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By Kirti Azad
Like a cantankerous child whose toy has been forcibly taken away, the Indian cricket board (BCCI) has been throwing tantrums and almost questioning the power of the Supreme Court to “interfere” with the governance of what they claim is a wholly private society.
Just look at the kind of people who are complaining! The Haryana Cricket Association was taken over during the Emergency by Haryana strongman Bansi Lal; over the decades, his son (Ranbir Singh Mahendra) and grandson (Anirudh Chaudhry) have controlled HCA. Thus, in effect, HCA is a family-owned company in which no cricketer can even become a member, let alone becoming an office-bearer. Who can forget the meeting in 1994 where the legendary Kapil Dev and several other cricketers were almost manhandled and thrown out by Mahendra’s henchmen in Chandigarh?
Is it any wonder that each of the 21 districts in Haryana gets a measly Rs 1 lakh a year as grant when the BCCI gives HCA Rs 35 crore as subvention money every year?
Huge grants
As in the Delhi and Districts Cricket Association (DDCA), where hundreds of crores of rupees have been swindled and defalcated, practically no state association can properly account for the massive sums of money that were given to them over the last decade. Most of them do not even have a proper stadium despite gobbling up tons of money.
Interestingly, the senior counsel of HCA, who passionately spoke about the contribution of the Bansi Lal family since 1975, is himself part of the system: he himself represented Haryana and now his son is captaining the Haryana Under-16 team — and their performances as cricketers are not even worth mentioning.
The Saurashtra Cricket Association has been run by Niranjan Shah who, according to his counsel, used to have a stationery shop 42 years ago when he got into SCA. Claiming the credit for producing Salim Durrani, Ravindra Jadeja and Cheteshwar Pujara, Shah wants the proposed age-limit of 70 years on officials and the nine-year re-election embargo to be dropped. The officials don’t want change — status quo suits them fine. They only need to get 15 states/votes to control all power, money and positions in the states and BCCI. The politicians can make a mockery of the election process. Just swing three central votes — Universities, Services and Railways — and add the captive 11 votes from Kolkata, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, and you’re in charge of BCCI!
The state associations can teach even the politicians how to rig elections. Membership is rigged and elections are manipulated. In Delhi, proxy voting is thoroughly abused with multiple members even residing at the residences of the office-bearers. Twenty-four office-bearers control nearly 4,200 out of the 4,300 proxy votes.
Over the last few weeks in the Supreme Court, the associations of Maharashtra, Baroda, Punjab and Haryana have added a new dimension to their brazenness by claiming that the Lodha Committee’s recommendations were only recommendations — nothing more!
The executive functionaries are all honorary office-bearers with most of the top state cricket associations being run by a politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists, petty shopkeepers, tailors, drapers, stationery shop owners.
Politicians in BCCI
The most contentious issue seems to be the Lodha Committee’s recommendations on politicians, who occupy top positions in BCCI. Already resentful of any such move, a lot of members in BCCI have already started saying it is tough to ensure that only ex-players can prove to be good administrators.
In fact, they claim that the politicians are required to get clearances from local government and having politicians at the helm helps them get clearances easily. We have seen how a file pertaining to the demolition orders for an unauthorized block in Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi was kept hanging in various courts for 19 years, and no action was taken despite the Delhi High Court’s orders.
Institutional integrity is a term that is alien to BCCI. Politicians seeking glamour, completely lacking any knowledge of cricket administration, have destroyed the concept of accountability in BCCI. The very fact that the Supreme Court has had to step in shows the rot in the BCCI’s and its units’ functioning. Having seen all state associations clamouring for relaxing the age and tenure criteria, the Chief Justice of India rightly quipped: “Are all these guys indispensable and that there is no one else to step into their shoes? The cemeteries the world over are full of people who were once indispensable.” It is time that these people moved over.
Kirti Azad is a former India all-rounder and Member of Parliament
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