The man who can’t be ignored

Back in India, he parlayed his vague idea of a city league into a full-fledged American pro sport league after he saw the success of the first ever T20 world championship in South Africa.

This was Lalit Modi’s Eureka moment, and he took the idea of a professional league forward, until it took off, becoming a deadly cocktail that melded the popularity of cricket, the pull of cinema celebrities and the power of politicians. The scene after the first IPL in 2008 was so seductive that the whole country was in thrall to the idea of ‘cricketantainment’.

The clamour for IPL teams grew, even as TV rights deals were re-negotiated. Except, the league commissioner may have used just that very opportunity to spirit away a sum in excess of Rs 400 crore.

Seen against the backdrop of the totally opaque functioning of the BCCI, an autonomous sports federation awash in cash, it is easy to see how Lalit fitted in like a cosy glove. Putting his grand idea into motion after working obsessively for its launch, Lalit was clever enough to bring in the professional group IMG to manage the tournament logistics. That may have left him just enough room to manouvre everything to his benefit, between flying on a chartered jet to match venues and partying hard at the after-match events in which his ability to ‘swing’ — in every sense of the word — made him immensely popular. Clearly, he was the IPL’s ruling czar.

Wheeling and dealing came naturally to him since he had done all that as a confidant of the Rajasthan Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje Scindia when it was alleged that Lalit virtually ran the business of the government from his hotel room from where all the liquor vending licences were ‘auctioned.’

The rise and rise of Lalit Modi is now part of sporting folklore, as was his equally swift downfall. The first point of friction was in 2009, when then home minister Mr P. Chidambaram refused to provide security for IPL-2 as it coincided with elections to the Lok Sabha. In thumbing his nose at the UPA government and deciding to move IPL-2 out of India and to South Africa, he fell afoul of the powers that be in the UPA government. He lasted only another year, holding IPL-3 in India, but after accepting the plaudits at the closing ceremony, he quietly packed his bags and fled.

Lalit may have been a master manipulator and a flamboyant circus master who loved the spotlight, but in the BCCI he was only one among many. His troubles with Mr N. Srinivasan were a long-festering wound before they broke out in the open. A Machiavellian administrator who thought nothing of buying his way past any difficulty, Srini outplayed Lalit in the game of cricket thrones. Lalit also alienated Arun Jaitley to the extent where the current finance minister was said to have vowed that Lalit would never step into India again.

In the course of an abrasive career as the scion of Modi Enterprises family and then as IPL commissioner, Lalit had crossed swords with three successive finance ministers of the country — Pranab Mukherjee, P. Chidambaram and Arun Jaitley. The haute society he moved in may have made Lalit super confident.

He claimed he could manipulate the wheels-within-wheels of India, play one section against another and get away with it. And it was his hubris, his virtually evangelical larger-than-life TV presence during IPL seasons that invited opprobrium and led to the hardening of political forces against him.

Using his wife’s British passport and her health condition – he married a woman nine years older than him, his mother’s best friend – and the death threats against him by the notorious ‘D’ company to leverage his way into UK, Lalit pulled strings through the UK Indian Labour MP Keith Vaz to get his right of residence extended. The rest is history as his wife had to seek treatment from experimental cutting edge treatment at the Champalimaud Institute in Lisbon, Portugal. Whether Rupert Murdoch had any reason to leak the Modi-Vaz emails, as Lalit claims or it was the Israeli based security company based in London (and hired by the BCCI to hack into Lalit Modi emails), which did it, the consequences are there for all to see.

A cornered Lalit is pointing fingers at everyone, friend and foe, in a bid to deflect the blame.

In the final analysis, he is a fugitive from Indian justice who may have other residence options beyond UK to keep out of reach of the Indian authorities. A nice cushion of a fortune built out of selling Rajasthan government liquor vends and then dipping into the $80 million of TV rights, Lalit is betting he could make his home wherever he needs to, except India where he remains a much wanted man.