I believe the best time to analyze the impact of the Lodha Commission is when its work is fully done — yesterday’s opinion, to which I had linked in my previous post, is merely one part of the brief given to it by the Supreme Court.
Yet, there is food for thought even in what has emerged from the Commission on date. Basically, Judge Lodha and his colleagues have found sufficient reason to hold Gurunath Meyyappan and Raj Kundra guilty of acts relating to betting, spot-fixing etc that clearly bring the game into disrepute. Equally, they have found sufficient reason to suspend the owners of two franchises playing in the IPL.
The point is, though, that these findings are not the result of the Commission’s own probe — they merely validate, and opine on, the findings of the earlier Mukul Mudgal inquiry committee.
The final report was available in November last year; an interim report naming names (including that of then BCCI president N Srinivasan and BCCI CEO Sundar Raman) was available two months earlier.
The facts of the case were in any case known to the BCCI from May 16, 2013 on; Mudgal’s report merely validated what the officials were already aware of. And yet for two years the board stonewalled, it obfuscated, it lied in court and outside it, it went through sham after shambolic “inquiry”, it handed out clean chits like so much candy…
Sharad Pawar. Rajiv Shukla. Narendra Modi. Jyotiraditya Scindia. Arun Jaitley. That’s a roll call of the most powerful politicians in the country today — and they were all members of the BCCI administration in 2013, when the news broke. Shukla continued as IPL chief, even though these events occurred on his watch; Jaitley was part of the board hierarchy (as a member of the disciplinary committee) that applied multiple coats of whitewash to the whole affair.
If Raj Kundra and Gurunath Meyyappan are guilty, as the Lodha Commission has held, why then do these honorable men get a free pass for knowing the truth and yet choosing silence and self-interest over doing what is right?
And that leads to a bigger question: Why were they silent, all these men? What was their self-interest in maintaining status quo?
It’s a point I raise in this quick piece for The Wire.
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