Duality of office and position in BCCI

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Cosy private club gets cosier

The chairman of the Indian cricket selection committeeKrish Srikkanth is also the brand ambassador for IPL team ChennaiSuper Kings. The owner of Chennai Super Kings similarly is thesecretary of the BCCI. He will be taking over as president of thecricket board this September as it is south's turn by rotation to getthe job. This duality of office and position is not helping Indiancricket, is it? If office for profit could trip Mrs Sonia Gandhiwhere she needed to resign from her parliamentary seat, then by thesame yardstick, this duality of office and position should not beallowed in the cricket board. Yes, Caesar's wife was above suspicion,but the board is an autonomous body which has been registered as acharitable organisation in Chennai itself, so it reckons that it isabove the law. Registered as a society under the aegis of the TamilNadu Societies Act, it operates like a private club. Should the board,even if it is a private consortium, be allowed to have administratorswho double up as beneficiaries and financial dependents? Ever sinceIPL came on to the scene, it has queered the pitch within the board,fissures have deepened and the might is right principle remainsdominant. Intra board politics is nothing knew, remember JagmohanDalmiya's bitter feud with Sharad Pawar and the latter's embarrassingdefeat. The board works on a simple rule - votes. There are 27associations and each vote is worth its weight in gold. A headycocktail of industrialists, politicians and administrators havedominated board presidentships over the last 50 years. Transparencyhave never been its greatest virtue. But in the recent past, thisconfluence of business and commercial interests and cricket boardadministration is getting murkier and messier.
Recently a curious turn of events took place in the Madras High Court.PTI reported that the Madras High Court declined to interfere with anamendment ofits regulations by Indian Cricket Board, excluding IPL and T-20tournaments conducted by it, from the purview of its rules allegedlyto 'favour' its secretary and India Cements managing director NSrinivasan who is the franchisee of Chennai Super Kings T-20 squad.
While this case was filed by former BCCI president A C Mutiah andcould well be mirroring the internecine sniping in Tamil Nadu CricketAssociation, it threw into stark relief the way our cricket boardfunctions and acts. The High Court dismissed appeals filed byindustrialist and former BCCI president A C Muthiah challenging theamendment to clause 6.2.4 of the Board'sregulations, a Division Bench comprising Justices D Murugesan and MSathyanarayanan held that they found "absolutely no merit tointerfere" with a single judge's order turning down Muthiah's plea toset aside the amendment.Contending that the amendment excluding IPLand T-20 tournaments from the purview of the Board''s regulation was"illegal and opposed to public policy", Muthiah said that under theunamended clause no administrator of BCCI could have, directly orindirectly, any commercial interest in the matches or events conductedby the Board.
The PTI story unfortunately was not picked up by national media.During the course of arguments, Muthiah''s counsel, senior advocateNalini Chidambaram, had submitted "the new regulation was brought inonly to favour N Srinivasan". The Bench said a careful reading of theplaint indicated that all the averments were aimed at only Srinivasanand Muthiah had sent two complaints to BCCI President on September 5,2008, and Septmber 19, 2008. In the complaints, Muthiah had notmentioned that he was making the complaints in the capacity of theBoard''s past president. Mutiah was BCCI boss between 1999 and 2001.The concerns that he has raised are significant because the duality ofbeing an administrator in the board and as a corollary a beneficiaryof the BCCI's largesse every once in a while is an issue that some oneneeds to deal with.Readers may well remember that the BCCI chose to compensate just twoteams for the cancellation of the inaugural Champions League Twenty20of 2008. Rajasthan Royals, who were winners of season 1and the ChennaiSuper Kings, who finished as finalists in the same edition werecompensated $5 million, approximately Rs 22 crore, for thecancellation of the Champions League T20 last year due to the 26/11terror attacks in Mumbai.However, none of the other foreign participating teams - Victoria andWestern Australia (Australia), and Titans and Dolphins (South Africa),Middlesex (England), and Sialkot Stallions (Pakistan) - are eligibleto any form of compensation from the BCCI or the IPL. This againshowed Srinivasan and Modi's (whose brother in law Suresh Chellaram islead owner of RR) clout and influence within the board. Modi has sincefallen out with Srinivasan and despite repeated denials that all iswell between the two, finds himself in a corner with BCCI presidentManohar and Srinivasan using every opportunity to cut him to size.
Anyway, these events once again point out to the fact that the BCCI isa cosy club. The Srinivasan-Srikkanth combine have also been accusedof being partial to state players like Murali Vijay and S Badrinath,but I don't want to go there because Indian cricket has been litteredwith instances of regional parochialism and bias. Somehow the riddledwith controversies zonal selection system is responsible for thismalaise. The sports ministry and International Olympic Committee arebattling the Indian cricket board on different issues, yet the BCCIseems to be trumping both repeatedly due to its naked money power. Theway the BCCI has managed to subjugate cricket's apex body - ICC - isalso worth noting. With the spectators and commerce available inabundance in India, the BCCI can get away with blue murder at themoment. The question is for how long? People like Muthiah are not thetype to let sleeping dogs lie, he will make more attempts todestabilise Srinivasan, just as Srinivasan will do the same to Modi.This game of dominoes should get more interesting when Srinivasanascends the throne of the BCCI. Will Pawar who by then will become ICCboss be able to circumvent Srinivasan's designs against Modi is whatwe are waiting to see.