Newsmaker: RM Lodha

On a firm wicket

Former Chief Justice of India RM Lodha is a dreaded man these days. He headed a panel famously called the Lodha Committee, which is now in the process of implementing the second part of Operation Cleanup of Indian cricket.

The Lodha Committee was formed on January 22, 2015, by the Supreme Court after the Mudgal Committee, appointed as an investigator into the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2013 scandal, submitted its report. The terms of reference of the committee, comprising Justice Lodha, and retired Supreme Court judges, Ashok Bhan and R Raveendran, were: Determine appropriate punishments for Gurunath Meiyappan, Raj Kundra and their respective franchises, Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals; examine the role of Sundar Raman, the IPL chief operating officer, in the IPL 2013 scandal and suggest amendments to the processes followed by the The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) with a view to preventing sporting frauds now and in the future.

There is no cricket buff who does not remember the shameful background to the Mudgal Committee. In 2013, Delhi Police were tracking cellphone conversations of bookies after they got leads that players were involved in match-fixing. That’s when they found conversations between Meiyappan and some bookies. As Meiyappan was the son-in-law of former BCCI president N Srinivasan, who also had a stake in the Chennai Super Kings IPL team, Srinivasan was asked to step down on grounds of conflict of interest. While monitoring conversations, the police also found evidence of Kundra’s contact with these bookies.

The Mudgal Committee found both Meiyappan and Kundra guilty. But the punishment was left to another committee. This was the Lodha panel and the Supreme Court brief said: “The order passed by the committee shall be final and binding upon the BCCI and the parties concerned.” This means that the order passed by the Lodha Committee could not be appealed against. The BCCI accepted this.

The Lodha Committee’s mandate was to find ways to restructure the BCCI as well. That is what the current moves are all about. He went not just into the issue of age limit for cricket administrators and their qualification. He also outlined clearly where there was conflict of interest and suggested how this could be fixed.

In January this year, the Lodha Committee unveiled a set of sweeping reforms. In July, the Supreme Court accepted most of the recommendations. Lodha then submitted his report to the Court in which he said there were problems in the implementation of the recommendations made by the panel. He blamed Anurag Thakur, current president, and Ajay Shirke, secretary of the BCCI, for a standoff with the committee.

As politicians on the BCCI—Rajiv Shukla, Sharad Pawar and others— muttered and grumbled, the BCCI went ahead with what it thought was its routine work. But Lodha has now asked the BCCI not to move money around and demanded closer scrutiny of accounts. He has clarified that all the BCCI has been asked to do is stop transferring money to state cricket associations  — and says this has nothing to do with the matches it is conducting and other expenditure it is incurring. Thakur and others say they can’t work like this. Lodha is equally determined to bring order to the financial dealings of the BCCI whether it likes it or not.

The flashpoint came when at their Special General Meeting on 30 September, the BCCI rejected several key reforms of the Committee, including the ‘one-state-one-vote’ and an age limit of 70 years, which led to the Lodha Committee’s directive to banks to freeze some accounts.

The board is not exactly a bunch of Little Red Riding Hoods. When members hinted at the possibility of cancelling the India-New Zealand series, Lodha was forced to clarify that money for the series was not being curtailed.

All the indications are that this is not going to end here — and more stand-offs are inevitable. That is what makes cricket so interesting in India.