The confirmation that voice samples forensically match those of Gurunath Meiyappan and an aide captured in wire taps by the Mumbai police further exposes the games that persons connected with IPL cricket teams have been playing. The betting and spot- and match-fixing activities of certain Rajasthan Royals players had already brought cricket’s cash-rich premier league into disrepute.
The fact that owners of cricket teams have also been found to be indulging in questionable activities like betting on matches involving their teams and passing on team information of strategic value, which may have been expertly exploited by bookmakers and high rollers, brings to light how far things had been allowed to descend.
The game of cricket, already hit by periodical revelations of a nexus between bookmakers, mostly involved in an illegal Asian gambling market controlled by underworld forces, and players has come to its lowest ebb. The Supreme Court-appointed probe of the Justice Mudgal Commission represented the best ever opportunity for Indian cricket to get rid of the worst excesses brought on by greed as represented by the best paid cricketers in the world indulging in dubious activities.
Unfortunately, the big brass of the BCCI, which owns and runs the IPL and dominates world cricket by virtue of its financially sound position, only saw the legal angles of the issue and how to wriggle out of it rather than tackle head-on the problem of corruption.
The moral question of a personality with a clear and personal connection to the top administrator of world cricket was never addressed. While there is no reason to believe that the top honcho had anything to do with cricket’s seamy side, the kind of obfuscation the BCCI indulged in before the top court appointed a credible probe committee betrayed its moral bankruptcy.
It was never the board’s intention to clean its stables, which is why the court had to assert its authority, despite the awkwardness of the judiciary in having to take up the cleansing of a sport which once believed it was an allegory for fair play and sportsmanship.
The least the BCCI could have done is to have opened up its internal procedures to judicial scrutiny and run a probe as well as a cleansing campaign on its own authority. It is a comment on the times we live in that an administrator who runs world cricket has no legal sanction now to preside over the BCCI. This was a moral conundrum the board brought on itself.
The only hope now is that the SC will take note of the probe findings, which are to be submitted by the month-end, and pass orders towards setting things right, a task the board refused to do because it refused to accept moral responsibility.
