It all started when Lalit Modi convinced Sharad Pawar to run for the BCCI presidential job. They wanted to defeat the old group in charge, which was led by Jagmohan Dalmiya. However, it didn’t go as planned in the first attempt as Pawar lost by just one vote. That was because someone in their own group secretly switched sides.
Modi and his entourage were angry but they didn’t give up, spending the next year working incredibly hard to win the next election in Kolkata.
When the day arrived of the vote it became total chaos. There were court arguments, big fights and guards everywhere. But the craziest things happened before the voting even started. Modi admitted that they hid voting members in hotels so the other side couldn’t talk to them or bribe them.
Even crazier, Modi confessed that they deliberately caused flights to be diverted. If they knew a flight was carrying voters who supported the other side, they found ways to change the flight’s route so those people would land in a completely different part of India and miss the meeting.
“Before all of this is happening. People are coming in from different parts of India for the meeting. Members of the BCCI. There are people being held up in their hotel rooms. People whose flights are being diverted. And I must say, we diverted a few flights also of their members. Okay? Because we also diverted some members’ flights to different parts. It was like an election, you have to win. The writing was on the wall. We will win on merit basis.” – Lalit Modi revealed in a recent podcast.
Even though the other side had a lot of powerful politicians and rich businessmen supporting them, Modi’s group ended up winning the election.
“We won. By the way, Shukla, Anurag Thakur, Arun Jaitley, Srinivasan, all voted for Dalmia and they still lost. So they were never on the Pawar camp. And I’m naming those people specifically. They were on the other side. They were the ones who were spreading the money around. They were the Dalmia core group along with the Roomtas, who had only been thrown out, but they’re still the core group.” – Lalit Modi said in a recent podcast.
This win changed Indian cricket forever. By defeating the old bosses, Pawar and Modi took control of the BCCI which led to the creation of IPL a few years later. The competition turning Indian cricket into a major cash machine with the Indian apex body ruling world cricket in the decades to come.
