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HomeNewsLong detested control of BCCI by schemers: Ramachandra Guha (Book Review)

Long detested control of BCCI by schemers: Ramachandra Guha (Book Review)

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New Delhi, Feb 4 : Ramachandra Guha is one of Indias most respected contemporary historians and has been a cricket fanatic since his formative years – he is now 62 – and a harsh critic of the BCCI for the “shady nature if its financial operations” – accentuated by the IPL. Thus, when he laments that when his attempts to clean up the Augean Stables, as it were, were stymied by the other members of the Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators (COA) of which he was a member prompted him to quit and that the situation was returning to “normal” – its time to sit up and take notice.
“There was no trace of ambivalence in how I saw the apex body of the game in India, the Board of Control for Cricket in India. I had long detested the control over the BCCI of scheming politicians and self-important ex-Maharajas. The shady nature of its financial operations stank. Then the Indian Premier League began, and the BCCI’s operations became even more dodgy,” Guha writes in “The Commonwealth Of Cricket” (HarperCollins).
The book works at two levels – his “lifelong affair with the most subtle and sophisticated game known to humankind” and his BCCI stint that lasted just five months but the pain it caused has led him to devote two of the book’s 11 chapters or some 80 of its 347 pages to this episode.
Guha is, however, happy that his resignation helped bring two “superstars” of the game down to earth and end their “conflict of interests” with the game.
The Supreme Court had appointed the COA in January 2017 after a committee headed by former Chief Justice of India R.M. Lodha, acting on the findings of another committee headed by Justice Mukul Mudgal, formerly of the Delhi High Court, had recommended far-reaching reforms in the country’s cricket administration in the wake of the match fixing scandal centering around the son-in-law of then BCCI President N. Srinivasan erupted in 2013.
In appointing the COA, headed by Vinod Rai, a former Comptroller and Auditor General of India, and its members – Guha, Diana Eduljee, who, during her time, had taken women’s cricket to new heights, and banker Vikram Limaye – the Supreme Court dismissed the then BCCI President, Anurag Thakur, now the junior finance minister at the centre, for obstructing justice.

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