Supreme Court pushes BCCI to the edge of precipice

The BCCI has come in for more flak and pain in the 'mandatory overs’, as former Mumbai captain Shishir Hattangadi terms it, when the contest against reforms mooted by the Justice Lodha committee reached its closing stages.

The Supreme Court has deferred its final order till October 17, but the unsparing criticism it subjected the BCCI to in the review petition Thursday and Friday suggest that it is unwilling to bend even an inch in its intent to see the reforms through in toto.

If anything, the pitch appears to have been queered further for the BCCI. For one, the SC has disallowed state associations to have any financial transactions (not directly related to everyday conduct of cricket) without first amending its memorandum of associations till the final order is passed.

While this may not seem as complicated considering the brief time frame involved, it is serious admonishment of the BCCI which had released funds to state associations in its last meeting in Mumbai in an effort to keep its flock together, as it were.

Perhaps even more embarrassing is the SC demanding BCCI president Anurag Thakur come clean on a conversation he is purported to have had with David Richardson some time back, allegedly asking the ICC CEO to provide a statement which could influence the courts in the Board’s favour, or some such.
In effect, the SC has tied up the Board in knots for its failure to implement the reforms — or negotiate them — within the original time lines given. That essentially is the crux of the matter.

Fact is the BCCI failed to exploit the time available to it for a cogent rebuttal of what it didn’t think was possible to implement. The reforms mooted by the Lodha committee, sweeping as they are, came more than a year back.

Most were no-brainers which the BCCI should have actually implemented on its own several years earlier.  Some were admittedly contentious, but the BCCI lapsed into a miff instead of trying to resolve matters with strong logic supported by powerful votaries.

For instance, the one state-one association-one vote is fraught with great administrative issues — apart from affecting legacy and continuity — and could have been pursued over a longer time frame rather than with the immediacy the Lodha committee was seeking.

The fact that it is a private society perhaps lulled the BCCI into a false sense of security. In the past, the Board has survived all attempts at interfering in its affairs, but when the IPL controversy erupted in 2013, the mood of the people as well as the judiciary in the country had changed, which the BCCI misjudged.

In not wanting to be abjectly pliable (not ill-founded), the BCCI chose outright defiance, at least on issues that it found irksome, instead of being amenable to reasonable negotiations by sitting across the table in a give and take attitude.
It could be that there have been three BCCI presidents in the past year perhaps hampered a clear-cut, persuasive counter by the establishment.

But attempts to convince the judiciary moved in fits and starts, sometimes all too late. For instance, the support received recently from Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Ravi Shastri on the issue of one state-one vote would have carried a great deal of weight had this come a year earlier: coming as it did a week back, it seemed only an afterthought.

This was unlikely to impress the Lodha committee which had based its reforms speaking to former cricketers (among others associated with the game) in any case. By this time, the judiciary’s position had also hardened to the extent that it had become inflexible.

What the BCCI can do to impress the SC in the10-day window now available till October 17 is anybody’s guess. Unless there is a dramatic and convincing shift in the line of argument, it would appear that the reforms have to be accepted in toto.

Meanwhile, as the BCCI finds itself in the doghouse for misgovernance and other errors of omission and commission, the Indian team has achieved number 1 status in the ICC Test rankings. How’s that for bitter irony?