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[email protected] Sorting India: It’s as Tough as it Sounds I s it legal in India to play rummy for stakes? This is the question before the highest court in the land, and simple as it sounds on the face of it, we’re talking about India, a virtual continent unto itself, a nation so large and of such mind-bending complexity, nothing is ever simple. Depending on how the court decides to wrestle with it— and it’s never an issue that has generated a clear answer, not to mention one that hasn’t been contradicted by lots of other answers—the implications for the future of gambling in the second most populous country on Earth are likely to be enormous. Same as everywhere else, gambling is immensely popular in India—a US$60 billion market, conservatively estimated—and conducted with aplomb at all levels of society, and in India these are many. The laws governing it are anything but uniform, although they are almost uniformly hostile, which is about the same as everywhere else, too, so it mostly goes on in a vast gray realm with some touches of black and white around the edges. The surface question before the Supreme Court is whether a private club in Chennai was running a “common gaming house,” a no-no, broadly speaking, since the days of the British Raj, by allowing its members to bet against each other at rummy. Police raided the club back in 2011 and issued fines. The club went to court and won an exemption on the grounds that rummy isn’t gambling but a game of skill. It’s an age-old plaint, of course, and one that’s still hotly disputed in online and land-based jurisdictions the world over, mainly with regard to poker. But this one didn’t end there. The Madras High Court took the matter on in a very pointed fashion by resorting to a 45-year-old ruling out of the state of Andhra Pradesh on the skill- versus-chance question only to break with it by declaring that skill and chance aren’t the issues: money changed hands and therefore the club effectively was operating an illegal gaming house. The club appealed to the Supreme Court, which may well choose to limit its ruling to this specific case and the specific circumstances relevant to it—in other words, it may do what legal minds are inclined to do and draw more lines across a page that’s pretty marked up as it is, with 29 states and seven federally administered territories all regulating gambling under different, often conflicting, laws and enforcing them in conflicting ways, severely at times and sometimes not at all. Or the justices could take the rare opportunity to say something definitive about skill and chance. They could, in effect, define what constitutes gambling in India and thereby provide some urgently needed guidance on what is legal and what is not. This is the great elephant in the room, if you’ll pardon the expression, and to finally deal with it would be huge, and not only as it pertains to a national market that is flooded with purveyors of rummy, both of the terrestrial and online variety. It could persuade the federal government, which has been no help to date, of the need to impose some kind of order on the anarchy. The country is also flooded with online poker and sports betting sites, many of them run by major names of the likes of William Hill and Poker Stars and bet365, and they have an obvious and quite considerable stake in this as well, as do the thousands of clubs like the one in Chennai, which could become mini-casinos for all intents and purposes. Believe it or not, the prevailing federal statute dates back to 1867, you know, when the sun never set and all that. Everybody knows it’s obsolete. Nobody does anything about it. Well, almost nobody. The Law Commission of India, a body of experts that advises the central government’s Union Law Ministry, is in the process of reviewing a passel of colonial-era laws still on the books to recommend which ones to repeal. The Public Gaming Act, as it’s titled, is one. The key point about that decades-old Andhra Pradesh ruling is that it was unequivocal. Rummy isn’t gambling, it said, therefore the state’s ban on “common gaming houses” didn’t apply. The High Court in Madras couldn’t ignore this. It had to strike a line through it, and a bold one at that. Interestingly enough, not six months later, an online poker case came before the Delhi District Court, which wanted so badly to come down against poker as a game of skill that it said there is no such thing as “skill” on a computer. So the Supreme Court has its challenges cut out for it, and it has asked the federal government to weigh in by contributing a brief, which may indicate that it indeed intends to confront them.