NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, December 9, decreed it would continue hearings on the proposed amendments to the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s constitution in the third week of January.
Restricting itself to procedural matters, the apex court DID NOT take up hearing the BCCI’s application seeking amendments to its constitution.
With arguments on the matter itself still to be heard, SportzPower does not expect any RULING (which is the operative part of this increasingly long in the tooth saga) on the case for well into 2021 at the earliest. So, at the very minimum, BCCI president Sourav Ganguly and secretary Jay Shah (son of Union Home Minister Amit Shah), will have tenures that are a year and counting over their terms had they remitted office as prescribed (and ruled upon twice by the apex court) by the RM Lodha Committee reforms recommendations.
For the record, Ganguly and Shah were to have ended their terms in July and May respectively. As a side note, another beneficiary of the slow pace of the apex court’s adjudication on the matter is joint secretary Jayesh George, whose term has also got over.
In terms of immediate term impact though, it will be Ganguly and Shah presiding when the BCCI has its Annual General Body Meeting (AGM) on December 24.
Since BCCI’s new constitution was signed into law by the Supreme Court a second time in August 2018 with some amendments, the BCCI and various state associations had moved multiple Interlocutory Applications (IAs), no less than 102 in all, seeking further reliefs. Then on March 14, 2019, the apex court appointed PS Narasimha as amicus curiae to mediate on the multiple IAs and report back to it.
A Bench comprising Justices L Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and Ajay Rastogi had asked Narasimha to compartmentalize the various IAs related to the BCCI and proceeded to deal with them in a phased manner, IANS reports. Subsequently the recommendations from the amicus curiae were that 25 such IAs could “be disposed off with a liberty to avail appropriate remedies”. There were 35 IAs that were deemed infructuous or not relevant anymore, while 28 IAs were “successfully mediated” by the amicus Curiae.
However, 14 further IAs that needed contesting including ones with regards to the right to form association and the ones seeking key changes/clarifications to the constitution pertaining to the cooling off period for administrators were pushed to the third week of January, the newswire further reports.
Speaking to IANS, Narasimha said: “A substantial number of applications were disposed by the court today (Wednesday). A large number of cases that were related to funds have become infructuous while the court said that in the state cricket associations where the amicus curiae had successfully mediated and helped them hold elections, like Karnataka, were also disposed of.
“Only some cases remain, and the court asked these to be listed in the third week of January. The BCCI application seeking amendments to its constitution was not (emphasis ours) taken up today.”
Staying with the operative parts of the proceedings, the Supreme Court vacated its March 2019 order restraining other courts from hearing disputes related to the BCCI and state cricket associations, PTI reports.
All those petitioners, who have asked for various reliefs which could be decided by the high courts, have been now permitted to go to the respective high courts to avail their remedies, Narasimha said.
