NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court will on Wednesday hear an appeal filed by the Indian cricket board in April that seeks to junk the key operative principles of recommendations made by the Justice RM Lodha Committee for reforms in the BCCI.
Incidentally, it was on July 18, 2016, that the final order on the matter was delivered by a two-Judge Bench comprising then Chief Justice TS Thakur and Justice Ibrahim Kalifulla. The Bench had then signed off on most of the Lodha proposals, setting in motion a major revamp of the way cricket is run in India.
That was then.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will look afresh at a BCCI plea to modify its constitution to primarily enable president Sourav Ganguly and secretary Jay Shah (son of Union Home Minister Amit Shah) to continue to hold on to their posts rather tha serve the mandatory cooling-off period as laid out by the apex court’s ruling of 2016.
As Sportstar notes, soon after the dispensation led by Ganguly and Shah took charge last October as elected office-bearers, the BCCI started an effort to dilute the apex court-directed administrative reforms. During its annual general meeting in December, the BCCI passed several resolutions that were directly contrary to the spirit of the reforms instituted by the Justice Lodha Committee and passed into law by the Supreme Court.
In the civil appeal filed on April 21, the BCCI, among other requests, asked the Supreme Court to separate the tenures of office-bearers of the BCCI and the state associations before serving mandatory cooling-off periods. The BCCI has also requested India’s apex court to do away with a clause allowing any amendment to the BCCI constitution only with the Supreme Court’s approval.
As per the new constitution, an administrator can only serve six years on the trot at the state association or the board or a combination of both. After the completion of six years, the administrator has to serve a mandatory ‘cooling-off’ period. Both Sourav Ganguly and Shah had served as administrators in state associations before being elected as BCCI officials.
As per the new constitution, Shah’s tenure ended in May while Ganguly’s tenure will end on July 27. However, Shah is yet to leave his post while the former India captain also has no intention of resigning as BCCI president.
