Revision as of 20:12, 16 July 2015

Narayanaswami Srinivasan

A profile

India Today

He has somehow managed to tide over every controversy in the aftermath of the 2013 match-fixing scandal and continues to rule Indian cricket with an iron hand in spite of several attempts to unseat him.

He is only the third Indian to become chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC), following in the footsteps of two other powerful administrators, Jagmohan Dalmiya and Sharad Pawar. The president of the Tamil Nadu Golf Association, Srinivasan is an accomplished golfer and still boasts of a very impressive handicap of 10.

He says, "My conscience is clear. I have not done anything to tarnish the game, bring disrepute or done anything wrong."

Rise and fall

India Today, May 11, 2015

Seven allegations, India Today,

Kunal Pradhan and Vikrant Gupta

April 30, 2015

Like many others before him, N. Srinivasan is cut down to size by a ruthless cricket board he once lorded over

The rise and fall of Srinivasan will perhaps be remembered as cricket's most compelling narrative over a decade when the game transformed from a serious sport that generated bountiful revenues to a Twenty20 circus that made more money than anyone could ever imagine. Srinivasan's story would arguably beat anything that happened on the field, including India winning the World Cup at home in 2011, and maybe even edge out the sordidly dramatic saga of his friend-turned-foe Lalit Modi, who has been in self-imposed exile in England for the last five years. Modi, the larger-than-life creator of the IPL, was a maverick who thought he had become bigger than the system, only to be cut down by a board that takes no prisoners-just like Dalmiya in 2005 and Srinivasan now. For the BCCI is a poisoned chalice. What it giveth, it taketh away. And so its wheels continue to turn, making cricket firmly a consequence of, rather than a precursor to, power as the larger universe of politicians, industrialists, lobbyists, promoters, players-turned-agents and legends-turned-commentators prepare to crown the next monarch of a password-protected society that has gone in the last three decades from a non-profit organisation to a corporate giant with an annual turnover of Rs 2,286 crore. In a system where the stakes are high, control is addictive, and hubris is intrinsic, the next rise is always round the corner, followed soon after by the next great fall. So let it be with Srinivasan. His unforgivable indiscretion is that he has turned on the board itself, and is now in danger of losing his job as the ICC chairman, a post to which he had so grandiosely nominated himself despite being mired in controversy last summer.

"We all know that the BCCI is really about control, not cricket," says a former member who knows its inner workings. "Even its bosses are becoming more brazen with the passage of time. When Dalmiya was beaten, he concentrated on regaining control of the Cricket Association of Bengal and chose to quietly bide his time. When Modi realised his time as IPL chairman was up, he fled to England and continued to hound the board intermittently through leaks and tweets.

Now, Srinivasan is desperately trying to hang on to his empire, trying every trick in the book to regain lost ground."

Directed by the Supreme Court to choose between being a cricket administrator and an IPL team owner, Srinivasan allegedly tried to shortchange the BCCI through a hilariously simplistic scheme. Chairman and Managing Director of the Rs 4,000-crore India Cements, he created a subsidiary of the company with the same shareholding pattern and transfered Chennai Super Kings shares to it for just Rs 5 lakh. To put this in perspective, CSK are one of the top teams in the IPL, and the Sahara Group had paid a staggering Rs 1,700 crore for the now-defunt Pune Warriors in 2010. Even considering that 2010 was the IPL's boom period, market insiders peg CSK to be worth Rs 1,000 crore today. The Rs 5-lakh ploy was crafted so that Srinivasan would have to the pay the BCCI, which takes a 5 per cent cut from any sale, only Rs 25,000 for the transaction, instead of an estimated Rs 50 crore at market price. Srinivasan's hold was such that the IPL governing council cleared the transfer, before the board's new working committee blocked it at the last minute.

Perhaps the last straw came in late April when an increasingly desperate Srinivasan allegedly used the ICC to try and establish a link between the new BCCI Secretary and BJP MP Anurag Thakur and a suspected bookie. Though the veracity of the allegation is still open to interpretation, Thakur promptly hit back, claiming that Srinivasan had hired a London firm to spy on certain BCCI members and saying that his position as the BCCI representative in the ICC was now under review. From cricket's supreme leader, Srinivasan suddenly became a man with a target painted on his forehead.

The story of Srinivasan's fall from grace fits into two riveting timelines-one much longer than the other. It all began two years ago, when his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan was named in a spot-fixing scandal by the Mumbai police, opening an investigation into the board's affairs by a Supreme Court panel led by former High Court judge Mukul Mudgal. Even as the saga continued, and Srinivasan's stock within the board gradually began to fall, he wrote an almost superhuman survival script, managing to stay on track despite numerous hurdles thrown in his path. Denying that either he or Chennai Super Kings had anything to do with Meiyappan's activities, he first refused to step down as BCCI chairman, then created a scenario where he could 'step aside', thereby regaining control of the board and even naming himself as ICC chairman in 2014. It was only in January 2015 that the Supreme Court verdict finally barred Srinivasan from contesting BCCI elections and told him to give up his IPL team. Even at this point, he "helped" Dalmiya become BCCI president, ostensibly in the hope that he would do Srinivasan's bidding.

The second timeline began just this April, soon after Srinivasan was heckled at the Melbourne Cricket Ground while handing the 2015 World Cup trophy to Australia. Two days later, ICC President Mustafa Kamal, nominated by the Bangladesh Cricket Board, announced he was stepping down because decisions were being arbitrarily made in the ICC under Srinivasan's chairmanship. He went on to say that the ICC had become the Indian Cricket Council. The statement so infuriated Srinivasan that he apparently began frantically calling Dalmiya, asking him to cancel India's Bangladesh tour in June, which would have caused its board severe financial distress. When Dalmiya refused, saying it would harm diplomatic relations between the two nations, Srinivasan allegedly lost his cool and virtually put Dalmiya on notice: cancel the tour or face impeachment as BCCI chief.

An angry Dalmiya called Jaitley, one of India's most powerful ministers who also controls Delhi cricket, to tell him about the threat. Srinivasan, meanwhile, had spoken to his bête noire, former BCCI and ICC chief Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party, who is also Jaitley's political rival, to bury the hatchet and form a partnership that might help him stay afloat. That is when Jaitley, who had been soft on Srinivasan, is said to have pulled the trigger. It has been a downward spiral since.

The Dalmiya-Thakur duo, egged on by a few other senior members led by former BCCI chief Shashank Manohar, are now talking about calling an emergency Special General Meeting (SGM) to end Srinivasan's tenure as ICC chairman with imme-diate effect. They would need a two-third majority, or at least 21 votes, to oust him since he is the BCCI's representative in the ICC.

"You can't imagine the hostility against Srinivasan," says a senior BCCI member. "He had manipulated the system to his advantage and always had the numbers he needed, but nobody is scared now. If you take his case to the floor, he will definitely lose the ICC chairman's job." The issues that have angered BCCI members range from the presence of India Cements or Tamil Nadu cricket officials on Team India's roster in various capacities to alleged favouritism towards loyalists by sidestepping the board's venue rotation policy for international matches. And from the staggering Rs 320 crore that the BCCI had to pay as litigation fees last year to defend him in court to how the cases against Srinivasan allowed the Supreme Court to get into the BCCI's affairs, something the board has resisted for decades by using the Societies Act to block all litigation.

But a final decision on the SGM has not yet been taken since sources say the Dalmiya-Thakur combination is willing to wait until the Annual General Meeting in September to boot Srinivasan out of the ICC. In any event, his days at the helm are numbered.

If a cat has nine lives, Srinivasan probably has ten or eleven. But abandoned by colleagues, booed by fans, and goaded by the Supreme Court, he may have run out of lifelines. Just like his rise, his fall may be not quite cricket.

Career as the BCCI chief

The Times of India, Jul 16 2015

Narayanaswami Srinivasan, some dialogues; Graphic courtesy: The Times of India, Jul 16 2015

Sumit Mukherjee

He wanted to go down in history as the `best' president the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI) ever, but following a chequered three-anda-half-year reign at the helm, Narayanswami Srinivasan is certain to be dubbed as its most controversial chief, if not the one who left the Board in complete disarray . If the BCCI is now on the verge of losing much of its autonomy , thanks to a long-drawn court-commissioned probe into its affairs, Srinivasan should take much of the blame because had he dealt with IPL6 scam firmly and impartially in 2013, the matter would not have reached this far.

The Supreme Court not only decreed that he was ineligible to continue or contest for Indian cricket's top administrative job but also pulled him up for trying to brush things under the carpet.

All Srinivasan had to do was order a probe into the betting and match-fixing allegations in IPL-6 by an independent agency and recuse himself from his position as BCCI president till the probe was over and taken the guilty parties to task.

But by describing his sonin-law Gurunath Meiyappan, accused of betting and matchfixing, as a mere “cricket enthusiast“ when for all practical purpose he was functioning as a Chennai Super Kings official, Srinivasan clearly betrayed ­ and succumbed ­ to his conflict of interest.

Like a stubborn kid refusing to part with his favourite toy, Srini dug in his heels when his colleagues in the BCCI urged him to step down temporarily. By reluctantly `stepping aside' ­ as opposed to stepping down ­ and appointing two former judges from Madras High Court to probe the IPL-6 scam, Srinivasan hoped that the monkey would be off his back.

But in spite of getting a clean chit from the two-man probe panel, Srinivasan and the BCCI were hauled to the Supreme Court by a petitioner from Bihar. Indian cricket's image took a nosedive, but Srinivasan remained defiant. “I don't agree that Indian cricket is taking a hit, I am not able to share your sentiments on that,“ he told reporters in Chennai during an ICC event on December 1 last year.

That was the beginning of the end for Srinivasan, whose lawyers contended in court that he, in spite of being the BCCI president and the owner of CSK by virtue of being the MD of India Cements, had no conflict of interest. The Supreme Court threw out his plea, but his arrogance remained intact. His apparent contempt for the media, whom he accused of hounding him, is best highlighted by the following quote: “I was on the front page, occupying the entire front page for almost 12 to 13 days... I am not that important or the BCCI is that important. Eighty-one pieces were written about me... during that period, and 10 or 11 editorials. Now, this is not news. This was a savage attack on me.“

Srinivasan had also boasted during an interview to Times Now at the height of the IPL controversy: “I never get sleepless nights. I sleep well... Do not put me in a position of an accused because I am not accused of anything.In my mind, there is no double standard.“

With CSK now suspended for two years and his son-inlaw banned from cricketing activities for life, Srinivasan, who had won two presidential elections unanimously , stands completely marginalized in the BCCI. He is still the ICC chairman, but for how long is anyone's guess.