The Delhi Police deserve credit for unearthing corruption in cricket, not once but twice in the last 15 years. In 2000, they stumbled upon sensational tapes indicating a deep bookie-player nexus; and in 2013 they detected spot-fixing during that year’s Indian Premier League tournament. If the earlier probe led to South African captain Hansie Cronje making a contrite admission, two years ago, three players — S. Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan — were among those arrested in a dramatic swoop. It was seen as the beginning of a cleansing process. Unfortunately, these achievements were not built upon by the Delhi Police. A sessions court in Delhi has now discharged all the 36 suspects arraigned for cheating, conspiracy and organised crime. The probe seems to have been so shoddy that there was not enough evidence even to frame charges. The move to invoke the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act to strengthen the case seems to have failed. The link with the Dawood Ibrahim crime syndicate was quite tenuous and limited to a few suspicious phone calls. The judge threw out the charge of organised crime and conspiracy easily. She concluded that even if the charges of receiving money from bookies and concealing it were true, these did not amount to cheating; what was caused to spectators was just disgust, and not wrongful loss.
That sporting corruption can be identified but allowed to slip through the definition of any law is disturbing. In similar circumstances, a British court had little difficulty in convicting Pakistani cricketers and sending them off to prison. The match-fixing phenomenon has been crying for a systemic response since the turn of the century, but there has been no effort so far to come up with a legal framework and a set of appropriate punishments to deal with it. The latest outcome is a big setback to efforts to deal with corruption in cricket. As far as the players are concerned, their discharge has understandably raised their hopes of getting the life ban on them revoked. They have reason to be aggrieved that they were put through the humiliation of arrest, imprisonment and judicial process that kept them out of the game and tainted their reputation, for two years. However, the BCCI has not yet agreed to lift the ban, saying the action against them was based on an internal disciplinary hearing and not linked to the criminal case. In this, the Board is right, as the standard of evidence for a criminal trial is substantively different from what it is in disciplinary proceedings. The BCCI must wait to see if the Delhi Police seek revision of the court order before considering a revocation of the ban.
