Even while Indian cricket is breaking fresh ground at home, recording comprehensive wins, discovering astounding fresh talent to augment its already formidable existing strength, comes the news that two Karnataka cricketers have been arrested for their links with book-makers and for spot-fixing. While cricket is spreading and flourishing in the country, so is corruption and the fear that the player-bookie nexus could be far more widespread than anticipated. This is terribly disturbing news and could be founded in realistic assessment of the ground realities.
Otherwise, how would one account for a key first-class cricketer being on the take of bookies in the Karnataka Premier League, along with the owner of a team. When the final of a tournament is “fixed” with the connivance of a captain and at least one player, it is safe to assume that the virus of manipulating odds has seeped deep down. In this spread of the T20 pie, we have now even shorter leagues being played and planned, like the T10 in Dubai and elsewhere. It is being alleged that the same owner of the KPL team also had stakes in the T10 Dubai league.
In this eco-system where a captain of a national team, Bangladesh, has been banned for two years for his links with bookmakers, it is very likely that cricket could be sitting atop a threatening volcano that could burst anytime. The one common link to all these exposures is that the bookmakers are Indians, which seems to be the epicentre, like in the past, of cricket’s descent into treacherous deception.
In these distressing times, one would expect the Indian board to respond with alacrity and create systemic measures to counter this threat to the game’s credibility. The BCCI now has a fresh set of office-bearers, who have recently taken control under a new constitution that has Supreme Court sanction. True to the nature of the beast, they are, however, more focussed on how to dismantle brick by brick the new edifice that the court had built for a more transparent governance of the cricket administration, than worry about this “fixing” menace that could destroy the very credibility of the game they are out to milk.
We all know the history of the Lodha reforms and the dilution it has gone through over the last couple of years before it was finally implemented. That those elected are proxies of those who were disqualified by the new constitution, is too well known. Now these proxies have one task and that is to nullify all those measures which the court believed would lead to a more democratic, transparent functioning of the board.
Reports indicate that in the first AGM of the new board, amendments would be suggested, that would do away with a cooling-off period, age and tenure caps and many other statutory provisions that saw the “purge” of the old guard.
One of the most important provisions of the Lodha commission is the nine-member apex council, which along with elected office-bearers, will have two representatives of the players and a CAG nominee who will be authorised to take decisions on behalf of the board. This effectively makes for a sharing of power and dilutes the powers of the secretary and president of the board.
Even before the apex council has been constituted and had a meeting, the AGM is planning to change all this and vest sweeping powers in the secretary of the board. These and many other amendments are being planned, that would be in defiance of the court order. That the board, whose secretary is the son of the Home Minister of India, is all set to mount a fresh challenge to the Supreme Court order, will in itself be seen as an act of unprecedented defiance.In the light of this power struggle, the “fixing” threat to cricket may seem too insignificant for the administrators to even take note of, forget about taking any concrete measures to stop it.