Conflicts of interests and superstar culture: full text of Ramachandra Guha’s letter on BCCI/

Johnson Cherian.

Historian Ramachandra Guha, one of the four members of the Committee of Administrators (CoA) appointed by the Supreme Court to run the BCCI, on Thursday announced his resignation from the committee, citing personal reasons.

Mr. Guha had informed a Vacation Bench of Justices M.M. Shantanagoudar and Deepak Gupta that he had resigned from his post and discussed the issue with the committee’s chairperson and former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai.

Here is the full text of Mr. Guha’s letter to Mr. Rai:

Dear Vinod,

It has been a privilege working with Diana, Vikram and you in the Supreme Court appointed Committee of Administrators. It has been an educative experience, spending long hours with three top-flight professionals from whom I have learned a lot in these past few months. However, it has seemed clear for some time now that my thoughts and views are adjacent to, and sometimes at odds with, the direction the Committee is taking as a whole. That is why I eventually decided to request the Supreme Court to relieve me of the responsibility, and submitted my letter of resignation to the Court on the morning of the 1st of June.

For the record, and in the interests of transparency, I am here listing the major points of divergence as I see it:

1. The question of conflict of interest, which had lain unaddressed ever since the Committee began its work, and which I have been repeatedly flagging since I joined. For instance, the BCCI has accorded preferential treatment to Some national coaches, by giving them ten month contracts for national duty, thus allowing them to work as IPL coaches/mentors for the remaining two months. This was done in an adhoc and arbitrary manner; the more famous the former player-turned-coach, the more likely was the BCCI to allow him to draft his own contract that left loopholes that he exploited to dodge the conflict of interest issue.

I have repeatedly pointed out that it is contrary to the spirit of the Lodha Committee for coaches or the support staff of the Indian senior or junior teams, or for staff at the National Cricket Academy, to have contracts in the Indian Premier League. One cannot have dual loyalties of this kind and do proper justice to both. National duty must take precedence over club affiliation.

I had first raised this issue to my COA colleagues in an email of 7″ February, and have raised it several times since. I had urged that coaches and support staff for national teams be paid an enhanced compensation, but that this conflict of interest be stopped. When, on the 11″ of March, I was told that that there was a camp scheduled for young players at the National Cricket Academy but at least one national coach was likely to be away on IPL work and might not attend the camp, I wrote to you:

No person under contract with an India team, or with the NCA, should be allowed to moonlight for an IPL team too.

BCCI in its carelessness (or otherwise) might have drafted coaching/support staff contracts to allow this dual loyalty business, but while it might be narrowly legal as per existing contracts, it is unethical, and antithetical to team spirit, leading to much jealousy and heart-burn among the coaching staff as a whole. This practice is plainly wrong, as well as antithetical to the interests of Indian cricket.

I would like an explicit and early assurance from the BCCI management that such manifestly inequitous loopholes in coaching/support staff contracts will be plugged forthwith.

Yet no assurance was given, and no action was taken. The BCCI management and office-bearers have, in the absence of explicit directions from the COA, allowed the status quo to continue.

2. I have also repeatedly pointed to the anomaly whereby BCCI-contracted Commentators simultaneously act as player agents. In a mail of 19 March to the COA I wrote: