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| The BCCI clique |
| Suveen K Sinha / New Delhi May 03, 2009, 00:43 IST |
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Is it time to separate the business of cricket and administering the sport?
Is BCCI the master of all cricket in India? It may have been started by a bunch of princes with a heightened perception of the self, but the sceptre is long gone. The board once described itself in court as a private club not performing any public function, and said that it could therefore not be subjected to public interest litigation. The board’s refuge was its status of a private society answerable only to its members — the 31 state associations. The board took the same cover when two cricket-lovers filed a PIL in February 2000, seeking accountability and transparency in the way cricket was run in the country.
As things stand, BCCI has only a handful of contracted players. There are another 450,000 or so out there who play matches in abysmal conditions, watched only by the jobless and stray dogs. Thousands of cricket players, with no hope of ever representing India and not under contract with BCCI opted to join Subhash Chandra’s Indian Cricket League (ICL), which offered them better pay and more respect at a time when IPL was not even on the drawing board.
The ICL players have now been given a supercilious and condescending offer to come back into BCCI’s fold if they ditch ICL by May 31. Most of them would be tempted, as this would make them eligible to play for their state almost immediately and for India in a year. If they do desert ICL, which is downsizing and cancelled its March programme due to the recession, BCCI would have nearly snuffed out the first flicker of competition.
The one year period is meant to be a cooling-off period, a practice common in the corporate world for executives who leave to join a rival. However, if BCCI wants to follow corporate conventions, perhaps it should also wake up to other issues that concern that world, such as free competition and monopolies. The West is extremely sensitive to this; Standard Oil, the world’s largest oil refiner, which allegedly used its size and clout to undercut competition, was broken up by the US Supreme Court way back in 1911. Microsoft has had long and bruising antitrust battles.
BCCI’s power is more absolute because in addition to being a monopoly it is also being allowed to act as the regulator. We had a similar situation when the Union government’s Department of Telecommunications, the policy maker, also operated nation-wide telephone services. Naturally, it used its position to fight competition, which was ushered in the middle of the 1990s. After a few acrimonious years, BSNL was carved out of DoT to prevent conflicts of interest. Has the time come to apply the principle to BCCI?
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