It came as a bolt from the blue. When N. Srinivasan was busy parrying attacks from various quarters following the involvement of his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan in the IPL betting scandal, he brushed aside a petition filed by Cricket Association of Bihar in the Bombay high court. The BCCI chief wouldn’t have imagined that CAB’s petition raising several questions on conflict of interest and the constitution of the IPL probe panel would become an albatross around his neck.
Srinivasan’s re-election in the AGM on his home turf had appeared to be a formality before the Supreme Court observations on Friday changed the equation. Now the rivals of the Tamil Nadu official are grinning again. The apex court’s conditional approval to his candidature means he can’t take charge even if he gets re-elected.
For starters, CAB with Shekhar Sinha as chief and Aditya Verma as secretary is not recognised by the BCCI. The authorised cricket body in the state is Bihar Cricket Association (BCA), but the BCA is only an associate member and doesn’t have voting rights in the Board. To further complicate cricket administration, there is one more faction — Association of Bihar Cricket (ABC) — under the leadership of BJP MP and former Test cricketer, Kirti Azad.
Cricket administrators from Bihar have been at loggerheads with the BCCI since 2000, the year the state was bifurcated into Jharkhand and Bihar. The original body BCA, founded in 1935 with Jamshedpur as headquarters, became defunct in the new millennium after the regime headed by Jagmohan Dalmiya granted affiliation to Jharkhand.
After Sharad Pawar came to power in 2005, the BCCI decided to restore affiliation to BCA the next year merging Bihar and Jharkhand Cricket Associations. “The committee submitted two different reports. The first one appreciated the good work done by ABC, but the second report was in favour of BCA, then led by Lalu Prasad Yadav. After protracted legal battles, the BCCI offered associate membership (without voting rights) to BCA, but the state government dissolved the association citing irregularities. But it continues to be an associate member,” Azad, the chief of ABC, told this newspaper.
Verma went on record to say that Srinivasan was behind Bihar not getting BCCI affiliation and it was one of the reasons for his fight. Azad, however, wonders why Verma is going hammer and tongs against Srinivasan when he wasn’t even in the picture when Bihar was fighting in the early 2000s.