Interests, conflicts

Shekhar Gupta does the unthinkable: somehow find a way to put ‘conflict of interest’ and ‘BCCI’ in the same sentence.

The issue, for example, is not that so many players suffered injuries, or got “fatigued” playing the IPL. Professionals will take what playing opportunity comes their way and have to watch their fitness. The issue is, if they were carrying injuries, why did the selection committee not take a call on it? Today, the BCCI will be blamed for this generally. But soon enough, particularly if poor performance continues, questions will start getting raised about a very nice guy like Krishnamachari Srikkanth who, as chairman of selectors, has one of the most powerful jobs in the country. Are you conscious yet of the fact that he is also a brand ambassador for the Chennai Super Kings team which, in turn, is owned by

N Srinivasan, who also happens to be the secretary of the BCCI? All this may be entirely meritocratic, but hasn’t the cricket establishment heard anything about conflict of interest? If the BCCI, a non-profit “society”, is supposed to supervise and regulate Indian cricket and also the IPL — which is its prime, and most profitable, product — should its office-bearers own teams in it? And can their brand ambassadors (on their payroll) be national selectors?

What beats me is, why did Gupta stop there?

One of the listed owners of Kings XI Punjab is Dabur scion Mohit Burman, whose brother Gaurav is the husband of Lalit Modi’s step-daughter.

Suresh Chellaram, who co-owns Rajasthan Royals, is Lalit Modi’s brother-in-law.

The Kolkata Knight Riders franchise is fronted by Shah Rukh Khan, but the canny Bollywood bad-shah has very little of his own money invested in it; the funding comes largely from Jay Mehta, one of Lalit Modi’s best buddies.

Kings XI Punjab is managed by one Amar Bindra, who happens to be the son of Inderjit Singh Bindra, who is a member of the BCCI’s governing body, principal advisor to the ICC president, and a member of the IPL governing council.

What Gupta doesn’t either doesn’t get, or at least doesn’t spell out here, is that the BCCI is a family concern — always was, is, and always will be. And there is little that can be done about it. Also from Gupta’s piece:

The BCCI has now come to acquire powers over media coverage on its own doings and performance that nobody in India has ever been able to arrogate to themselves, not under Mayawati, or Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency. During the Emergency, the government censored our newspapers, it got some inconvenient editors fired, but it did not appoint its own employees as our editors.

Look at what the BCCI has achieved. It has hired Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, two of India’s most-loved former cricketers and commentators, on its own “commentary” team and irrespective of which channel wins the bid for covering cricket in India, it has to use these — in this case the BCCI’s — commentators. Incidentally, both are also members of the IPL governing council.