The perverse perfection of tyranny

We are participants in the sense that we are moral observers in this morass where we may also have our sympathies, clear notions of who is right and right, which side is more correct than the other. But ultimately we are not, nor can we be, soldiers—that is a condition that lies on the other side of a very clear boundary line, at least in my mind.

But back to Saddam’s Iraq, the Iraq of Kamel Sachet’s life, which Steavenson explores so searchingly in this book. The thing about the citizens —really, they were subjects, not citizens—of Saddam’s Iraq is that they were both victims and victimizers. Saddam had forced them to be. There is an analogy in my mind with the sickening story of that Austrian man who raped his daughter and then kept her, and then their many offspring, locked in a basement for twenty-four years. In other words, Saddam brutalized his own people at will, and he also forced them to sleep with him and to kill one another and to stay silent about it all.

This was the perverse perfection of his tyranny. He created a society of victims, a society that, toward the end, lived in order to exalt him for victimizing them and to laud him for keeping them as his hostages. He created a wall of fear around his people and a national belief that only he could protect them from the terrible world that waited outside.

Former Cricinfo staffer and currently Open magazine correspondent Rahul Bhatia sent me this link to a fascinating discussion in the New Yorker —  and the first thought that struck me as I read was that if you substituted ‘Saddam’ with ‘BCCI’, you’d still be on the money.

The link came appropos. Two days ago, while writing this post on conflict of cricketing interests, I needed to refresh my memory on the connection between Suresh Chellaram and Lalit Modi. I called a very good friend, who happened to be travelling on BCCI-related work just then.

‘Are you alone? Can you talk?’, I asked. ‘Of course,’ he said. So I asked him what I needed to know. ‘What kind of question are you asking?’, he said, and the line went dead. He called me back after a few minutes, presumably from a more santized environment, and even so answered my question in a rush, and called off saying he’d get in touch with me ‘later’, when he was done with his work.

The inherent paranoia in his reaction was hardly novel. In my years of covering cricket for Rediff, I’ve encountered it repeatedly, at all levels of the cricket hierarchy. Senior players who had gold-plated guarantees of their place in the side and in the public’s affections have called to talk of things that concerned them/the team, and almost every such conversation invariably ended with ‘Please don’t quote me by name, don’t even identify me as a senior member of the side or whatever’.

On one occasion I called a very senior administrator and asked if I could get a copy of the BCCI’s statement of accounts [a document that is, or should be, in the public domain]. He hung up. Two days later, I got a call from someone who identified himself as a friend of this administrator, and asked me to meet him in a bar known to be a gay hangout, in one of the bylanes behind the Taj. I sat at a table, waiting, at the appointed hour; this stranger walked up, sat opposite me, refused refreshment, slipped me a bulky brown-paper parcel, and left after telling me to open it after I got home. It was the kind of scene you would expect in a John le Carre novel, not one you encounter as a reporter doing a harmless story on cricket and its finances.

The BCCI controls the media, Shekhar Gupta had said in his article, to which you can only add, and how! As a direct result of some stories we did at the time based on those statements of accounts, the BCCI banned Rediff from stadiums in India. The organization didn’t need to send out an official memo; it merely kept turning down our applications for accreditation to cover Tests and ODIs; when we asked why, we got official sounding guff for the record about the ‘internet’ not being recognized, but off record, the officials — including then secretary JY Lele — told us the orders came from ‘the top’, and was linked to our coverage of the BCCI.

There in essence is the cricket journalist’s dilemma. You can make a career out of endlessly recycling the sort of pap that will not give cause for official offense; look squiggle eyed at its activities, though, and the BCCI will freeze you out, deny you access to the sport you are supposed to cover. So which reporter, knowing his job depends on it, is going to go out of his way to look under the rocks to see what crawls out from under? Far easier to write about the consuming importance of an essentially pointless one day series, or create tales of dressing room friction [the BCCI has no problem, note, with players copping flak from the media; it only bars commentary and criticism of its own activities].

That is why the real story of Indian cricket in its most seminal phase, from the 1990s through the 2000s, will never be written — and we are all the poorer for that silence: the fans, the players involved, cricket literature in general and yes, even the BCCI.

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