Depending on your viewpoint these days, Lalit Modi is either a visionary or a scoundrel. There was a time when he could do no wrong. He conceived the IPL with a vision to make it the richest sports league in the world — no small ambition considering the obscene amounts of money floating around in European football and many American sports leagues — and he almost succeeded. According to Sports Illustrated India, the IPL amassed collective revenues of US $209 million in only its second season, of which $89 million was surplus. Future revenues, combining television and digital rights, gate receipts, advertising, co-branding, and franchise fees are projected in billions.

Modi, who is of Marwari extraction, comes from a long line of astute Rajasthani businesspersons. His grandfather Raj Bahadur Gujarmal Modi founded a business empire that is today worth over $1 billion and includes a number of significant holdings in manufacturing, education, entertainment, textiles, consumer goods, healthcare and air travel. Modi attended elite boarding schools in India and then completed college and got an MBA from the United States.

He is a restless creature whose hunger for business success appears insatiable. Apart from being an executive director in his family's industrial conglomerate, he is credited with bringing Disney Entertainment and the sports network ESPN to India. Around 10 years ago, Modi became involved with cricket administration, making an opening foray into cricket associations at provincial level. This trajectory eventually led him to vice-presidency in the Board of Control for Cricket in India or BCCI, India's equivalent of our PCB.

There is no denying that the IPL, in which eight privately-owned teams with regional identity compete in a seasonal T20 tournament, has been a phenomenon. Many top players from around the world participate, the cricket is liberally garnished with ravishing cheerleaders and glamorous team owners, and a huge audience tunes in. But critics say it is cricket without a soul — the sporting equivalent of rapacious but empty-hearted consumerism that is culturally bereft and intellectually bankrupt.

In Pakistan, observers have been both fascinated and nauseated by the IPL. We warmed to it initially, when several Pakistani players were included and some, such as the left-arm seamer Sohail Tanvir, shined spectacularly. Yet we have also found it gaudy and tasteless. Prem Panicker, an Indian cricket journalist who has been covering the game for decades, was recently quoted in The New York Times as saying that much of the IPL is “smoke and mirrors.” Such views resonate loudly in Pakistan.

Lalit Modi, who created and nurtured the IPL into the darling of India, is now also the man responsible for inviting such scorn. Details are convoluted, but the basic complaint is that his outsized hubris forced him to behave without a conscience. The specific charges cover a wide territory. He is said to have rigged bids when franchises were auctioned, obtained kickbacks in lucrative contracts, given preference to relatives and friends in plush deals (his brother-in-law, for example, was given mobile and digital rights for the IPL), and is also accused of personal stakes in some of the teams that are silently held through offshore entities. A report in The Times of India even claimed there was evidence of match-fixing in the IPL, and an investigation is underway.

As always in these sagas, the spark that lit the original fire seems to have been so unnecessary and avoidable. It was a clash between Lalit Modi and the junior external affairs minister Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed writer and noted UN personality who has many outsized achievements of his own.

Ostensibly, the conflict had to with Modi accusing Tharoor of inappropriate collusion in the bid for a new team to join the IPL. But if you watched closely, you got a sense that something more visceral was at play. Tharoor is suave, handsome, and articulate — which is more than can be said for Modi. He also has a soft corner for Pakistan, having co-authored a cricket book with ex-PCB chief Shaharyar Khan that was published after the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11. It is easy to imagine Modi being incensed with the overall Tharoor package. The dust-up quickly ballooned into an incendiary scandal that caused all eyes to be fixated on the IPL and its underbelly — eyes that belong to a probing media, income tax investigators and Modi's own detractors in the Indian cricket board who had been lurking for a chance to jump at his jugular.

Naturally, Pakistani fans are watching Modi squirm with not a small amount of satisfaction. The IPL had never seemed particularly Pakistan-friendly. As far as Pakistanis are concerned, its true colours were apparent when Pakistani players were embarrassed at the players' auction last year, a boorish act that has left a bitter taste that just won't go away. Modi's finessing of the situation won him no friends across the border.

The man, nevertheless, is a tremendous fighter and survivor and it is likely that the final word on this crisis may not be written for a while. For now, the lesson is that all that glitters is not gold. At least Pakistani fans can take heart that theirs is not the only benighted cricket enterprise.