The story so far:
On March 3 militants attacked a bus carrying Sri Lankan cricket players just outside the Gadaffi Stadium in Lahore. Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram almost immediately appeared on television voicing his doubts on whether India’s security apparatus was equipped to deal with simultaneous elections and cricket. It wasn’t that India could not provide security for IPL2, he said, it was simply that providing security simultaneously to IPL2 and the general elections would stretch our security forces. A simple solution, he suggested, would be to postpone the IPL dates.
Not possible, said IPL administrators led by Lalit Modi. These dates were set in stone in accordance to the international cricket schedule. Worse, said Modi, failure to host the games in India on schedule would amount to loss of national pride. So, various alternatives were trotted out: IPL would get private security; there was no question of moving the venue overseas and, of course, matches could be rescheduled to be held on dates when there was no polling.
When that failed to materialise, Modi went from state to state asking which ones were prepared to take responsibility for security. Suddenly, IPL2 acquired a political hue: Congress-ruled states (Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi) said they couldn’t provide security due to the general elections. Finally, on March 22 after days of protracted wrangling and speculation, the BCCI announced that the IPL matches would be held outside India — fans could watch them on primetime TV.
The venue hasn’t yet been announced for the matches to be held between April 10 and May 24, though it’s likely to be a toss-up between England and South Africa.
Meanwhile reactions have varied. Sachin Tendulkar has said IPL abroad simply won’t be the same. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister, said the decision to shift the venue outside the country was forced by the government and was a ‘national shame’) to a condemnation of the BCCI and IPL for refusing to understand that security was a priority and that the general elections had to take precedence over cricket.
In BBC, Gulu Ezekiel looks at the pitfalls still ahead for the IPL.
The decision to shift the second season of the Indian Premier League from its home base to either England or South Africa has further clipped the wings of the IPL czar Lalit Kumar Modi, the man with aspirations to rule the cricket world. Mr Modi is credited with conceptualising cricket’s first franchise-based Twenty20 club cricket tournament – though it was preceded a few months earlier by the “rebel” Indian Cricket League, launched in late 2007 by Indian media magnate Subhash Chandra Goyal.
(Image attributed to Hashmil under the Creative Commons license)
