The cricket board now has a former first-class cricketer as the helm, though this isn’t necessarily a change of guard as one-time Ranji player Anurag Thakur was BCCI secretary and is moving up to the president’s chair as Shashank Manohar “escaped” from Indian cricket to head the ICC. New BCCI secretary Ajay Shirke is an industrialist who once renounced a plum cricket post on principle as he didn’t agree with how the ICC betting scandal was handled by a former president whose son-in-law was found involved in betting from the dugout.
It’s in the wake of the scandal, bringing cricket into the crosshairs of judicial intervention, that the president and secretary had to together face the challenges before the BCCI in the Supreme Court-supervised cleanup. Mr Thakur’s elevation simply means the ruling BJP has a career politician controlling all strings in the board. As both the Prime Minister and BJP chief have been cricket administrators in Gujarat CA, association with cricket is nothing new for the BJP, whose finance minister was also a BCCI bigwig until immersion in politics left him no time for cricket.
The problem for the new office-bearers lies in the Lodha reforms which, if implemented, will change the BCCI’s very structure. Several administrators with vested interests have already quit BCCI, and those in the new setup have little to fear in the proposed reforms like “one state, one vote”. The current officials stand a better chance of cleaning up cricket after the BCCI itself changes with the court’s prodding.
