Wadekar, media at war over phone tapping

Prem Panicker

Alice, she of Wonderland fame, said it best: this whole thing is getting curiouser and curiouser.

On Monday evening, former Indian cricket star and manager Ajit Wadekar appeared on Star News and denied that he had ever said he had the phones of Indian cricketers tapped during the 1992-1993 tour of South Africa.

"I am not a member of the CBI or the CID, or, for that matter, any government agency that I am allowed to tap telephone conversations. What I meant was that it could have been one of the measures used to 'tab' the players' activities," Wadekar 'clarified' on Star News.

This morning, Indian Express has squarely put the former India manager on the spot by reproducing, in full, Wadekar's signed fax message to Joy Chakravarthy, a correspondent of that paper.

We quote the relevant extract here. "During my tenure as manager of the Indian team, I have never come across such an incident (of bribery and match fixing). I can vouch that no Indian player has ever thought of playing dirty with his country. They might have asked for more allowances, prize money, modelling charges, logo money, etc., but never ever betrayed the team or the country. When we came back from South Africa's disastrous tour, I had to implement colde of conduct to make players focus on the game as their priorities were different, and not in the middle. As the rumours were afloat in the media about briberies/bookies in the cricketing world I kept a tap on their telephone conversations for a month of so without the players' knowledge and found absolutely nothing incrimination or objectionable which would have led to such false allegations. Since then I thought my players were abslutely clean."

"....I kept a tap on their telephone conversations...". Donno... seems clear enough to me, no amiguity there whatsoever. And Wadekar has signed the fax himself... and there is no way his charge that he was 'misquoted' will stand up.

Intriguing, this. What caused Wadekar to backtrack and attempt - rather foolishly, given that he had actually given this in writing - to deny his own words?

I suspect that the reason is simply this: it has occured to Wadekar, rather belatedly, that tapping someone's telephone, no matter how laudatory your reasons may be, is, in the first place, a clear violation of that person's privacy and, secondly, in contravention of existing laws. Or, not to mince words, downright illegal.

And once the realisation dawned that he might actually have landed himself in deep trouble, Wadekar quickly attempted to repair the damage by denying that he had ever tapped phones - again, forgetting in the heat of the moment that his denial would boomerang the minute the reporter concerned produced the original faxed statement.

So where does all this lead us to? Why, right back to where we started from - the need for a complete enquiry, a total clean up, of the Indian cricket establishment. The BCCI has, after a bit of vacillation by Jagmohan Dalmiya, finally woken up and demanded that Prabhakar either name the Indian player who reportedly attempted to bribe him in Sri Lanka, or face a suit for libel.

The BCCI apparently thinks that this is enough. To my mind, though, it merely scratches the tip of the iceberg. So Prabhakar, under duress, comes up with a name. So what? The player concerned denies it. And given that if at all such a bribery attempt had been made, the person making it was hardly likely to have done the deed in the presence of a notary public, it is one person's word against the other and the rest of us are right back in square one.

And this is precisely why sections of the media, including Rediff, have been insisting that nothing short of a commission of inquiry, presided over by an eminent jurist and with former cricketers of irreproachable integrity providing expert input, be instituted to enquire into the whole state of Indian cricket, to probe the various allegations, and to function on the widest possible brief.

Nothing less will clear, from overhead, this cloud of doubt that has been cast on the entire cricketing establishment - on players and administrators alike.

However, there is an even more intriguing question that arises from Wadekar's recent faux pas. In course of the Star News interview, Wadekar said that it was obviously impossible for him to have tapped the phones of an entire touring party - and that too in a foreign country.

True. It does stretch credibility to breaking point to imagine the Indian cricket manager having such omnipotent powers as to keep a telephone tap going on a touring party of 16 cricketers. More so when you remember that the team at the time was on tour - which means that the players were moving from one place to another. At home, perhaps, a tap could have been placed on the residence telephones of the players - but to imagine a scenario where such taps were placed in a succession of hotels in a strange country is, well, laying it on with a trowel. As Wadekar himself said, he is not CBI - and even that august agency does not have foolproof phone tap facilities anyway.

Okay. If he didn't do it, why then did he say it?

There are two possibilities. One is that Wadekar, in his zeal to clear the name of Indian cricket, gilded the lily. Tried to make a foolproof case for the defence. And didn't realise till the last moment that he had overreached himself.

If this is the case, then he erred on the side of mendacity. His heart may have been in the right place, but the same cannot be said about his head. And the biggest service that Wadekar can do for Indian cricket, from here, is to own up - in a signed statement, to prevent more allegations of being 'misquoted' - to the real truth. And if that truth is that he did not tap anyone's phones, that he merely said he did to bolster the case for the defence, then even at the risk of looking foolish, Wadekar needs to come right out and say so.

But there is another - and far more frightening - possibility. And that is this - was Wadekar's unsolicited statement meant to cover something up?

Ask any expert in jurisprudence this: when does a person go out of his way to embellish his alibi? The answer, invariably, will be: when tthe person concerned is not too sure the alibi will stand up, or when he has something to hide.

And that is the most scary possibility here: that Wadekar went out of his way to dream up this entire private eye scenario of telephone taps and such because he wants to put an end to awkward questions by coming up with an emphatic statement.

And it is this possibility that makes the need for a comprehensive enquiry all the more urgent, immediate, vital.

At least, that is how we read it - we would be interested in hearing what you think, on the Wadekar contretemps and, in fact, on the miasma that today shrouds Indian cricket.