UNCHARTED -TERRITORY
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well, there are fears that the unremitting legal overreach into the affairs of Indian cricket might end up harming the long-term interests of the sport, rather than eliminate the scope for wrong-doing. At a time when India has established supremacy in the cricketing world, at a time when a new crop of talented players has ensured a smooth generational change, a wholesale reordering of the BCCI is bound to cause avoidable disruption. The argument of jurisdiction advanced by the BCCI has not been addressed. Registered under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act way back in the late 1920s, strictly speaking what the Supreme Court is doing to the BCCI is debatable. The right forum to agitate an assumed or real grievance remains the Company Law Board. Period. Given that it is the highest court in the land, the SC has no doubt the freedom to stretch its jurisdiction far beyond the one prescribed in the Constitution. But it must be said that in the name of Public Interest Litigation, the court has not only expanded its writ beyond what are traditionally delineated roles and functions, but, in several cases, into an uncharted territory.
Legal purists will certainly cavil at this judicial excess, but because the public holds the other branches of the constitutional order in rather dim light, higher judiciary has expanded its own sphere of influence. Thus you have had the court determine the height of a controversial hydro power dam or the viability of a road widening project, or the height of a human pyramid in Mumbai when the task, strictly speaking, belongs to the local fire department or the police, etc, etc.
Judges need to prove worthy of the high respect in which, they believe, society holds them, instead of relying on the disenchantment of the people with other limbs of the state to indulge in grandstanding. In this respect, we can do no better than draw the attention of the honourable justices to the almost daily verbal gems emanating from the retired SC judge Markendeya Katju.
To return to cricket, granted that what N. Srinivasan, the former czar of BCCI, did was inexcusable. There was a clear conflict of interest in his case, which the apex court did well to penalise. But must it use the PIL filed by a disgruntled official of a state cricket body to ride roughshod over the entire edifice of Indian cricket? In its bid to implement the Lodha recommendations in toto, the apex court has disregarded even the case argued by the BCCI.
Fair play may be a casualty should the apex court ignore pleas for moderation. And there will be a real threat of the baby being thrown out along with the bathwater, should the court, in its zeal to cleanse the Augean stables of Indian cricket, pull down the entire managerial structure of the sport. By equating the virtually non-existing Mizoram and Manipur cricket bodies with those of, say, Mumbai or Delhi, and giving them an equal say in the management of the sport, the court will only create new cliques, new vested interests.
The principle of one-state, one-vote reads well on paper, but in pragmatic terms it could prove disastrous for Indian cricket. In principle, UP, the largest state in the Union, is equal to the tiniest state, say, Sikkim. But in cricketing terms, even UP must take a back seat to Mumbai or Delhi. Giving each state an equal weight in the BCCI is a recipe for utter confusion. The role of money might in fact grow further when these non-playing cricketing states come to wield the same power in the selection of BCCI office-bearers as those of the major cricketing centres.
That some of the states which are sought to be treated at par with Mumbai, Delhi, UP, etc., in cricketing terms do not even have a Ranji team of their own ought to have persuaded the apex court to reconsider its total faith in the Lodha committee. Notwithstanding charges of corruption, groupism, empire-building etc., on balance, the cricketing officialdom has served the cause of Indian cricket well. It is the richest and the most powerful cricketing body in the International Cricket Council, which hitherto was dominated by the English-Australian duopoly.
Also, to repose faith in former cricketers to manage the sport is again an uncharted territory. A Bishan Singh Bedi at the head of a state cricket body can only wreak havoc, given his inherent inability to get along with people and his multiple frustrations at having lost out to the likes of Gavaskar and the younger lot. And in the couple of states where former Test cricketers have helmed cricket bodies, neither the management of the sport nor the nurturing of talent has been of superior order. What the apex court has done already might be enough to put the BCCI and the state associations on notice that any future breach of the moral and legal codes would attract stringent punishment. Meanwhile, in the interest of complete transparency it is only fair that we are told what the exertions of the Lodha Committee have cost the BCCI thus far in financial terms alone.
AMAR USED, DUMPED?
Poor Amar Singh. In spite of himself, he finds it hard to steer clear of the headlines. The on-going fight in the Yadav family in UP seems to have many players but only one villain. And that is Amar Singh. Is it fair? Is it true? We are not sure.
But what we find completely unacceptable is that very often the very people who use Amar Singh’s enormous multi-faceted services stemming from his well-oiled networks in the world of politics, high finance, films and the media are the ones to point an accusing finger at him. Use and discard seems to be the fate of this no-longer-portly Samajwadi MP. Ungratefulness is a human failing. Not only the Bachchans and a large part of the Yadav parivar but many more people whose irons Singh had pulled out of the fire are guilty of dumping Singh after being “rescued” by him. Here is this man who has scattered IOUs all around and yet he finds himself defenceless and lonely.
To his credit, Mulayam Singh Yadav at least acknowledged how Singh had helped him stay out of jail. We know how the disproportionate assets case against Mulayam was more or less buried by the CBI and the courts. And we can tell how Singh, given his cross-party connections, had sought the services of a top lawyer belonging to a rival party to bail out Yadav in yet another case.
Slapped with a huge bill running into crores of rupees for the gross misuse of the Air Force plane when he was Defence Minister, Singh took it upon himself to bail out his party chief. And the ace lawyer informally, and, of course, free of charge, provided the clinching argument which got Yadav off the hook.
His bi-weekly sorties into the UP hinterland aboard the IAF plane, it was argued, were undertaken to learn first-hand the grievances of tens of thousands of ex-servicemen and to try and address them. The morale of our soldiers was also contingent, among other things, on the wellbeing of ex-servicemen.
PUBLIC -CHARGES, PRIVATE -COMPROMISE
A minister in the Kejriwal government and his accuser reached out-of-court settlement and the case of corruption was thus allowed to be withdrawn. But neither the court nor the plaintiff nor, for that matter, the defendant minister bothered to share the details of the compromise with the public. Aft
er all, the charges of blackmail and extortion levelled by his own constituent were of serious nature. The AAP government, which makes much noise about transparency, must reveal the terms of the compromise. Was any money involved in the out-of-court settlement?