A five-corner fight in Maharashtra has left voters spoilt for choice but bookies, who sense that the contest is too wide open and could cause unaffordable losses, have decided to abstain from accepting any bets for the Assembly polls beginning October 15.
“This is probably for the first time in the last 15 years that we have decided not to accept bets on an Assembly election,” a Mumbai-based bookie told The Hindu . “The decision was unanimously taken last week at a meeting held in Delhi between top bookies from Jaipur, Gujarat, Delhi and Kolkata,” he said.
According to another top bookie based in Navi Mumbai, the rates for the elections “were to be declared” on September 25; on the very day, however, the Bharatiya Janata Party announced that it would go it alone in the polls and the NCP, later on in the day, followed suit and snapped its alliance with the Congress. The bookies, he said, had played “a wait and watch game” for a couple of days but as parties remained firm on their decisions to contest alone, they decided to give the polls a complete miss. The reason: with five major parties contesting for almost all the seats, the odds offered would be too large and it would be too difficult to predict the winner.
“Electorate votes differently in State elections. The margins are very small. There are certain constituencies where we could predict an alliance to win but now it is thrown open to all. The loss was pegged to over Rs.10,000 crore and, therefore, we decided it would be better to stay away,” he said. However, during the Lok Sabha polls the bookies had made a cool profit of around Rs.5,000 crore and were hoping for a repeat during the State polls.
Bets of around Rs.350 crore were accepted in Mumbai alone. “Mumbai generates a lot of interest and the local punters bet heavily. We were getting inquiry [till as late as] October 1,” he said.
However another Thane-based bookie claimed that small-time bookies may accept bets on an individual basis.
Throwing some light on how the business operates, a bookie explained that the rates were conveyed to punters mostly over phone. Most of them are mobile and operate from moving cars to evade arrest. The police agencies on their part put their mobile numbers on surveillance.
The illegal business is an offshore syndicate where money is accepted and returned through hawala transactions.
For every paisa a punter bets on a winning party, he gets a rupee.
In India, betting is illegal but with no stringent laws in place, the arrested bookies manage to procure bail easily, a senior Mumbai police officer claimed.
