The Board of Control for Cricket in India has no room left for manoeuvre. Having dominated the sport for close to two decades as the uncrowned monarch of world cricket affairs, the BCCI now finds itself on the backfoot against the might and reach of the Supreme Court. In their wisdom the serving judges as well as the three retired judges they had leaned upon to suggest ways of reforming the BCCI have decided that the arrogant set of administrators must be brought to heel if the board is to progress to clean and transparent administration.
Blood will be spilt, in a manner of speaking, if all the reforms are to be carried out in one go. However, the BCCI was given a long enough rope in a protracted legal battle in which its biggest honchos believed they were above the law and acted in such a manner as to damage BCCI’s credibility when the image of the game itself was in grave danger thanks to scandals on and off the pitch.
The radical restructuring of the structural organisation as well as the strict eligibility rules for officials and their conduct to avoid conflict of interest will lead to a whole new era. Administration heavyweights had built up the BCCI into a powerful monolith impervious to voices of reason from outside. It was in Mr N. Srinivasan’s tenure that it hurtled along like an enraged bull, upending the structure of world cricket itself to satisfy the financial greed and lust for power of Indian officials.
The hiring of expensive lawyers was their only defence because their actions could not be justified regardless of how much they claimed to enrich the Indian cricketer, at the cost of a burgeoning exchequer it must be said. Their stand against the laws of natural justice was sufficient for the edifice to be brought to its knees.
The thirst for reform has so seized the new head of world cricket that Mr Shashank Manohar is today busy undoing the lopsided advantage that the Big Three — India, Australia and England — arrogated to themselves at the cost of an equitable and just way of running an international sport. Far from playing the role of a new world leader, the BCCI was tutoring others to behave like the school bully.
Having once dominated an imperial organisation, they were only too glad to play along with the goose laying the golden eggs. The reforms to be carried out in BCCI and the ICC will hurt while throwing up several paradoxes in a historical context. While an equitable power structure should help the ICC manage the sport in a fair manner, the dismantling of the old power structure in the BCCI will come at a cost. The reform process must, however, be hastened to right the wrongs inflicted by men like Mr Srinivasan.
