Cleaning the BCCI stable
You don’t say!
Darius Nakhoonwala
Much emotion has been vented by leader writers on the Supreme Court judgement on the Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI). All have welcomed it because they think, perhaps rightly, that it has freed Indian cricket from the greed of BCCI’s office-bearers.
But I wish they had done just a little homework to explain to readers, even if only in a sentence that said it is feudal, how the BCCI is set up. Basically, it was designed at a time (1928) when the British wanted to ensure that Indians would not have a say in running it.
So they created a body that was virtually self-perpetuating, rather like India International Centre. Then a system of elections was introduced for electing office bearers. That opened the way for patronage for proxy voting from the state cricket associations. Then came TV and big money, which led to the capture of the BCCI by crooked politicians and businessmen.
Inevitably after this, came the Indian Premier League. It was custom-built for big money and big betting. The sums involved in every aspect of the IPL were mind-boggling. The stage was thus set for an N. Srinivasan - it could well have been someone else like him – to enter stage right. He effected what economists call vertical and horizontal integration.
He has now been kicked out. There is relief all around.
The Hindu, in a needlessly long-winded edit (I will not inflict its verbosity on you), said the ruling “marks the beginning of what ought to be a long process of cleaning up a game that... is struggling to preserve its purity in an era of unbridled commercialism... the verdict addresses the BCCI’s credibility deficit in more ways than one...”
The Times of India was pithy and it got to the heart of the positive aspect of the judgment. “The Court also rejected the board’s defence that it was a private body, ruling that as repository of the faith of India’s cricket public, BCCI’s functions “are public functions, amenable to judicial law”.
Yes, precisely. That indeed is the new principle which will clean up other sports as well which are run by fiefdoms.
The Pioneer said it simply: "The Court has struck down the amendment to Rule 6.2.4 of the IPL which allowed the clash of interest. It is this action that makes the verdict a landmark one, and it will go a long way in cleansing Indian cricket, which has been beset since the amendment came into being in September 2008...It has shattered the cocoon of privacy that the BCCI had managed to maintain all these years on the pretext that it was not a state organisation that should be put to public scrutiny. While the bench did not declare the BCCI as a government body, it clearly stated that “the functions of the board are clearly public functions…no matter discharged by a society registered under the Registration of Societies Act."
The Economic Times also got it right. It said: "The import does not lie as much in the court’s ruling that Srinivasan cannot contest elections for the post again, or that his son-in-law and another individual were involved in betting, but in the constituting of a panel to propose sweeping reforms in the BCCI."
For reasons unknown, the Indian Express and the Hindustan Times did not write edits.
The Telegraph, after whole-heartedly endorsing the judgement, decided to rail at the Court itself: "There are, however, a couple of points that can be made even while agreeing with the judgment of the Supreme Court. The first of these relates to the time that has been taken by the Supreme Court to arrive at this ruling. There is no understandable reason for this...The other point relates to expectations from a Supreme Court... With due humility, The Telegraph would like to suggest that 'conflict of interest' was one issue on which the apex court could have made an intellectual point since there is so much of that prevalent in so many spheres in India.”
My question: was this the right edit to raise this issue? Should not the paper have written another one on it?
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