Prodigal Daughters

The IPL scandal’s impact on the NCP could eventually reach ballot boxes. For now, it is Poorna Patel and Supriya Sule who are squirming.

On 15 November 2008, the dusty bylanes of Bhandara district in Maharashtra’s Vidharba region awoke to charged excitement. Never before in the history of this tiny region, infamous as a Naxal belt, was there such frisson in the air. Wherever the eyes could reach, there were cricket bats, balls and people in whites. It was a crowd phenomenon matched only by election rallies.

The excitement was over the inauguration of a Lagaan-style cricket match, with Bhandara’s local boys getting a rare chance to display their cricketing skills. From that chilly November day for the next two months, every part of the district reverberated to the sounds of cricket commentary (by local wannabe commentators). About 1,500 teams from the district played in the matches held across the region.

Poorna Patel, daughter of Union Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, was the brain behind this mega event organised by the Manoharbhai Patel Academy. Given the Indian obsession with cricket, this event acquired a special significance in helping her father set the pitch for the Lok Sabha polls to be held some months later. Few in Bhandara, the Patels’ home constituency, are likely to forget the grand finale of the tournament. The superstars of Indian cricket, including members of the then Indian team, had been flown down to the district to play a well publicised and much watched match.

The success of the grand sports event, on which an estimated Rs 5 crore was spent, set in motion an unofficial election campaign for the minister, who, as a member of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the Congress’ ally in Maharashtra, hadn’t always had it easy in past electoral contests. Praful Patel’s corporate image and mannerisms have always been a drag on his ‘mass leader’ credentials. But the cricket matches won him crucial outh support.

The minister’s daughter is also well networked within the Hindi film industry, and all of Bhandara seems grateful for the dash of Bollywood glamour this big-name network has brought them. Salman Khan, Shilpa Shetty, Preity Zinta, Anil Kapoor, Tabu and several other stars are reported to have turned up there for the centenary celebrations of the late Manoharbhai Patel (Praful Patel’s father).

Cricket and Bollywood is the perfect confetti conferring combination. And, as it happens, Poorna is also the hospitality manager of the Indian Premier League (IPL), and thus can hardly expect to be shielded from the latest controversy around its conduct.

At 27, Poorna is reputedly quite sure of herself. The Mumbai educated, management and mass-comm graduate from the US does not visit Bhandara much. “But whenever she does visit, it is in the company of some glamorous and well-known personality. The last time she came, it was with Mahima Chaudhary,” says a source close to the Patels. But until the IPL controversy thrust her into the spotlight, she was unknown beyond the rarefied confines of Mumbai and Delhi’s glitz-and-glam circuits. According to those in the know, her father’s clout helped her develop her own ‘power circle’; for the glitterati, civil aviation is the perfect portfolio to snuggle up to.

Why, just the other day, Poorna flew into a controversial air pocket once news broke that she had ordered an Air India flight (IC 7603 from Delhi to Coimbatore) to be re-deployed as a chartered flight barely 12 hours before its departure. Scheduled to leave at 5.20 am on 20 April, the plane found itself ferrying some IPL players from Chandigarh to Chennai instead. Though the airline has officially denied any meddling by Poorna, sources say that this was just the latest instance of her flighty sense of entitlement.

But in the gilded information age, more than flight diversions, it is the other stuff that is more controversial. Such as reports that the minister’s daughter gleefully forwarded a confidential email from the office of IPL CEO Sundar Raman to her father’s office. This was how this email—detailing the financial projections of a hypothetical IPL franchise—found its way into the inbox of former Union Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Shashi Tharoor, the man who lost his job for his own behind-the-scenes IPL entanglement.

Of course, Poorna is not the only daughter in the picture. Union Agriculture Minister and NCP President Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule has found herself dragged into the IPL quagmire. Her husband Sadanand was reportedly part of a team which lost out on an IPL bid. Interestingly, he has a 10 per cent stake in Multi Screen Media (Sony’s holding company), which is accused of paying a huge ‘facilitation fee’ to get second-hand IPL match telecast rights ceded by World Sports Group (in lieu of the fee), which had won them the first time round. The day after this news surfaced, Sule made an emphatic denial of her IPL ties (“Nobody from my family or relatives holds any stake in IPL”), but the very next day, she had to concede that her husband owned a stake in the telecast rights holder, but an “inherited” one.

Despite denials by Poorna and Supriya, daughters of the NCP’s most high-profile leaders, most of the party’s rank and file now suspect that both Praful Patel and Sharad Pawar have hidden stakes in some IPL money-spinner or the other. Though Pawar’s election affidavit puts his wealth down as Rs 3.6 crore, Supriya’s indicates that she is almost ten times richer than her father; in fact, she is one of Maharashtra’s richest politicians. Along with her husband and two children, the Sules’ wealth is pegged at 41.5 crore, and they have big investments in overseas financial institutions. Praful Patel’s assets are worth Rs 49 crore.

The generation difference is apparent on the social circuit, where the daughters are much less restrained in having their lavish lifestyles exposed. With successful businesses under them, especially in policy-influenced sectors, and hefty investments in other arenas, perhaps few expect them to live modestly. High street fashion labels, foreign holidays, road crunching SUVs, the latest electronic gadgetry, and swanky houses feathered to perfection by interior designers, all these are now taken for granted.

It’s the sort of high life that makes rubbing shoulders with film stars mandatory, on some pretext or the other. Whether it is Gokulashtmi’s Dahi Handi celebrations, Ganeshotsav or Holi, Bollywood actors are rarely missing. “The wave of these stars gets them more votes than their constituency work sheets,” says a second rung NCP leader, “Therefore, glamour has become a necessity.” Also, such spectacles of tradition are a good way to keep ‘an ear to the ground’, to gain some sort of connection with their rustic lineage left so far behind in the dusty outfields of Vidharba—even if it is via an artificial show of pomp and glamour.

Maybe it’s a political formula of a new era. Yet, the IPL controversy has left NCP workers confused. Many feel that Pawar has a bigger interest in the IPL than anyone dares even whisper, with the beseiged former IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi just his front man. “I admire Saheb’s (Pawar) work, but now I have started to wonder why his name crops up in any major scam. He is a very wealthy man,” remarks Abhijit, an NCP card holding party member.

The political impact is unlikely to be immediate. But watchers of Maharashtra politics sense that a shift in public perceptions is underway. Any conspicuous display of wealth takes its toll on ballot box, by and by, and sneaky dealings only hasten such a process.

Take the case of Pawar. Though political parties find it difficult to find a candidate who can match his stature, election results over the years have indicated a consistent depletion in his victory margin. The trend could sharpen now.

Even so, Praful Patel is far more vulnerable, having never had Pawar’s political appeal, and with the IPL scam closing in on him so much harder. The growing grumbles of party workers are an indication enough.

IPLpoliticsPoorna PatelscandalSupriya Sule