BHUBANESWAR: The turf war between the BJD and BJP has now spilled over to the arena of cricket following the election of Pranab Prakash Das, organisational secretary of the ruling party in the state, as the president of Odisha Cricket Association (OCA) without any contest.
Direct entry of a senior ruling BJD politician to the administration of the cash-rich OCA has come as a surprise for this is the first time that a political party had shown such an interest in a sports body in the state and that too cricket. Earlier, Ashirbad Behera ruled OCA for decades, but he was never a mainstream politician and remained a fringe player in different political parties during his career.
Though Das maintained after his election that the aim is to develop cricket infrastructure as it is the most popular game, observers believe that there is more to it than the simple development narrative.
Some members of the OCA maintained that the nomination of BJP MLA Lalitendu Bidyadhar Mohapatra as a voting member of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) may have spurred the ruling party in Odisha to take such a step. Mohapatra was nominated as one of the institutional members from the Associations of Indian Universities (AIU) to the BCCI.
The BCCI has 35 members who are representatives of the 35 state cricket associations and three institutional members, the AIU, the Railways and Services.
Sources said nomination of Mohapatra to the BCCI through the AIU would not have been a problem given the fact that Dharmendra Pradhan is the Union Education minister. Mohapatra, however, said that he was nominated to the BCCI purely basing on his cricketing background. A former Ranji Trophy player, he has represented Odisha for several years.
On the other hand, several members of OCA said that they were not aware that Das will be filing the nomination papers till the last moment on October 21. Everybody expected that OCA president Pankaj Mohanty will continue in the post.
However, only single nominations were filed for all the posts and Das, Mohanty, Sanjay Behera, Prabhat Bhola and Bikash Pradhan were elected uncontested as president, vice-president, secretary, joint secretary and treasurer respectively. Das did not introduce a new panel, but co-opted the panel which had the blessings of Ashirbad Behera, whose son is the secretary, OCA.
The change in the cricket body has come barely two months after the Supreme Court allowed BCCI to amend its constitution to permit MPs and MLAs to be part of state associations as well. With this, Das becomes the second BJD politician to head a sports body after hockey legend Dilip Tirkey, also ex-party MP, who recently took charge as Hockey India president.