NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday appointed senior lawyer Maninder Singh the new amicus curiae in the case relating to the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s petition seeking the abolition of the cooling-off clause from its constitution.
The amendments sought are essentially to allow Sourav Ganguly and Jay Shah, BCCI president and secretary respectively, and other office bearers to stay in power until 2025.
Singh, a former additional solicitor general of India, replaces PS Narasimha, who in 2021 was elevated to the position of Supreme Court judge. The Bench of Chief Justice NV Ramana, Justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli, later adjourned the case to August 28.
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.
ESPNcricinfo adds:
Narasimha was appointed amicus in 2019 by the apex court to help the Committee of Administrators (CoA) finalise the BCCI’s new constitution and facilitate board elections, which eventually took place on October 23, 2019. That ended a 30-month vigil by the court-appointed CoA, which had drafted the BCCI’s new constitution as per the RM Lodha Committee recommendations that were mandated by the court in a landmark judgement in July 2016.
In August 2018, Justice DY Chandrachud passed a judgement approving the new BCCI constitution. However, immediately upon taking office, the current BCCI administration filed a plea in the court seeking amendments to the board constitution which, if approved, would roll back significant reforms put in place by the Lodha Committee.
The BCCI filed a second application in April 2020 where it argued that the mandatory cooling-off period (three years) that an office bearer had to face upon completing two consecutive terms (six years) needed to be reviewed.
Justice Chandrachud had already tweaked the cooling-off period clause (from three years to six) in his 2018 judgement, while retaining the basis of the Lodha Committee recommendation. His judgement allowed an office bearer to serve two consecutive terms (six years) separately at the state association or the board or a combination of both, while retaining the maximum tenure of nine years (broken up by the mandatory cooling-off period after six years).
Related Report
SC adjourns plea for Ganguly, Shah tenure extensions to Thur
