 "Dalmiya comes with baggage that BCCI could do without")
So Jagmohan Dalmiya is back as the president of the Board for Control of Cricket in India. It was 15 years ago that he had held the same position and then had succumbed to the power play that is the hallmark of the shadowy manner in which the Indian cricket governing body functions. For over two and half decades till his loss in the 2005 BCCI elections, Dalmiya steered cricket’s administration. He is back at a time when everyone, from the players to the fans to the courts of law, would want to see transparency and ethical governance in the country’s richest sports body.
Is Dalmiya, 74, the man for such a job? He replaces the notoriously obscurantist N Srinivasan, who took full advantage of the BCCI’s loose understanding of the term “conflict of interest” to run a successful cricket franchise in a tournament run by it and defending the team when it was caught in a betting scandal.
The controversies that Srinivasan got into feel almost like ripples of those that Dalmiya himself had wrestled against during his various terms with BCCI and the International Cricket Council. It was Dalmiya who changed the way cricket was telecast in India. Till 1993, Doordarshan was paid to televise the cricket matches played in India. Dalmiya, then the BCCI secretary, fought the government along with his president, IS Bindra, and began selling telecast rights to private channels. He thus created a wealthy business out of cricket, and then used the financial clout to bully world cricket. Once the focus was on commerce, you could be sure BCCI would get into problems that had nothing to do with the sport.
Under him, both BCCI and ICC were deeply riven. Right through his tenures, all state units and individual executives were beholden to him or to his rivals, especially through the allurement of financial gratuities. Dalmiya similarly wrecked the equations in ICC, often using the enormous money power accruing to the Indian board through TV and marketing to reward members who stood with him against the traditional powers like England and Australia. He even leveraged the Asian countries against the ICC in 2001, when he took on Mike Denness, the match referee who had penalised six Indian players, including captain Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag, in the Port Elizabeth Test during India’s tour of South Africa. No wonder, Malcolm Speed, who became CEO of ICC in 2001, later described Dalmiya in his book as “without doubt one of the most resolute, able, difficult, prickly, and unpredictable men”.
He became a victim of the irreconcilable rifts he himself had created in BCCI. Sharad Pawar, elected president in a bitter contest in 2005, alleged Dalmiya was involved in financial irregularities related to the 1996 World Cup jointly hosted by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. BCCI filed a police complaint against Dalmiya in Mumbai and later expelled him from the board. He approached the Calcutta High Court and had the expulsion stayed in 2007, which enabled him to stay on as a cricket administrator in the Cricket Association of Bengal. In March 2008, he was even arrested after the police claimed to have unearthed evidence of misappropriation of Rs 2.9 crore from the World Cup funds. The board, however, dropped the case in 2010, pleading that it would be unable to prove misappropriation in the court.
It looks like it will be more of the same now. Even his current election is the result of same old politics. Srinivasan, barred from contesting by the courts and stung by Pawar’s attempts to minimise his influence in the new committee, leaned on the side of Dalmiya, knowing that the Kolkata construction baron has never forgiven Pawar for what happened in 2005 and afterward. This intense dogfight will never, for certain, be conducive to open, transparent and ethics-led administration in BCCI.