You want to take out Lalit Modi, you sweat it out -Governance Now

You want to take out Lalit Modi, you sweat it out

This ugly fight is not about cleaning up cricket, but covering it up completely

BV Rao | April 21, 2010

You have to give it to the Congress. This party knows how to turn personal vendetta into a pious national mission.

Look at Mission Modi, for example. The whole party, many ministers and almost all the government's scary alphabets -- IT, ED, DRI, IB, CLB, RAW -- are out to get him, and the way things are going, get him they will.

I have no equity in IPL, neither do I know a branding beau from Dubai for Modi to sweat about me. So, I don't break a sweat over him either. Just like Modi couldn't care less how tough it is for me to sell a governance magazine to an IPL nation, I couldn't care less if, for his next assignment, he is sent to the Antarctic and asked to launch a version of the IPL there (which I suspect he will welcome considering how he loves to change/shift venues).

But when this Congress government makes it look like it's taking this Bad Boy down on my behalf, I have serious reservations. For one, I do not know how really bad this boy is, if he is indeed. For another I do not know if he is any, pardon the grammar, badder than the rest of the gang. For a third, I do not know the bossman, Sharad Pawar, is not as involved in all the murky stuff that Modi is supposed to be sitting on top of.

All I know is this: Modi got one of theirs (Shashi Tharoor), so they have to get Modi. That is fair game as long as they don't fire from the nation's shoulder. If national interest was at the the centre of all this frenetic activity, all the generous leaks about all the slush funds in IPL would have happened six months ago when the IT department is supposed to have prepared a dossier on IPL. Perhaps then a certain very morally and ethically correct minister would not have dared gift Rs 70 crore of other people's money to his friend.

I also know something else that will stop me from celebrating the fall of Modi as the ultimate clean up of the Augean stables of Indian cricket. That fall will not be the clean up that we want, it will be the cover-up that all the politicians of all the parties who are on the BCCI, want and will get.

I don't want to lend my shoulder for this fight. You want to take out Modi, you sweat it out. And, yes, keep the equity.

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