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The sense of bafflement that cricketing legend Sunil Gavaskar gave expression to, in response to Ramachandra Guha’s ‘letter bomb’ detailing the reasons for his resignation from the BCCI’s Committee of Administrators (CoA), is symptomatic of the widespread ‘denialism’ over the rot at the core of India’s cricket administration. Striking a pose of injured innocence, Gavaskar has questioned Guha’s exposition of the strands of ‘conflict of interest’ that taint several current and former cricketers’ relationship with the establishment that governs the game.
Guha’s epistolatory explosive was unsparing in its criticism of the “superstar culture” that comes in the way of holding cricketing legends to account when their commercial and other interests flagrantly come into conflict with the business of administering the sport that sets a billion-plus Indian hearts aflutter. To Guha’s eternal credit, he did not fight shy of invoking the names of these errant “superstars”: from Gavaskar to MS Dhoni to Rahul Dravid, they have the capacity to enhance the bench strength of an all-star cricket team.
The cynical but unvarnished reality, however, is that Guha’s exertions, for all their rootedness in good intentions, may go in vain. That’s because it is not just cricket’s countless fans that are in thrall of “superstars”; the cricket administration, too, has an ignoble record of looking the other way even when faced with manifest conflict-of-interest situations. After all, it is these selfsame superstars who make the Indian cricket establishment arguably the world’s richest sporting administrative body. Even the BCCI rules that govern this dark area were woven in only at the Supreme Court’s intervention in 2015.
More generally, as illustrated by the episode involving External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s grant of travel documents for fugitive IPL tycoon Lalit Modi in 2014-15, the sense of ‘denialism’ about blatant conflict-of-interest situations is widely shared in the Indian context. Sadly, in an age where rectitude has been hit for a six, only historians in the Ramachandra Guha mould appear to be agitated by such ethical excesses.
Associate Editor
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