By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad
At Sunday’s meeting of the BCCI in Chennai, when it seemed that N Srinivasan would have to bow to the inevitable and resign as board president, he pulled out the oldest trick in the book: a pose of injured innocence. “I have been under terrible pressure,” Srinivasan evidently told the meeting, which had been convened in the context of allegations that his son-in-law and Chennai Super Kings principal Gurunath Meiyappan had been involved in the betting and spot-fixing scandal that has enveloped the IPL.
The media, he said, had been “hounding him as if I am a criminal.” They were even coming after him during his morning walks, and were given to chasing his daughter’s car, he said.
According to media reports, Srinivasan’s story so moved the other members that they “gave him a patient hearing.”
Having notionally won their sympathy, Srinivasan then went on the offensive, questioning the wisdom of the demands for his resignation. “Why should I resign?’ he thundered. He had done nothing wrong, he said, and if his son-in-law “has done something wrong, the law will take its own course and I will accept it.”
Srinivasan’s strategy of going on the offensive appears to have worked well for him. From all accounts, it appears that Srinivasan, who “stepped aside” as BCCI president at the meeting, had his way on practically every one of the demands he set. In any case, he enjoys the confidence of Jagmohan Dalmiya, the man who has been tasked with running the day-to-day affairs of the BCCI until the investigation into the IPL betting and spot-fixing allegations are completed.
Dalmiya’s motives in stepping up to take responsibility of the BCCI in its moment of crisis are not entirely altruistic. He has his own axe to grind, driven principally by his long-standing antipathy towards Agriculture Minister and former BCCI president Sharad Pawar, who was looking to leverage the current crisis to his advantage.
According to an official of the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB), with which Dalmiya has had a long association, Pawar was seen to be leading the campaign against Srinivasan. This gave Dalmiya, who had himself been “humiliated” by Pawar in the past, the elbow room to form an alliance of convenience with Srinivasan to get back in the saddle in order to clear his name.
As the CAB official put it, it was a case of “an enemy of my enemy being my friend”.
In other words, even after Sunday’s developments, no meaningful change has been effected to the BCCI structure, and there is nothing to restore confidence in the board’s readiness to clear up the mess it finds itself in today. As this editorial notes, the prerequisite for any clean-up operation that the BCCI launched in the wake of the spot-fixing scandal was the resignation of Srinivasan. “His move to step aside temporarily questions the BCCI’s willingness to address the issue effectively.”
What the BCCI needed was for the hatchet to be taken to it. What we saw instead on Sunday was some tinkering with a surgeon’s scalpel.
As columnist P Sainath observed, the question of what to do with the BCCI is easily answered. ”Dissolve it. Scrap the BCCI and start afresh. Have a public audit of this body’a activities over the past decade.”
Any organisations that runs the Indian team, he adds, must be accountable to the public and the country in whose name it acts. But the BCCI today is “characterised by its contempt for the public interest” and by the “impunity it could act with” – since it was confident of its power – corporate, political and media.
But the proceedings at Sunday’s meeting have put paid to all such hopes. It appears that for all the show of Srinivasan having “stepped aside” and the pledge to “maintain an arm’s length” from the investigation into the spot-fixing scandal, he will continue to hold sway as a the “non-playing captain”. And given that Dalmiya has formed an alliance of convenience with Srinivasan to advance his own power agenda, nothing has changed from Sunday’s meeting.
The ugly reality, which was validated at Sunday’s meeting, is that nobody is serious about addressing the rot in the BCCI.
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