Lalit Modi

Lore & Background

The story of Lalit Modi and Rajasthan Royals begins in the boardrooms of Mumbai, where a man who made his name moving capital on stock exchanges decided that the next great story he would tell was not about quarterly returns but about a cricket team in a city that had never hosted a top-flight franchise. When the IPL's inaugural franchise auction took place in 2007, Modi bid for Rajasthan and secured the rights. The decision was not a safe one. Rajasthan had no established first-class cricket infrastructure of the kind that, say, Mumbai or Chennai could offer. The stadium—Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur—was a solid ground but not a cricketing cathedral. Modi saw something the market did not: a blank canvas, a proud state, and a colour nobody had claimed.

The 2008 season validated that vision in the most dramatic way possible. The Royals, captained by Shane Warne and stacked with players like Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, and Andrew Flintoff, went on a run that ended with them lifting the IPL trophy in Kolkata. For a city that had long been overshadowed by its neighbours in the cricketing conversation, that night in Eden Gardens was a coronation. The pink flags that had fluttered in the Jaipur stands all season suddenly felt like a national symbol of underdog triumph. Modi, watching from the owner's box, had built something that belonged to the fans as much as to him.

The later years were more turbulent. The 2013 IPL spot-fixing case—allegations that match-fixing had occurred during the 2013 season—landed on Modi's desk. He was convicted by a CBI court in 2013, a verdict that sent shockwaves through the franchise's fanbase. In 2015, the Bombay High Court acquitted him, clearing his name in the eyes of the law. By then, however, the emotional distance between Modi and the Pink Army had grown. He sold the Rajasthan Royals franchise in 2014, and the team entered a new ownership era. The stadium still wears pink. The fans still chant. But the man who chose that colour, who stood in the Jaipur sun and told a sceptical cricket world that Rajasthan was ready, has since stepped back into the background of the story he started.

In Their Own Story

The auction room in 2007 was all mahogany and murmured briefcases. Modi stood at the back, arms crossed, watching the other bidders circle the table like sharks around a small pond. When the Rajasthan slot was called, the room went quiet in that particular way it does when someone about to do something expensive and slightly insane is about to do it. He raised his paddle. The number went up. The number went up again. Somewhere in the back row, a journalist stopped typing. When the hammer fell, Modi did not smile. He simply nodded, once, the way a man nods at a chess move he has been calculating for three moves. He walked out of the room, into the Mumbai heat, and pulled out his phone. The first text he sent was two words: 'Pink. Find it.' He never told anyone who he was texting. The colour, though, stuck. It stuck to the stadium, to the scarves, to the faces of children in Jaipur who had never seen a T20 final and now had one to argue about over chai. He had not just bought a team. He had handed a city a colour it would never wash out.

Reader's Guide

Sawai Mansingh Stadium on a match day is a pressure cooker of saffron dust and pink noise. The pitch is that particular Rajasthan tan—dry, cracked at the edges, baking under a sun that does not negotiate. The stands rise in a rough bowl around the oval, and when the Pink Army fills them, the effect is less a crowd than a single organism: ten thousand scarves, ten thousand faces painted in that exact shade of magenta that Modi chose in a boardroom and a city adopted in a heartbeat.

The chants are not the polished, choreographed roars of a European football terrace. They are rougher, more conversational. A section will bellow a player's name—'Yuvraaj! Yuvraaj!'—in a rolling, almost musical cadence, and the opposite stand will answer with a counter-rhythm. Between overs, the air smells of bhujia, of the cumin-and-chili smoke drifting from the food stalls in the lower concourse, of the warm rubber of a hundred pairs of sandals on concrete. Children ride on their fathers' shoulders, small pink flags waving like tiny pennants on a ship's mast.

The pink is not a marketing afterthought. It is a declaration. In a state where the visual language is ochre, cream, and the deep red of henna, that electric magenta is a disruption, a shout. It says: we are not a footnote in someone else's cricket story. The Jaipur crowd does not watch the game the way a Mumbai crowd watches it—analytically, from the safety of a long tradition. They watch it like a festival, like a wedding, like a thing that is happening *to them* and *for them*. When a wicket falls, the groan is communal. When a boundary is struck, the release is physical, almost violent, a thousand bodies leaning forward in unison. The stadium is not a venue. It is a living room the size of a city, and the pink on the walls is the one colour that was chosen, deliberately, to say: this room is ours.

Did You Know?

• Rajasthan Royals won the inaugural IPL title in 2008, making them the first champions of the tournament's history.
• Lalit Modi chose pink as the team's colour specifically because no major cricket franchise in the world had used it, making it uniquely Rajasthan's own.
• The franchise was one of the original eight teams in the 2008 IPL, established during the 2007 franchise auction.
• After his 2013 conviction in the IPL spot-fixing case, the Bombay High Court acquitted Lalit Modi in 2015, clearing his legal record.