I find all this fuss about the IPL scandal simply astounding. Why are we behaving as if we’ve never heard of corruption in Indian economics or politics? Can anyone recall a single politician or business house that doesn’t have a major scandal behind it? Or is it just that we didn’t expect this in a gentleman’s game like cricket? But it’s been over a decade now since cricket scandals began to surface, so why the fuss? I suspect this may have more to do with the opposition’s thankless search for a platform to mobilise people against the current regime, coupled with a competitive media’s increasingly desperate search for stories and scams than with any genuine public outrage. As a scam, it doesn’t look like much in a country where Chaudhari Devi Lal once told a journalist who quizzed him about appointing his own son as a minister: “Do you expect me to appoint Bansi Lal’s son?”
The hostility to Shashi Tharoor came from a different source. Neither the Congress nor the...
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