All that power and no glory

[Detonator]

There is no precedent within the game for N Srinivasan to resign and leave. © Wisden India The most incongruous moment of the sixth edition of the Indian Premier League happened soon after the last ball was bowled. A few minutes into the prize-distribution ceremony, soon after the Mumbai Indians won their maiden title, ensuring that the Chennai Super Kings did not add to their tally of two, Rajeev Shukla, chairman of the IPL, handed over the FairPlay award to Chennai, even as Gurunath Meiyappan, once paraded as a prominent member of the CSK management, cooled his heels in custody having been charged under 12 different sections of the Indian Penal Code. It could not have been more absurd, and the 60000-plus strong crowd at the Eden Gardens made their feelings clear, booing N Srinivasan, the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, and the father-in-law of Gurunath, as he was introduced as a member of the presentation party. It’s worth noting that this crowd did not boo the Chennai team, or any of its players, even when they collapsed dramatically. For the first time since the latest controversy hit the IPL, the public weighed in. For days now, 24-hour news channels have told us that the nation wants Srinivasan to resign. Given just how often these channels tell me what I am supposedly feeling, without once having the courtesy to ask, I’m a bit sceptical about their daily attempts to speak on my behalf. That said, the Kolkata crowd did boo Srinivasan. But what does a boo actually mean? Were they reacting with understandable disgust that the FairPlay award (and no-one actually knows how this is calculated and if it’s worth anything) went to a team whose representative was arrested for an offense that chips away at the very foundations of the game? Were they registering a general protest at how the fortnight had panned out, confirming the worst fears people had about the game? Or, and wait for this, did booooooooo somehow translate to “Mr Srinivasan, you should resign� In the interest of fairness, I should disclose right here that I am not a fan of telling people what they should do. Resignation, like retirement, is a personal choice, and once that choice has been extended, maturity demands that you accept whatever the person in question decides. I don’t believe it is any more my place to tell Srinivasan he should resign than it is to ask Sachin Tendulkar to retire. And, believe me, applying this on a daily basis can be difficult, as there’s only so much negotiation you can do with a toddler, as I have to on a daily basis, since I don’t believe in telling him what he should do and expect it to be followed without reservation. Should Srinivasan be sacked? That is a separate question that, in my mind, can be addressed on three separate levels. Firstly, as the father-in-law of the accused, M Gurunath, should Srinivasan be removed? If we sacked everyone who had a relative or employee who cut corners, it’s fair to say there would not be too many working institutions in India. There’s nothing to suggest that Srinivasan knew what Gurunath was up to – and if he was Gurunath’s boss, you might argue negligence, and we’ll get to that – and this will be frightfully tricky to prove one way or the other. If Srinivasan did not know that his son-in-law was betting illegally, it’s unfair to ask him to go on this count, and those that know Srinivasan well suggest that he would have been the first one to get rid of Gurunath had he known his activities were such a threat to a carefully constructed edifice. Further, to argue that Srinivasan had to know about the activities of his son-in-law opens a dangerous door, as this would cast similar shadows over the owners and management of the Rajasthan Royals, and this leads to the doorstep of one of India’s most honest and upright cricketers in recent memory, Rahul Dravid. Secondly, as the driving force behind India Cements, the company that owns the Chennai team, is ignorance of the illegality of a key member of the set-up a valid defence? To draw an approximate parallel, if a relative of Srinivasan’s who was in the management of India Cements committed some kind of fraud, would the company stop at removing the offender or go to the extent of removing Srinivasan? There are two schools of thought here. The first is that the buck eventually stops at the top, and therefore that head must go. The second is that a period of crisis demands a different kind of accountability from the person at the top, in that he should not leave the situation in a shambles, but rather, must stand and fight to clean things up. Again, it’s pretty clear what Srinivasan’s choice is in the matter, but are the rest of us willing to accept it as legitimate? There’s nothing to suggest that Srinivasan knew what Gurunath was up to and this will be frightfully tricky to prove one way or the other. © AFP Thirdly, there’s the suggestion that Srinivasan should be removed as president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India as recent developments has irreversibly tarnished the reputation of the board and the image of the game in the country. Here, there’s precedent – no board president, beginning with Ali Bacher in South Africa to Jagmohan Dalmiya in India, has stepped down simply because cricketers from that country had been found guilty of bringing the game into disrepute through match or spot-fixing. Within the BCCI, no action is possible based on sentiment as there is a constitution in place. Over the course of the last week, several worthies, including some of the finest legal and political brains of the country, have pored over the BCCI constitution to see if there was a way to initiate proceedings that would end in Srinivasan’s removal. These efforts have drawn a blank, but you can be sure those that want to see the back of Srinivasan will leave no stone unturned. But, the thing with the constitution, like any good rulebook, is that it does not deal in grey areas, or concern itself with the debatable – including morality and ethics. The constitution is an instrument of governance, and is tone deaf. It does not aim to understand nuance, and ethics and morality are not its business, simply because these words mean different things to different people. Constitutionally, it may be impossible to remove Srinivasan, and this I can live with, because it was not me who put him in the president’s chair in the first place. For those that did, there will be an opportunity at the September Annual General Meeting of the BCCI, and if they are willing to walk the talk, they can speak through the ballot box. A wise friend, who has intimate knowledge of how the cricket board works, stated a simple fact: “If you have 16 of the 30 votes in the BCCI, it does not matter whether 1.2 billion Indians are against you or with you. And if you don’t have those numbers, it won’t help even if the whole world is with you.†This reality is playing itself out in front of our eyes today. Whether that’s right, or even just, is not something I can easily answer. But it’s no different from the fact that even in situations where we have an actual vote, leaders who repeatedly fail to live up to even the most basic standards are elected into power. For some, the difficult thing to accept was not that a man in a position of power ignored the rules; that is something we’ve come to accept, even expect. The real killer was that three cricketers, and the possibility that there may be more is chilling, sold the game that puts food on their tables. If they could do that, what does it tell us about ourselves?

Source: http://www.wisdenindia.com/cricket-blog/power-glory/64263