Cricket took so much enormous popularity in India due to historical reasons and due to luck.
India won World Cup in Cricket exactly at the time when Colour Television had started (1982) and TVs were getting accessible to the masses. This gave renewed interest in the game, and the rest is history.
While Hockey and Football are both action-packed games and get unrivalled attention from most of the countries of the world, Cricket is limited to the British-ruled countries, and among them too, not many take it seriously.
Both games have their own merit, but we must not forget that winning a Hockey World Cup has much more credibility than winning a Cricket World Cup - due to the intensity of competition involved.
You might remember that Olympic Hockey was entirely dominated by India for several decades of the 20th Century, but in the 2nd half of 20th Century, more and more countries joined Olympic Hockey and India started losing its champion status - more and more aggressive competition.
