Late cuts from BCCI

The cricket body is making a spectacle of itself

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is the richest administrative body in the global cricketing firmament and it hosts one of the world’s most popular cricketing events, the Indian Premier League. Yet the manner in which it has handled the controversy involving Hardik Pandya and K L Rahul suggests that the BCCI’s administrators have an inordinate amount of time in hand to pursue pointless agendas. Following cringe-worthy sexist comments on the talk show Koffee with Karan last week, the board suspended Pandya and Rahul from any form of cricket. The two cricketers, who have been brought back midway through the Indian cricket team’s tour of Australia, have since tendered an unconditional apology.

 
Having administered a serious rap on the knuckles, which is what the offence merited, the board should have sent the two cricketers for gender sensitivity counselling and reinstated them after a gap. Instead, the board has opted for an enquiry, the conduct of which appears to have re-ignited a months-long feud between the chairman of the committee of administrators (CoA), Vinod Rai, who is also former Comptroller and Auditor General of India, and CoA member Diana Eduljee, former Indian women’s Test cricketer. First, the necessity of an enquiry is unclear. The evidence of the two young men’s transgressions is captured on tape for all to see. At best, the administrators can ask the broadcasters for unedited footage, though to what end is doubtful since neither cricketer has claimed to have been quoted out of context or coached to make those comments. Second, an enquiry is out of proportion with the offence.

 
The misdemeanours, though reprehensible, did not amount to physical harassment or assault. But the salutary disciplining of two young men, as a lesson for all other young cricketers, seems to have been subsumed in a bizarre argument between Mr Rai and Ms Eduljee. Mr Rai has directed that the enquiry be conducted quickly and completed by the second One-day International, so as not to debilitate the strength of the Indian cricket team ahead of the World Cup, which is four months away, and cut short the careers of two promising sportsmen for serious youthful errors of judgement. Ms Eduljee prefers the BCCI’s legal team’s advice of appointing an ad-hoc ombudsman to conduct the enquiry and has objected to BCCI Chief Executive Officer Rahul Johri conducting the preliminary enquiry since he had been accused of sexual harassment just last year. She says she fears a “cover up,” but did not specify what would exactly be covered up.

 

It surely behoves two senior administrators to have settled the issue without so public an exchange of icy emails. It has snowballed into a controversy subsuming the main issue at hand. It is difficult not to agree with Justice Lodha’s statement just last month, that Mr Rai and Ms Eduljee were making spectacles of themselves (he was referring to their public airing of differences over the choice of coach for the women’s cricket team), especially when there is work to be done in following the Supreme Court's prescription for reforming the cricketing administration. Politics is but a human failing in any institution, but in the BCCI it appears to have descended into the theatre of the absurd. At any rate, it is causing the public almost as much entertainment off the field as the Indian cricket team is offering on it.