The IPL Crisis
‘The dictator is dead.’
‘Who’s going to tell him?’
This old joke about the two flunkies of a deceased generalissimo has been on my mind ever since the Indian Premier League was plunged into crisis ten days ago by the arrest of Chennai Super Kings’ ‘team principal’ Gurunath Meiyappan on gambling, cheating and conspiracy charges.
The president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Narayamaswami Srinivasan, has long maintained that his association with the Super Kings represents no conflict, because it is not he who owns it, but his family company India Cements. But exuberant Meiyappan was swanning round the Super Kings’ dug-out, and purportedly acting as both a bookmaker’s client and source, for no reason other than that he was Srinivasan’s son-in-law. And Srinivasan’s airy response that Meiyappan was merely a ‘young enthusiast’ convinced no-one, being belied by virtually every known fact, including those on the Super Kings’ website. That India Cements notionally stood between the BCCI president and the IPL’s richest and most successful franchise could at last be seen for what it was: a distinction without a difference.
The question then became who would advise world cricket’s most powerful man that even he could not brazen out this dispute. Srinivasan was taking no cues from the media, telling one television journalist who reached him: ‘Shut up. Just shut up. I will fix the whole lot of you.’ And ‘fix’ is not a word lightly bandied at the moment.
It fell to BCCI secretary Sanjay Jagdale and treasurer Ajay Shirke who by their resignations on Friday belatedly conveyed their displeasure at Srinivasan’s clinging to the windowsills. Having stepped aside last night at the BCCI working committee meeting at Chennai’s Park Sheraton for the duration of investigations, he finds himself with questions to which it will no longer suffice simply to repeat: ‘I have done nothing wrong.’
In a blogpost yesterday, for example, the venerable former BCCI president Inderjit Bindra, who now acts as adviser to the ICC, asserted that it has been a custom in Srinivasan’s time for India Cements to send an employee with the Indian team wherever it goes, home and abroad. ‘Now think of this,’ wrote Bindra, ‘it means that these people are outsiders and are not subject to the ICC Code of Conduct. They are also out of the BCCI’s purview.
‘These people are privy to the Indian team’s strategy meetings and dressing room deliberations and they have access to all classified information. India Cement nominees are not BCCI officials/employees. The precedent of a private company involved in intimate cricket insider information is highly controversial and has some serious and thought-provoking implications.’
Perhaps this has a completely innocent explanation. Perhaps the ‘nominee’ is available in case players have any cement questions. Perhaps he has been on hand to periodically reinforce The Wall, Rahul Dravid. But in order for a thorough investigation of these and other matters, Srinivasan really can have no connection with the BCCI, even vestigially. And, frankly, the ICC should see to it – which it would if it had any authority at all, although it doesn’t, so it won’t.
No, once again, cricket is confronted with the implications of having become a plaything of India’s commercial, political and media elites. For Srinivasan’s eclipse, which also follows Saturday’s resignation of IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla, will leave a colossal power vacuum.
Srinivasan’s moods and motives dominated ICC. He was able to block the governance reform urged there last year by consultant Lord Woolf, a former chief justice of England and Wales, by sniffing that he didn’t need the advice of an English lawyer. He was free to foist a BCCI stooge on the ICC’s cricket committee in place of the Federation of International Cricket Association’s trenchant Tim May. But at least with Srinivasan ensconced, everyone knew whose sanction was needed for any major initiative, especially given his ill-concealed designs on the post of chairman of the ICC to be established next year.
Now the lines of patronage and influence will need re-establishing. Global administrators and Indian commentators alike have been on tenterhooks, waiting to learn to whom they will need to suck up. It turned out to be Jagmohan Dalmiya, the old Marwari warhorse from Kolkata, who survived his own wilderness period at the BCCI six years ago after being banned ‘for life’ for corruption. Turns out there are second acts in the lives of Indian cricket administrators – and that is a problem.
The one candidate the Indian cricket system never turns up is the fresh face from outside the Indian game’s self-perpetuating ruling caste who has a passionate interest in turning the BCCI into a credible organisation where cricket’s welfare is paramount. If the BCCI proves incapable of reform, however, a further possibility exists: a political appointee. In which case, we may eventually be waxing nostalgic about Srinivasan.
Even assuming Srinivasan is pure as the driven six, there is also the question of what to do with the Super Kings, bellwether of the world’s evolving T20 circuit, round whom an air of malfeasance now swirls thickly. In the past, the BCCI has cut adrift two franchises, Kochi Tuskers Kerala and Deccan Chargers, for technical breaches of IPL rules (a third, Pune Warriors, has just severed the tie itself). What penalty befits these apparently far darker misdeeds, given their commission by Meiyappan, wont to refer to himself as ‘owner’ of the Super Kings and inclined to behave like one, whether attending team strategy meetings or bidding for players at auction?
Not only can Srinivasan have no say in the disciplinary process round the Super Kings, he cannot be suspected of a say. This will prove difficult to engineer for as long as his withdrawal is deemed temporary. That’s the thing about dictators. When they purport to stand down, it’s usually as a prelude to their standing up even taller.
The Australian, June 2013