Jagmohan Dalmiya: The man Indian cricket needed to cut England, Australia down to size

The condolences paid by Cricket Australia and the England and Wales Cricket Board to Jagmohan Dalmiya is perhaps a mark of grudging respect for a rival who not only helped India rise up as a commercial power in cricket, but also undermined the hold Australia and England had established over the game. Dalmiya was many things and let it be clear, not all of them can be classified in black and white. In fact, there are so many shades of grey that in his prime, rivals were never quite sure of what backroom manoeuvring he might manage. Remember the deciding vote to keep Sharad Pawar out of power and make Ranbir Singh Mahendra (his man) the president, or the manner in which he beat Malcolm Gray to become ICC president? He was the man who mattered. The man who understood how to work the BCCI constitution better than anyone else. The man whose career was the template that N Srinivasan adopted in his rise to the top. He was a man who rarely ever lost himself to anger, and always spoke in a calm voice with a smile on his face. He had a piercing gaze and a matter-of-fact manner. He was also a hands-on administrator. He could be a hard man to deal with, but rarely, if ever, would one see the lethal edge that made him so feared. [caption id=“attachment_2440838” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File photo of Jagmohan Dalmiya and Malcolm Gray. Laurence Griffiths/ALLSPORT[/caption] An English county chairman called him ’that awful man from India’. Another administrator described him as ‘a cricket terrorist’. India saw him in a much, softer light. But, of course, to give him his due, one must go back to the 1983 World Cup final when NKP Salve was famously denied passes to the Lord’s enclosure, despite India being in the climactic game. Salve didn’t take to the affront very kindly. “We must take the World Cup to India,” he told his two BCCI cohorts, Dalmiya (who was then the treasurer) and IS Bindra. It was never going to be easy though. England and Australia raised all sorts of objections – of history, lack of infrastructure and the lack of necessary capital. When all of that seemed to fail, the English focussed on a technicality – cricket is a winter sport and it would be impossible for each side to bowl 60 overs, which would violate the World Cup rules. Salve’s response was simple, he changed the rules. Just like that 60-over cricket took a back seat to the 50-over format. But even then, the final push only came when India-Pakistan offered to up the prize money in the 1987 tournament by over 50 percent as compared to 1983. It was a lesson Dalmiya learnt – money is the best bargaining chip – and one he never forgot. Dalmiya joined the BCCI in 1979, and soon enough formed a formidable partnership with Bindra. They had a vision for Indian cricket, which at that point operated out of a small room in Churchgate in Mumbai. They wanted the body to make money; they wanted it to be profitable and to their credit, they saw the potential much before anyone else did. In the early phase of Dalmiya’s career, it was almost impossible to tell him and Bindra apart. The 1987 World Cup was a success, but their biggest moment was still ahead of them. In 1992, with Bindra as president and Dalmiya as secretary of the board, the BCCI decided it wanted to make some money. Before 1993, Doordarshan (India’s state-owned broadcaster) held a monopoly on the live telecast of cricket matches. The BCCI had to pay – yes, that’s right – DD roughly Rs 5 lakh per game to broadcast the matches. But Dalmiya and Bindra sought to sell the TV rights. The duo fought DD in the courts (the Supreme Court ruled that airwaves could no longer be a state monopoly, paving the way for the BCCI to sell television rights) and broke the monopoly, selling television rights to TransWorld International (TWI) ahead of the India-England series for $40,000 or Rs 18 lakh. Small change, given what the Board makes today, but a big step towards the commercialization of the BCCI. The 1996 World Cup brought in even more money. TV rights were sold to the tune of $10 million and Wills, a cigarette brand owned by ITC Ltd, paid $12 million to become the tournament sponsor. Big money had arrived and so had India – suddenly everyone wanted India to tour. In 1997, Dalmiya became the ICC’s first Asian president and led the council till 2000. Throughout his tenure, he sought to become the powerbroker for Asian Cricket. Bangladesh also became a Test nation during his tenure. His argument that the game’s commercial future lies within the sub-continent was proved true time and again as he managed to raise massive deals for the ICC and for Indian cricket. The match-fixing scandal also broke during his tenure and his tepid response was typical of a man who never wanted to make internal matters public. He was rarely ever ruffled but beneath that veneer of calm was a man who carefully selected the battles he wanted to fight. Take for example, the Mike Denness controversy. In November 2001, Dalmiya was the president of the BCCI when the storm blew in. Tendulkar had been found guilty by ICC match referee Denness of tampering with the ball during India’s second Test against South Africa. Denness slapped a suspended one-match ban on Tendulkar and also sanctioned five other Indian players, including captain Sourav Ganguly, for bringing the game into disrepute through excessive appealing. It exposed a very big problem that persisted despite Dalmiya’s rise – that Indian cricketers were, in those times, guilty until proved innocent. Dalmiya stood by the cricketers, issued a boycott threat, forced the ouster of former England captain Denness and the UCBSA-appointed South African Denis Lindsay, preventing them from officiating in the final Test. A little later, the ICC also made it clear that Tendulkar was not guilty of ball tampering. In his book Indian Summer_,_ former India coach John Wright noted_: “The way Dalmiya handled this row sent out a very clear signal to the rest of the cricket world that from here on India wasn’t going to take any crap from any quarter. His critics accused him of inflaming public opinion and turning a cricketing issue into a post-colonial ‘us versus them’ confrontation, but from the team’s point of view it felt as if our integrity was being defended and our interests protected. I certainly sensed a difference in the way we were treated by match referees after Dalmiya took over.”_ If you keep all the politics aside, Dalmiya was a cricket lover first. He really did care about the players (the ones he liked, at least) but perhaps he too was a prisoner of the system. If one wanted to stay in power, then the system was already there to be exploited and Dalmiya was the one who invented the system. In the end, he was perhaps just a shadow of his former self. But his re-election as president this year showed that he still, even in failing health, knew the right buttons to push. At the end of the day, the good probably outweighs the bad. And that, in essence, is the memory that Dalmiya leaves us with – a man who through various means set India on the path of becoming a super power in cricket. That is truly his legacy.