The sweeping reforms ordered by the SC for the BCCI are a victory for cricket, which is very special to millions of Indians.The change will not only help professionalise the administration of cricket but also rid it of several old administrators who had converted the board into a fiefdom and ruled over it like ancient monarchs, dispensing favours to member associations and their office-bearers and willy-nilly making up rules to perpetuate their hold. The seriousness with which the top court viewed the task of cleansing the BCCI after appointing two committees headed by retired judges also showed the extent of the rot.
The arrogance of some top administrators had led things to such a pass that the BCCI had begun acting as if it was above the law. Hiring expensive lawyers to keep the matter pending in court, the honchos were enjoying their terms in office. The contribution of the southern strongman N. Srinivasan, who headed the BCCI as well as the ICC, in bringing matters to such a head was immense. Such was his hubris that he continually defied top court orders — he not only attended a working committee meeting he was asked to abstain from, but also presided over it — even when he was under a cloud after his son-in-law was caught and jailed for betting on IPL matches. Mr Srinivasan’s “conflict of interest” in also owning an IPL team was the crux of the issue the court found to be an abominable breach of cardinal principles.
The acceptance of a majority of the Justice Lodha panel’s recommendations on BCCI reforms demonstrates how ingrained the problem had become. While the age cap on administrators, fixed at 70, would affect only a few top BCCI men, the regulations governing future terms of office-bearers are likely to trigger the process of getting today’s marketing, administrative and accounting professionals to run the game while the elected representatives decide policy. The drafting of a CAG nominee would ensure that money — the BCCI calls it subventions — given to member associations is spent on the game and its infrastructure rather than frittered away in an elaborate favour system tied to voting.
The reforms will help bring about transparency, followed by accountability, laughable concepts in the old opaque system. The top honchos, all said to be doing an honorary job, were answerable to none. They also played along with the historical mistakes of granting affiliation to non-state entities; this will be corrected in the principled “one state, one vote” system to be put in place. The fear of a “loss of ego, status, power or resources” of a few had stymied any talk of reform, as the CJ, delivering the 143-page order, remarked. He, his fellow judge and the four retired judges who analysed BCCI have rendered a signal service to cricket.
