NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday adjourned the hearing of a plea by the Board of Control for Cricket in India seeking an extended tenure for its president Sourav Ganguly and secretary Jay Shah to Thursday.
The Ganguly-led panel had taken charge at the BCCI in October 2019.
A plea was mentioned in the Supreme Court on Friday seeking an urgent hearing on a petition seeking amendments in the BCCI constitution.
The plea was mentioned by senior advocate PS Patwalia, who apprised the top court that the matter was pending for years, to which Chief Justice of India NV Ramana said that it will see.
A plea had been filed by BCCI seeking a direction for the extension of the tenure of Ganguly and Shah. The BCCI has sought permission to change the rules relating to “cooling off” period for the president, secretary, and other office bearers.
It bears noting that this matter has been in “cold storage” since August 2020, which was when the BCCI had sought the apex court’s permission to amend Rule 6.4 of its constitution, in “public and national interest”.
Clause 6.4 of the BCCI’s constitution reads: “An office-bearer who has held any post for two consecutive terms either in a state association or in the BCCI (or in a combination of both) shall not be eligible to contest any further election without completing a cooling-off period of three years.”
This had rendered both Shah and Ganguly ineligible to hold on to their posts as secretary and president, as their terms had ended in July 2020.
For the record, when the two were elected in October 2019 to the BCCI positions they currently hold, both men had already had lengthy stints as office-holders at the Gujarat and West Bengal cricket associations respectively. Which is where the legality of their continuance had come into question.
As Sportstar notes about the Supreme Court’s 2018 judgement, it had seen eye-to-eye with Justice RM Lodha’s conclusion that “the game will be better off without cricketing oligopolies”.
To this end, the apex court supported the recommendation that cricket administrators should undergo a “cooling-off period” before contesting elections to the BCCI or state associations.
Ganguly started as secretary at the Cricket Association of Bengal in 2014, following which he became the association’s president. He was re-elected in September 2019 before moving to the BCCI in October that year.
As for Shah, he was elected as the joint secretary of the Gujarat Cricket Association (GCA) in 2014 and took charge as the BCCI secretary in 2019.
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