'Behind Bars' — A Former India Spinner Wants Chahal in Jail, Not Fined

The IPL's vaping scandal has been escalating for weeks. Riyan Parag got caught on live television. Chahal got caught on a teammate's vlog. The BCCI responded with fines, warnings, and a seven-page advisory that promised zero tolerance. But nobody — not the board, not the franchises, not the media circus — had actually said the quiet part out loud.

Laxman Sivaramakrishnan did.

The former India leg-spinner, who played 9 Tests and 16 ODIs and now works as a commentator and cricket administrator, posted on X with a bluntness that makes the BCCI's advisory look like a permission slip. His argument is simple: vaping is banned in India under the Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes Act (PECA) 2019. It's not a grey area. It's not a matter of interpretation. It is a cognisable offence — meaning police can arrest without a warrant. So why is the conversation still about match fees?

Sivaramakrishnan's post is uncomfortable because it's unanswerable. If a regular passenger on that same IndiGo flight had been caught vaping, the crew would have filed a report, the DGCA would have been notified, and the individual would face action under aviation safety regulations updated in February 2026 that explicitly ban vaping on domestic flights. There would be no PR team managing the optics. No vlog getting quietly trimmed. No internal warning presented as accountability.

Chahal is not a regular passenger. He's one of the highest-paid leg-spinners in the IPL, travelling with a franchise that has a media team, a compliance officer, and a head coach named Ricky Ponting. And the response to an alleged in-flight offence was to warn the player, ban the vlogger who accidentally captured it, and move on.

The DGCA has confirmed it is aware of the incident and that smoking and vaping are strictly prohibited on domestic flights under its updated guidelines. Whether they actually launch a formal investigation remains unclear — but the fact that an aviation safety regulator is even in the conversation tells you this has gone well beyond cricket's jurisdiction to fix internally.

There's a reason Sivaramakrishnan's intervention matters more than a typical social media outburst. The Parag incident happened in a dressing room — embarrassing, unprofessional, but contained within cricket's ecosystem. Chahal allegedly vaped on a commercial aircraft with other passengers on board. That's not just a breach of IPL protocol. It's potentially a violation of the Aircraft (Security) Rules and the Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes Act simultaneously.

Under DGCA's February 2026 guidelines, smoking and vaping on domestic flights are explicitly banned. Cabin crew are supposed to report violations. Airlines are supposed to file incident reports. The fact that this surfaced through a YouTube vlog rather than an airline report raises its own set of questions about whether IndiGo even followed its own procedures — or whether the celebrity of the passengers involved created a blind spot.

The BCCI's own advisory, issued barely 24 hours before the clip went viral, explicitly stated that vaping within the tournament ecosystem was "not merely a breach of IPL protocol but also a cognisable offence under the applicable statutory framework." The board wrote those words. Then the board's enforcement of those words was: a warning for Chahal and a content ban for Arshdeep.

Sivaramakrishnan's most devastating line isn't "behind bars." It's his follow-up: "What if a regular person had done this?" That question cuts through every press release, every advisory, every PR-managed response. Because the answer is obvious. A regular person would face consequences. A cricketer earning crores faces a warning.

This isn't unique to Indian cricket. Professional athletes across every major sport exist in a bubble where consequences are mediated by commercial value. But the IPL's version of this problem is particularly acute because the league is still fighting to establish credibility as a self-governing institution. You can't issue seven-page advisories warning about honey traps, match-fixing, and banned substances while simultaneously treating an alleged criminal offence as an internal HR matter.

IPL founder Lalit Modi, who has spent the season sniping at the BCCI from the sidelines, weighed in by welcoming the board's advisory while maintaining that "zero tolerance is the only mantra." Coming from the man who was himself banned from cricket for life by the BCCI, the irony is as thick as it is deliberate. But broken clocks are right twice a day, and Modi's central argument — that the IPL's anti-corruption and disciplinary framework has been hollowed out — is getting harder to dismiss with every passing week.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Sivaramakrishnan is likely to be proven right in his implied prediction — that nothing meaningful will happen. Chahal will continue playing for Punjab Kings. The DGCA may or may not file a formal report. IndiGo will not publicly address whether its crew noticed anything unusual. The BCCI will point to its advisory as evidence of institutional seriousness while the advisory's actual enforcement record stands at zero.

PBKS play Delhi Capitals tomorrow in Dharamsala. Chahal will probably bowl his four overs of leg-spin. Nobody in the commentary box will mention the words "criminal offence." The match will generate its own narratives, its own controversies, its own content. And this story — a former India cricketer demanding that another cricketer face the same law as every other citizen — will be quietly filed under "awkward questions the IPL prefers not to answer."

Sivaramakrishnan didn't ask for a bigger fine. He didn't ask for a longer ban. He asked why the law that applies to 1.4 billion Indians apparently doesn't apply to the 200-odd who play in the IPL. Until the BCCI or the DGCA provides an answer, the question will keep echoing — not because it's complicated, but because it's simple.