Leagues Apart

The elections have claimed an unlikely victim in the shape of IPL.

The setting had all the makings of a potboiler. A wealthy industrialist with strong links to a BJP CM stumbles upon cricket administration (there is indirect spice around the CM links too which the media chooses not to report). The CM is overthrown and her lackeys face the heat from all sides. Bureaucrats, whose fate the larger-than-life cricket administrator once presided over, humiliate him on home turf in the local cricke body elections. The ruling party turns the knife by ensuring “its” state governments throw up their hands in despair citing security concerns. The proverbial last straw comes when the BCCI President, a hitherto ally of the ruling party switches camps before the elections.

So whichever way you look at it, the IPL and the General Elections were badly entangled well before the controversy around security began.

- Could the outcome have been any different if Sharad Pawar was part of a Congress-led alliance ?

- Who is guilty of being more pig-headed? The IPL for being inflexible about dates or the Govt about security arrangements?

- Is it really so much of a shame if the Government of the world’s largest democracy wishes to deploy all available security resources for the elections?

- Before Wimbledon 2009 begins, preparations for the 2010 tourney are already underway. Do we believe the organizers would shift to Roland Garros if there were serial blasts in London a week before Wimbledon or would they scrap the year's tournament altogether? The IPL may not be a century-old tradition but shifting to South Africa has ensured nothing around it will ever be considered sacrosanct.

- If the IPL had to be played for the benefit of TV audiences, could we not have arrived at a compromise solution where all matches were played in a single (Indian) City??

- Was the threat to shift to SA a mere mind-game which flopped when Chidambaram refused to take the bait?

For once, I do not have a strong opinion but numerous unanswered questions and mild views around some of them. However, the “Indian” Premier League beamed live from South Africa certainly is one big farce. But then, if Manmohan Singh could be a Rajya Sabha MP from Assam, I guess IPL has extended the same logic albeit in a slightly warped manner. Security concerns are being positioned as a political stance because those killed in the attack on the Lankan cricketers were faceless policemen. If a single international cricketer had been killed, the fraternity would have been numbed into a far more balanced response.