Column

One can discern a suppressed sense of gloating in India over the allegations of spot-betting and match-rigging by Pakistani cricketers. We shouldn’t be. Pakistani cricketers are no more crooked or saintly than Indian ones; the only difference is that our cricketers make tonnes of money without much effort. Theirs don’t. Hence the greater lure of short-term financial fixes with the help of slimy bookies.

Players in that hapless country have also been pressured by the waywardness of their cricket bosses. You never know whether you will be in the team or not; you never know what political alignments will decide your future. When uncertainty rules, anything goes. But the more important question is what should we do about the scourge of cricket betting?

The solution to illegal betting is legal betting, not foolish action by the International Cricket Council (ICC) or the various national cricket boards (though no one is stopping them from doing what they think is right). But they won’t get anywhere. They can inserts spies and eavesdropping equipment into dressing rooms, but the problem lies in the nature of the beast.

Where there is easy money to be made through simple means like bowling a couple of no-balls — which is what Pakistani cricketers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamir apparently did in cahoots with a bookie — it will be made.

On the other hand, the truth is no bookie can regularly fix entire outcomes. Fixing the outcome of an entire match needs the
involvement of many, many players. It is not something that can be easily hidden. This is why the real problem is not betting, but illegal betting.

If Ladbrokes were to offer unusual odds on an unlikely event, and it actually comes to pass, everyone would suspect it had been fixed all along. And for that reason alone it wouldn’t be easy to pull off. In the harsh glare of sunlit transparency, everyone can see that the emperor (the crooked bookmaker, that is) has no clothes.
But where hundreds of crores of rupees are gambled through illegal channels, there is no accountability whatsoever.

In the dark shades of illegal betting, there is no question of bonafide behaviour. Both bettors and bookies know they are trying to outsmart each other by “fixing” the outcome. This is probably why the bookie filmed in the News of The World sting operation was promising no-balls when he should have been promising the match. He was probably trying to prove his closeness to players.

The only sucker is the fan who invests passion in the game, and the unwary gambler who thinks the bookie is Honest Sam (or Honest Shoaib or Shankar). This is why it is best to let some light shine on the operations of Honest Sam to make him more honest. In short, India and Pakistan ought to legalise betting in cricket and other games and regulate the bookies. Trying to police players and cricket administrators is like dealing with the symptom, not the disease.

The problem is our sub-continent’s hypocritical attitudes to fundamental human tendencies and frailties. We are uncomfortable with the idea that homosexuality is part of
being human, so we try to convert it into a crime. The same applies to prostitution and imbibing alcohol. Or drug abuse.

In commerce, we want to ban insider trading in shares on the premise that company insiders should not benefit at the expense of other investors. But the reality is that only insiders know what’s really going on inside a company. So what’s the point in criminalising their acts? If an insider sells shares, it should not be treated as a criminal activity, but as an issue of transparency. The share market is full of experts who know what heavy share selling by an insider means.

By criminalising an act, we make it impossible to police it. Insider trading laws should thus only mandate complete disclosures, and
punishment should only mean confiscating a share of the gains made through insider knowledge. Plea bargaining should be the norm in insider trading crimes, not jail.

We are equally ambivalent when it comes to gambling — a human instinct as old as prostitution or excessive drinking. The only thing is to bring it out into the open and regulate it. But once again, we are a confused lot. When horse-racing is permitted, when governments themselves run lotteries and private sector players are allowed to conduct games of chance, what’s so unholy about legalising cricket betting and allowing the population to gamble a bit on the outcomes of a cricket match?

At the psychic level this can be win-win for the cricket fan who bets right: if his team wins, he gets his share of psychic happiness. If it loses, he can win an expertly placed contra-bet instead, and improve his bank balance. Let’s not be killjoys and try too hard to fix fixing.