Shining India or Poverty of Ambition?
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Dalmiya’s Jekyll and Hyde personality, a fantastic ability to make money but not always able to organise and manage events continued to haunt him as he rode up the cricket escalator. Dalmiya used the success of the World Cup to extend his power base by standing for the Presidency of the ICC. At that stage he was not even the Indian Board President but with the Asians angered by the ICC’s impotence in the face of Australia’s refusal on security grounds to go to Colombo to play their World Cup group matches urged Dalmiya to stand. The money man who had allowed others to be king now sought the throne himself. Dalmiya ran his election as if it was an American presidential race, energetically wooing the associates, but despite twice winning the vote of the ICC members, he found the old powers reluctant to accept him. The bitter power struggle, essentially a brown versus white (and black) battle with England, Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies ranged against the subcontinent, was so vicious that it left scars which have never healed. The Asian countries resented the grudging acceptance of them by England and Australia, while the old powers felt that the new kids on the block were not following the gentlemanly ways and were also doing nothing about cricketing corruption. In the end Dalmiya was accepted but with poor grace. He never felt part of cricket’s most important club and the club never felt he could ever be truly one of them. As he had done in India Dalmiya made money for the ICC. Before Dalmiya arrived ICC’s income was little more than the subscriptions the members paid. Under his leadership through initially controversial tournaments like the ICC. Knock-out tournaments – now know as the Champions Trophy – ICC began to harvest television income for the first time. But this was also the period when match fixing emerged as a great scourge and there was a lamentable failure by the cricket authorities to deal with it. The centre of match fixing was the subcontinent and it was sustained by the Indian love for betting. Gambling comes naturally to Indians. Mahabharata, one of the two great myths of Hinduism, turns on a loaded game of dice. It was played between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, two lots of cousins who were both claiming the throne of Indraprastha, the legendary capital of ancient India. In this epic story of good and bad the Pandavas were the goodies, the Kauravas were the baddies. The leader of the Pandavas, Yuddisthara, who was the embodiment of goodness and honour – he never told a lie in his life – agreed to a game of dice with his wicked cousins to settle the fate of ancient India. The Pandavas duly lost but unknown to them a wicked Kaurava uncle had loaded the dice. When the Pandavas found out they decided the dice game could not be allowed to stand and went to war to reclaim their just rewards. It was on this historic
