|
|
| August 07, 2000 | ||
|
| MATCH FIXING Unusual Suspects Even if the CBI drags players to court in the match-fixing scandal, providing the charges against them will be difficult. And conviction near impossible. By Ashok Malik and Sayantan Chakravarthy
That final point is crucial for the parallels between baseball's year of darkness -- it was the culmination of betting syndicates' insidious influence on the game and actually led to a purge -- and cricket's moment of infamy are striking. The most marked similarity relates to the legality of the match-fixing case. When the baseball commissioner punished the guilty players, he did so "regardless of the verdict of juries" and on the day after they were acquitted by the court. The reasons for their acquittal sound suspiciously familiar. Some players initially confessed and then retracted their confession. Important documents "disappeared" mid-trial. Nobody was sure precisely which law was infringed in fixing a baseball game. Defendants such as Jackson kept changing their minds, stating they had heard rumours of fixing, had refused offers, had accepted money without meaning to throw matches. Eight decades later Hansie Cronje read from an identical script. Eight decades later the CBI -- despite the great drama of the Income-Tax (it) Department's "Operation Gentleman" -- is on as sticky a legal wicket as the Ohio judicial system was in 1919. In sum, India's premier investigators admit that nailing the cricketers on the charge of match fixing is well nigh impossible. That is why they are hoping that the trauma of an it raid and interrogation and sheer public opprobrium will lead to some Indian cricketer cracking up and spilling the beans. After all, it was psychological pressure and that wily being called conscience that did in Cronje and his teammates. Yet, as a cynical Delhi lawyer who represents a senior cricket official snorts, "South Africa ke cricketer bewakoof hain. Hamare cricketer bewakoof nahin (The South African cricketers are fools. Our cricketers are not)." So expect nothing close to the truth -- with oath, without oath, in spite of oath. The CBI's last hope, then, is a slender one. That, however, is getting ahead of the story. For a start, top lawyers can't even agree if a plain case of cheating under Section 420 can be registered against the cricketers for match-fixing and if so who the complainant should be.
Arora should understand the importance of "corroborative evidence", a phrase much used in the hawala case, in which he was a defending lawyer and which came back as a whipping memory when, after the it raids, there was talk of "incriminating diaries". Apparently, at the homes of certain bookies diaries and books were found with amounts marked against names of cricketers. Hiren Hathi of Ahmedabad, for instance, had -- to quote a tax official -- a diary seized "with the names of Ajay Jadeja and Kapil Dev written against sums of money". The chargesheet in the hawala case was filed in 1996 on exactly such a flimsy basis -- entries in the diaries of the Jain brothers, showing sums of money against the names of politicians to whom they had allegedly been paid. The case was thrown out of court and the hawala accused walked out unblemished. Now legal circles are wondering if the cricket swindle will be hawala II. Anyhow, with hope in its heart and prayer on its lips, CBI is looking at three stages to a denouement -- or mirage. Step I: First, the agency has to establish that there are bookies who run a gambling grey market in India and accept bets on cricket. This is relatively simple. Some 100 bookies have been questioned by the CBI since the beginning of May -- 25-odd are still absconding. Most of the bookies questioned have admitted accepting cricket-related bets -- the menu of betting options actually ranges from horse racing to speculation on who will read the evening news on television. Less than 20 bookies have admitted to "links" with cricketers. Eight Indian players figure prominently on this list, six are Delhi-based -- including a former Indian captain who is a compulsive punter and even bets while teeing off at the Delhi Golf Club -- and the other two are from Mumbai and Hyderabad. Step II: This involves proving that cricketers were in touch with bookies on match days and kept tabs on odds. The CBI is tentatively optimistic here, particularly due to the mobile phone records of cricketers and big bookies. These indicate regular conversations between the Indian dressing room and the betting nodal rooms as it were. However, all this will lead to is a rough conclusion that Indian cricketers were perhaps punters and could be prosecuted under the Gambling Act (maximum punishment: Rs 500 fine). It will not establish rigging. Step III: The CBI could register a case against a bookie or a player under Section 420 after establishing a direct link between underperformance in a match and monetary consideration. This is where the danger gong is sounded. How do you make clear the channel by which bookies paid corrupt cricketers? Bank deposits? Hawala? Lifetime achievement awards from rich NRIs? In Delhi, one cricketer was gifted a house worth Rs 50 lakh by a noted bookie. The many expensive gifts cricketers receive from overseas "fans" are sometimes used as a conduit to "pay cricketers for services rendered". The point is: can you link these with the tanking of a specific match? Nishit Dhruva, senior advocate, Bombay High Court, says, "For the prosecution to prove the linkage will be very difficult."
The CBI certainly isn't confident. As an officer says, even the it raids haven't really helped because a particular cricketer's wealth will have to be correlated with a chosen bookie's allegation of payment at a given time. Since bribes are rarely paid by crossed cheques that are instantly deposited, this logic has a snowball's chance in hell of working. It is for reasons such as these that the CBI privately admits it is likely to end its investigations in a couple of months without filing a chargesheet and submit a report explaining its limitations to the Government -- and cricket will presumably go back into its complacent slumber. No wonder Adhik Shirodkar, a top Mumbai lawyer, says, "This is no way to go about fixing the fixers. Even if you begin a criminal trial, it will take 10 years." Shirodkar recommends a BCCI-imposed ban on grounds of "reasonable suspicion". Arora has a slightly different strategy. If you analyse the secretly recorded Manoj Prabhakar tapes, he says, the testimony offered by some cricketers and officials before the Justice Y.V. Chandrachud Commission and then before the CBI and, should trial begin, before the court, you are likely to find "huge contradictions". Obviously some people are saying one thing in private and another in public, to protect their friends in a conspiracy of silence, even if they themselves are not guilty. Arora proposes that they be charged under Sections 191 and 193 for giving false evidence and "sent to jail to put the fear of God into others". Like a crafty bowler, cricket's cleansing agents may have to resort to a legal googly. Bowling a tidy length doesn't seem to be getting them anywhere. -with V. Shankar Aiyar in Mumbai |
|
|||||||||||||
| Top |
 © Living Media India Ltd |
Early in cricket's never-ending
and completely tiresome match-fixing scandal, sports
writers with a sense of history turned their gaze to the
infamous 1919 baseball rigging scandal in the US. That
year the Chicago White Sox had lost the World Series to
the underrated Cincinnati Reds and eight of its players
were disgraced and banned for life. The star batsman of
the team, Joe Jackson -- nicknamed "Shoeless"
in a literal indication of the near-poverty that led him
to temptation -- is still seen in baseball annals as the
great American fallen angel, the sort of anti-hero Kapil
Dev or Mohammed Azharuddin would be if convicted.