The Board of Control for Cricket in India seems to have been in an unseemly hurry to give itself a clean chit with regard to allegations of betting against owners and representatives of its teams during the great IPL betting and fixing scandal. A village munsif may have taken greater care and diligence in arriving at such a conclusion of total exoneration, but the two-member panel of retired high court judges seems to have conjured up a report in double quick time clearing the names of the game’s top brass. There is more than a whiff of cosines to this arrangement.
The Delhi and Mumbai police are just about ready to file chargesheets in the match- and spot-fixing and betting scandals that swamped season 6 of IPL last May. Even before they do so, the panel, which has no legal validity apart from being an internal inquiry of a public body that controls a national sport, has pronounced that the two owners and two teams have not been guilty of spot- and match-fixing. While that may not be in dispute, what has obviously not been taken into account is the vast amount of circumstantial evidence, including irrefutable voice recordings of owners and their nexus with bookmaker and high-roller circles, gathered by the Delhi and Mumbai police forces, which understandably have been overtly contemptuous of the panel’s conclusions.
While there may be no direct evidence connecting Mr N. Srinivasan, board president who is in self-imposed exile currently, to any of the sordid events, like Rajasthan Royals players being involved in spot- and match-fixing, the fact that his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan was arrested by the Mumbai police in connection with a betting case should have impelled the BCCI to set up a fair and independent probe sanctioned by a recognised legal authority like the Supreme Court. But hand-picking judges and setting up pliable probe commissions that could guarantee favourable outcomes is part of the history of BCCI.
A retired chief justice was roped in to probe the first whispers of match-fixing that broke out in the late 1990s. He gave a similar clean chit to BCCI and its players leading to the entire issue being swept under the carpet. The game was to pay a heavy price for this when the late Hansie Cronje stood exposed. Similarly, there was the hope that the board would do a thorough cleansing job as an opportunity could be sensed rather than a crisis in the great expose involving Sreesanth and company.
The panel’s report may be sufficient for Mr Srinivasan to quickly take back the role of top honcho but it appears the whole thing has been engineered in his own interest rather than that of the game or its reputation.