesting story to tell. He goes back, like Ishwar Singh does, to June 1999, to the eve of the India-Pakistan match in the World Cup. Sharma was seated in the company of a well-known Indian bookie, who runs a restaurant in Delhi's Vasant Vihar suburb, and heard his friend speak to captains Mohammed Azharuddin and Wasim Akram on the phone. Having done so, the restaurateur turned to Sharma and said, "It's fixed. India will win. Put your money on India."

The next day India did win. Coincidence -- or design? The point is, after the Cronje scandal, cricket fans will believe anything. Suddenly, so much is under a cloud. One BCCI official says that India's decision not to effect a follow-on after scoring 583 and dismissing New Zealand for 308 at Ahmedabad in 1999 was guided by bookie considerations. Sunil Dev, former Indian manager and a firm doubting Thomas, says, "I have rubbed my eyes a few times in the past to figure out what's been going on in the field. Things have happened which can only be described as ridiculous. The public has been fooled."

Bookies India Today spoke to offered a more complex explanation. "Only 3 or 4 per cent of the matches are actually fixed," said one. He refers to those matches the final result of which are pre-decided. The bulk of the betting is (see graphic), however, on ancillary wagers -- spread betting or side betting as the terms go. In theory, there are infinite bets possible: who will win the toss? Will a batsman not out overnight on 98 reach his hundred? How many boundaries will be hit in the first five overs? You name it.

Coming back to the World Cup, bookies insist the only match fixed was the one in which Bangladesh defeated Pakistan -- and that too allegedly "because Akram's brother had bet a heavy sum at Ladbrokes on Bangladesh".
Oh these conspiracy theories.

ARE INDIAN CRICKETERS INVOLVED?
Despite allegations that the Cronje tapes contain references to "an Indian player whose name begins with A but is undecipherable in the recording", the police is so far mum on the local angle. A Delhi Police official assured BCCI chief A.C. Muthiah that there was no evidence to link Indian cricketers to the match-fixing scandal. Only, Cassim is supposed to be a "good friend" of two former Indian captains.

Insiders in the bookie business say the Indian team is the "most difficult to fix". This is no tribute to honesty though, and a bookie explains why: "To fix a match, pre-decide the result, you need to bribe a whole team. Or at least seven or eight players. The Pakistani, South African and Australian teams have that sort of unity. Not the Indians. Here it's each man for himself." In short, every player cuts his own deals. This is why bookies dealing with the Indian team say they prefer ancillary fixing -- bribing for individual performances. There is the famous story from the Cape Town Test of 1997, when an Indian batsman, having hit a savage 100, tapped the ball to slip, walked off for a run and simply continued to the pavilion without looking back. A team official on that tour says, "There was something fishy about the way he ran. It was a single even a schoolboy wouldn't attempt."

The bookie-cricketer nexus is one of Indian cricket's open secrets. It has spawned a black economy and, more visibly, a very imaginative sense of semiotics. You didn't have to hunt for clues with one former Test allrounder. Every time he bent down to tie his shoelaces during an over, bookies suggest, he was actually telling his accomplices that he was going to get hit for a four. It was also a signal for the captain to set the field accordingly.

Mumbai has a strong network of some 150 bookies. Delhi has some 50, say police sources, "10 of them being really big, in the match-fixing league". Together, they wager about Rs 100 crore per one-day match, irrespective of who plays where. Of course, no bets were accepted for the April 12 Pakistan-West Indies and South Africa-Australia matches because "phones are now tapped, you know". In time it'll be business as usual; at least the bookies are sure.

WILL CRONJE BE JAILED?
The FIR filed in the Cronje case is a fairly bulky document, containing 16 pages of transcripts. The former South African captain faces charges under Sections 420 (cheating) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code. The maximum punishment is imprisonment for seven years. Since India has no extradition treaty with South Africa, Pretoria says any request to send him to Delhi for trial would be followed up by a magisterial inquiry in that country. In a nutshell, Cronje isn't expected to formally stand before an Indian judge. Says Ashok Arora, a well-known criminal lawyer in Delhi: "The absence of an extradition treaty makes things difficult. But Cronje has implicated himself with his confession." His co-conspirators haven't been as obliging. Kishan Kumar, confined to a hospital bed in Noida, has denied everything apart from a "friendship" with Chawla and Kalra. Chawla's lawyers have denied his "involvement in allegations of match-rigging" or that he has ever met Cronje or spoken to him.

In Delhi, Ishwar Singh is a harassed man. His wife, fashion designer Santosh Singh, says she's barely seen him for a month. His cell phone and land line are perennially busy -- newspapers, TV crew, dotcom journalists, everybody wants a piece of him. He was worried that a voice test, not admissible in an Indian court as primary evidence, would need backing up and had ensured that interrogation of hotel employees who may have witnessed Cronje's meetings had begun. After the confession, he feels vindicated, tired but victorious. "I don't think I'll ever handle a bigger case," he says, "But ... he was one of my favourite cricketers. I feel sorry for Hansie."
Surely not as sorry as Hansie feels for himself.

-with Ashok Malik and Paran Balakrishnan

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