When Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Vishwanath other India cricketers were spooked by Madhavrao Scindia's prank
And so, the senior Congress leader and scion of the erstwhile Gwalior royal family staged a “dacoity” to spook the cricketers, including Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Vishwanath and Erapalli Prasanna.
The anecdote, on the time the cricketers had been invited to play an exhibition match in Gwalior, is recounted in senior journalist Rasheed Kidwai’s recently released book “The House of Scindias: A Saga of Power, Politics and Intrigue”.
It focuses not just on the history of the Scindias but also gives people a peek into the palace politics, intrigues and convictions of the Scindia household over generations. Madhavrao was not just a well-loved Congress leader and a former Union minister. He wore many other hats and would often take time off for a round of golf or don a pair of flannels to play cricket, his greatest passion, says the book published by Roli Books.
The story goes that on a rest day during the exhibition match in Gwalior, Madhavrao decided to take his guests to Shivpuri for a ‘shikar’ trip (hunting was permitted then).
“At midnight, when the players had gone to bed, they heard gunshots and found themselves surrounded by ‘dacoits’ who said they would ‘kidnap’ them. All the members of the party were asked to get inside jeeps and hand over their belongings,” Kidwai writes.
Viswanath and Prasanna were in particular petrified and started howling, saying they were part of the Indian Test cricket team and the country needed them, according to the book.
