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17 highlights

• India and South Africa played the fifth match of a One Day International series on 19 March 2000. On 7 April, the Delhi Police declared that it had recordings of phone conversations between South African captain Hansie Cronje and an Indian bookmaker called ‘Sanjay Chawla.’

• In less than a week, Cronje admitted to accepting money from bookies after being “tempted by Satan.” He had fed Chawla game trajectories—who would open the bowling, which batsmen would score slowly—in exchange for $140,000.

• By June, Cronje had told the King Commission in South Africa that Azhar had introduced him to a bookie named M.K. Gupta and several others. Further, Cronje alleged that Azhar had routine dealings with bookmakers with whom he had fixed matches in the past.

• At the time, the match-fixing scandal transformed the way fans understood the influence of money and politics in the game, especially in India. The affair dominated national headlines that summer, and then again later in the year when the CBI published its report.

• The ecosystem had received a jolt that should have led to corrective action. Instead, a sense of inevitability developed around corruption in cricket. Eventually, people began to see it as business as usual.

• A vast number of Indian cricket fans, born just before or during the new millennium, have no idea how the news of the match-fixing scandal shook India. If you are such a reader, you might understand what it means to live through a gigantic shake-up that nonetheless leaves no impact on public memory. You’ve grown up in the age of news cycles designed for distraction. Here, then, are some stories about the first time such a thing happened to the generation before yours.

• Much of Arjun’s characterisation and the film’s overall plot was reminiscent of the life of Sanjeev Chawla, the bookie who allegedly ran gangster Dawood Ibrahim’s international cricket betting syndicate. In June 2016, Chawla was arrested in London. Arguing against his extradition in connection with the match-fixing investigation, Chawla raised concerns about his safety in an Indian jail cell. In February 2020, Delhi Police’s Crime Branch managed to extradite him to India for interrogation.

• Decolonisation doesn’t play out amicably. The writer Mike Marqusee wrote that, in 1993, the English cricket board “had fought a bitter battle to stop the World Cup being held in the subcontinent, and it had lost.”

• The TV rights were sold for a massive $14 million, while India’s ITC corporation, through its cigarette brand Wills, paid $12 million to secure title sponsorship—four times what Benson & Hedges paid for the 1992 edition.

• Two theories emerged from Hawkins’ conversations with his bookmaker contacts and a Pakistani spy. One, that a cabal of super-wealthy Indian businessmen pooled resources to bribe the Pakistan team and ensure that the Indians wouldn’t lose a semi-final at home. The second was wilder—the Indian government convinced its Pakistani counterpart to trade a cricket victory for MOUs to prop up the economy.

• Both of these theories feel like they belong in a Hindi movie like Jannat. The basic ingredients—naked nationalism and entrepreneurial overreach with a side of hubris—are the same. A few glowing reviews apart, Hawkins’ book was never taken seriously by Indian fans or administrators.

• Azhar’s ostensible guilelessness was in play even in the immediate aftermath—it was in sharp contrast to Kapil Dev’s conduct, for instance. Dev appeared on national television and broke down in front of journalist Karan Thapar, pleading innocence and emphasising his allegiance to the nation. “Kapil told Azhar, why don’t you go and cry on TV?” Ugra told me. “They will believe whatever you say if you cry. But this guy was confused as usual. I don’t get why people are so quick to forgive Kapil but not Azhar.”

• In 2002, anthropologist Joan Wardrop wrote that the coverage around ‘Hansiegate’ was driven by “a peculiarly Fundamentalist Christian frame of guilt and atonement.” Her paper made the link between Cronje’s narrative and patterns in Afrikaner society: his performance of guilt conformed to a set of idealised “Afrikaner collective notions of the self.”

• It took till 1998 for the cricket team to have its first black player in spinner Paul Adams. Fast bowler Makhaya Ntini was the second. Last July, as the Black Lives Matter movement emerging from the United States gained momentum, Ntini told the South African Broadcasting Corporation that nobody knocked on his door to ask about dinner during his playing days. He said that his son Thando, who represented the country at the Under-19 World Cup in 2018, faced similar behaviour.

• Moonda told me that a lot of black players coming through the system don’t get the socio-economic support they need, due to which they have to look for employment outside cricket. In other words, it isn’t as transformative as hoped.

• In an interview with ESPN Cricinfo in June last year, Steve Richardson from the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) said, “I could actually deliver to the Indian police or the Indian government now at least eight names of people who are what I would term serial offenders, constantly approaching players to try and get them to fix matches. At the moment, with the lack of legislative framework in India, it is very limited what the police can do, and to that extent they have my great sympathy.”

• “People have stopped caring, Aditya,” Lokapally told me as a parting shot. “They see so much corruption around them in this country, with the police, with politicians, with businessmen, that they’re exhausted. And now, they’ve accepted it as a fact of life.”