Agencies
Chennai, March 2
Seasoned cricket administrator Jagmohan Dalmiya has been elected as the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) president, replacing Narayanaswami Srinivasan, in the board’s annual general meeting in Chennai on Monday, more than a decade after he last held the top job.
Apart from Dalmiya, the other new entrants are Haryana’s Anirudh Choudhary who has been appointed as the new treasurer while Cricket Association chief Anurag Thakur was named the board secretary.
Anurag Thakur was the nominee from the Pawar faction and he won the secretary post by one vote. His opponent was Sanjay Patel, who was favoured by Srinivasan.Barring Thakur’s surprise win, ruling camp loyalists swept the elections for the other posts at the much-postponed AGM, where Srinivasan himself could not contest for the president’s post owing to a Supreme Court directive.
Jharkhand Cricket Association’s Amitabha Chodhary was elected the Joint Secretary beating Goa’s Chetan Desai, belonging to the anti-Srinivasan faction, while Haryana’s Anirudh Choudhary won the treasurer’s position by defeating Rajiv Shukla.
While three vice-presidents were elected unopposed, the two other positions also went to the Srinivasan faction with TC Mathews (Kerala, West Zone) and CK Khanna (Delhi, Central Zone) winning the polls. Khanna defeated the influential Jyotiraditya Scindia, while Mathews edged past Ravi Sawant.
The three who were elected unopposed are Andhra’s Gokaraju Gangaraju (South Zone), Assam’s Goutam Roy (East) with ML Nehru of Jammu and Kashmir representing the North Zone.
However, the fact that other anti-Srinivasan camp candidates lost the elections proved that cross-voting took place only for Thakur.
Meanwhile, the Rajasthan Cricket Association, who were suspended after Lalit Modi had become president, had attempted to enter the elections. Mehmood Abdi had led a group to Chennai, but he was not given access to the meeting. Although he did submit a letter explaining why his vote needed to be counted as well.
The 74-year-old Dalmiya, president of the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB), was unanimously accepted by all the units loyal to Srinivasan to return to a position he held more than a decade back.
Dalmiya’s bid got a boost after Pawar failed to get any proposer from the East Zone, whose turn it was to nominate the president. The former ICC President had held the top post in BCCI between 2001 and 2004.
All the six state units from the East Zone owed allegiance to the Srinivasan camp when his loyalists met in Chennai on Sunday.
Pawar, who was projected as possible candidate for the president’s post, had also met his supporters.
Dalmiya’s elevation to the position was necessitated after Srinivasan was forced to stay away from the election owing to a Supreme Court directive, which reduced his role to merely voting.
The apex court barred Srinivasan from standing as a candidate for the BCCI chief following its probe into a betting and fixing scandal surrounding the Indian Premier League (IPL).
In fact, the AGM itself was delayed several times due to the legal battle that Srinivasan is fighting in the top court.
The court is currently hearing the IPL spot-fixing scandal in which conflict of interest with regards to Srinivasan’s position as the BCCI president and owner of the IPL team Chennai Super Kings has come in for sharp criticism from the court.
Dalmiya, a former International Cricket Council (ICC) chief from 1997 to 2000, has been heading the cash-rich CAB since 1993, except for a 19-month hiatus after he resigned in December 2006 on being expelled from the BCCI for alleged embezzlement of funds. But he rode back in style in 2008 defeating the incumbent Prasun Mukherjee.
