BCCI has to wake up and smell the coffee
Try as they might, neither Board of Control for Cricket in India president N Srinivasan nor Indian Premier league Commissioner Rajiv Shukla can any longer pretend that the spot-fixing scandal is not a systemic issue but merely linked to a few bad eggs. The deafening silence which the two senior officials have maintained even as the plot unravels to indicate that more than a “few rotten eggs”, as Mr Srinivasan had remarked when the scandal first broke out with the arrest of three players including S Sreesanth, are involved. And these rotten eggs are not just players; they are from the glamour world and perhaps also from within the country's cricket administration.
All of them are linked to the huge and dangerous illegal betting and match-fixing racket which is controlled by the mafia residing in Dubai and Karachi, through its Indian agents. How can it be that neither Mr Srinivasan nor Mr Shukla sees the issue as one of a moral and a management failure on their partIJ Given that spot-fixing and the related sleazy activities have been going on since the earlier IPl editions and the media has been reporting on them, it's impossible that the management was unaware of the issue. Yet, our cricket administrators have preferred to allow things to proceed because they were perfectly happy with the ever-increasing amounts of cash that was flowing into the coffers of the BCCI as a result of the IPl. Not once did it occur to them that they were betraying the very same cricket lovers who have given the game the status it now enjoys. By not owning at least the moral responsibility for the fiasco, Mr Srinivasan and Mr Shukla are not just rubbing salt into the wounds of cricket fans across the country but in effect also cocking a snook at the issue of propriety.
BCCI officials have been trying to disentangle themselves from the crisis by taking the stand that the board had already ordered an in-house probe into the string of recent incidents which have hit Indian cricket like a tsunami, but nobody believes in the efficacy of such an in-house inquiry. That the anti-corruption cell of the BCCI apparently had absolutely no clue about spot-fixing before Delhi Police nabbed the three players is difficult to believe. It is equally incredulous that our cricket administrators did not know of the web of illegalities that had cricket at the centre in Mumbai, before Mumbai Police arrested Vindoo Dara Singh. In any case, how can an in-house probe be considered credible given that the BCCI president's son-in-law has now come under a cloud of suspicion in the betting/spot-fixing racket, and given that actor Vindoo Dara Singh, who has been nabbed for his links with bookies, has reportedly named some players from the team that is effectively owned by Mr SrinivasanIJ It takes years for a brand to achieve cult status, and only a moment for that status to come crashing down. If the IPl is to be saved, the sport's administrators must stop behaving like arrogant dictators.