BCCI Seeks Supreme Court Intervention: Match-Fixing as Criminal Cheating in Cricket

A New Plea to Protect Cricket

BCCI, the Board of Control in Cricket in India has made an important step towards the control of corruption in the sports. It has gone to the Supreme Court of India with a critical petition. The board is petitioning the top court in the country to officially acknowledge the match-fixing as a criminal cheating act. The idea behind this legal action is to establish an effective new arm against the elements that seek to tarnish the game and take the penalty beyond a mere sporting suspension to a criminal conviction.

This request draws attention to one of the historical issues of the administrators of the sport. The term match-fixing refers to the act of illegally trying to affect the result or any aspect of a sporting event beforehand. This is normally done with money or other rewards, mostly associated with illegal betting. It shatters the core of the sports that is the competition based on fair play and unexpected outcomes. BCCI brings forward the argument that the act is a direct defraud against the people.

Cricket is not only a passion to millions of fans, but also a national pride. They put their time, money and feeling in the assumption that they are witnessing a real competition. According to the petition launched by the BCCI, in case a match is fixed, these fans are misled. They are misled to buy a fake product and their faith is shattered. This according to the board is not merely a violation of sporting rules but a case of outright criminal cheating as it is.

The BCCI is trying to seal a significant loophole in the law by appealing this issue at the Supreme Court. At the moment, there is no particular statute in India that criminalises match-fixing in sports. Such absence of a specific statute renders it highly challenging to prosecute the network of fixing scandals by police and prosecutors. The board is also hoping that the Supreme Court will give them a directive to have the legal clarity to prosecute the offenders effectively.

The Limits of Internal Punishments

Over the years, the BCCI has been fighting corruption on their own internal rules. It possesses its own Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) which keeps track of matches, trains players and takes investigations into suspicious events. In cases where the players are detected to have violated the anti-corruption code, BCCI can administer serious administrative sanctions. Such penalties may include long term suspensions or even life term bans to all forms of cricket.

A number of high profile scandals in the past have demonstrated how the board is ready to exercise this power. Some of the biggest cricketing careers suffered as a result of the 2000 match-fixing scandal, and the 2013 spot-fixing case in the Indian Premier League (IPL). These were powerful messages to the cricketing fraternity. Such internal bans are however harmful to a player but they are not enough to contain the entire scam of the problem.

The main problem is that a sports ban has no impact on the rest of the world other than the player or official concerned with the sport. The BCCI has no control over the fans who work beyond the game like the illegal bookmakers and criminal syndicates who plan these fixing schemes. These are the same masterminds who make the money out of the corruption. All they have to do is to find new players to corrupt them and they will be safe of facing any penalty by the sports body.

This is the crucial void that the BCCI desires to fill. Cricket ban is not an equivalent of a prison. The actual culprits of match-fixing have little to lose without the fear of criminal prosecution, arrest and jail term. They view player bans as equal to a business cost. The BCCI knows that to act effectively in stopping the corruption the law should be in a position to push beyond the boundary, a rope and defuse the criminal networks themselves.

Why Match-Fixing is Criminal Cheating

The legal claim of BCCI is based on the fact that match-fixing should be classified within the current definition of the term cheating in Indian Penal Code (IPC). According to the law, cheating is a situation in which one is manipulated to benefit financially or personally at the expense of the other person. The board argues that a fixed cricket game is an absolute case in point of this. The players and the bookies in question are defrauding people of their unjustified gains.

The number of victims of this crime is very high. The victims will be the first and the most evident one the spectators paying tickets or broadcast subscriptions. They are spending on a fair play in sport and what they get is a performance. It is a direct monetary fraud. The game has the most precious resource in the form of trust and the fans have on the sport, which match-fixing ruins.

The deceit spreads to other game stakeholders to a great number as well. The advertisers and sponsors spend crores of rupee to identify themselves with the game and the teams. They invest in the good image and the extensive coverage of cricket. In case of a fixed match, their investment is lost, as the image of the sport is spoiled. They, also, are cheated in this big manner.

Moreover, TV stations that are paying huge sums of money as a fee to air matches are also duped. They are marketed a product, which is a live and unpredictable competition, which turns out to be a myth. In placing the issue so, the BCCI is putting forward the argument that match-fixing is not a mere internal sports issue. It is a large-scale, calculated financial crime which defrauds both the people and the whole sports economy.

The Urgent Need for a Legal Deterrent

The criminalization drive is informed by the realization that match-fixing is hardly an activity of personal greed. Most of the time it is spearheaded by high level and mighty organized crime syndicates. Those gangs operate massive illegal betting industries with a few-thousand-crore worth in most cases. They are employing their vast wealth and power to attract or even intimidate players into cooperation. A sports organization such as the BCCI is just not in a position to combat this degree of organized crime.

Once there would be a proper criminal law, which would be a big deterrent. When players realize that by engaging in fixing, they might face a police trial, a criminal trial and a five-year jail term, the chances of being risky are much higher. It transforms a career loss to a loss of freedom.