In what could make Muhammad Shami’s allegedly sleazy extra-cricketing affairs murkier than assumed, a former Cricket Association of Bengal advocate has said promiscuity has not been new to Indian cricket.
The advocate’s blunt statement came almost in tandem with additional claims of extra-marital dalliances made by Shami’s estranged wife Hasin Jehan who cited the cricket’s mobile details to aver that enjoying proximity of women in Dubai and Nagpur apart, the cricketer also had relationships with a homemaker in South Africa.
According to Jehan her husband had met the South African woman even on the morning when he was leaving for India at the end of his South Africa tour. She recovered the mobile phone from Shami’s car before exploding in the social media and lodging a police complaint last week.
Her statement comes close on the heels of the Calcutta Police writing to the BCCI seeking Shami’s traveling details post South Africa tour. “The police want to know whether he traveled to India vial Dubai as has been claimed by his wife,” officials said.
Meanwhile in a curious turn of events the stated advocate on Monday said the matter did not deserve the kind of hype it was getting it was a known fact that the Indian cricketers enjoyed adventurous relationships even in the past.
“This (the Shami affair) is not a new thing,” he said adding “I know quite a few past Indian cricketers who enjoyed such relationships. Some of them even maintained diaries as to which woman to meet and when and where,” he told a Bengali news channel.
Shami has been charged under various non-bailable and bailable sections of the IPC, including Section 498A, (cruelty to a woman by her husband or his relatives), Section 307 (attempt to murder), Section 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), Section 376 (rape), Section 506 (criminal intimidation), Section 328 (causing hurt by means of poison) and Section 34.