Even assuming Srinivasan resigns tomorrow, what then? The reins will be passed on to another power-hungry, greedy politician/businessman looking to mint money off the game—answerable to no one save his cronies heading the various state associations. In other words, the biggest stumbling block to any truly progressive change in the BCCI is its structure and legal status—it is essentially a private club you can buy your way into.

Which brings us to a rather delicious political scenario, especially from the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) point of view: two of the senior-most club members and influential officials associated closely with the Srinivasan-led BCCI are bigwigs from the UPA’s prime political adversary, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The BJP’s leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley, is a BCCI vice president. Narendra Modi is the chairman of the Gujarat Cricket Association and member of the BCCI’s working committee. Srinivasan enjoys the backing of both Jaitley and Modi. Read More

Jyothi Shankaran

    Jyothi’s last role was as Senior Editor with the business news channel Bloomberg TV India. He also worked as News Editor at business-standard.com, the online version of the business newspaper Business Standard. Jyothi is a chemical engineer from the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar.