Azhar in an odd fix - is it fact or fiction?

Rohit Mahajan

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 13

Dirk Nannes, of all people, is angry that Mohammad Azharuddin is being “treated like royalty”.

Now who’s Dirk Nannes, you might ask. Nannes is a cricketer who’s played for Australia and the Netherlands. He became something of a celebrity in 2009 when he first figured in the IPL — more than his cricket, it was his personality that was remarkable. He was said to be a champion skier and fluent in Japanese. He’s faded away from cricket and right now is on a biking tour through Rajasthan.

He says he’s not really that terrific with Japanese or skiing; but what he says about Azharuddin is indeed very interesting. “Why is a confessed match fixer welcomed on a cricket show and treated like royalty? How is that even possible?” Nannes wrote on Twitter yesterday.

The movie

Azhar the movie was released today — it seeks to project Azharuddin as innocent of the charges of match-fixing. It does not include the confession that he is said to have made to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the year 2000. The movie is made from Azharuddin’s perspective; indeed, it’s almost an authorised biopic — that’s the reason Azharuddin has been flying across the country to promote it.

At the start, there is the disclaimer that the movie is not a biopic — so is it based on facts or not? If it’s not based on the facts of Azharuddin’s life, why is he flying around the country to promote it? It does exclude facts (according to the CBI and former South Africa captain Hansie Cronje) that are very uncomfortable for the former Indian captain. 

Cronje’s testimony

In 2000, testifying before the King Commission that was investigating the charges of match-fixing against him, Cronje had said that Azharuddin had introduced him to a bookie (Mukesh Kumar or MK) in 1996. This bookie, Cronje claimed, had offered him money to throw a Test match during South Africa’s tour of India in 1996. Azhar said that this was a lie.

But later that year, the CBI filed its report on an investigation into match-fixing in India. In this report the CBI said that Azharuddin “accepted that he had introduced Mukesh Kumar Gupta to Hansie Cronje at Kanpur in 1996”.

“He stated that the Titan Cup match between India and South Africa at Rajkot in 1996 was fixed through Mukesh Gupta, and revealed that Ajay Jadeja and Nayan Mongia were also involved along with him,” the CBI report stated.

Azharuddin was banned for life but he challenged the ban in court. In 2012, the Andhra Pradesh High Court revoked the ban. 

The court didn’t say that he was not guilty — it merely said that he hadn’t been given a proper hearing and the case wasn’t properly made.

MA Ganapathy, an SP with the CBI in 2000, was involved in the investigations. He’s now the director general of police in Uttarakhand. “There is Azhar’s confession on tape. He had very close links with some dubious characters and there are conversations on tapes about throwing away matches. There are more than two hours of recording of his confession,” Ganapathy was reported as saying by a newspaper recently.

The cloud of suspicion over Azharuddin never went away; the Indian cricket board (BCCI) was forced to accept the court’s decision, but it never really took the former Indian captain back into the fold.

Now Azhar — a movie on his life but not a biopic, according to its makers! — seeks to burnish his image. The Indian cricket fraternity won’t speak about this. But a former Australian cricketer biking through India is very, very angry!