From optimism to cynicism – how Sourav Ganguly’s tenure as BCCI president

On Oct 18, 2022

In November 2019, weeks after he had been installed as BCCI president, Sourav Ganguly‘s administration proposed several amendments to the board’s constitution, written in 2018 by the Lodha Committee, which had been set up three years before by the country’s Supreme Court to recommend improvements to the board’s functioning. Those amendments, if effected, would strike at the heart of the Lodha reforms, arguably taking the BCCI back to its days of unchecked power and lack of accountability.

On September 14 this year, the Supreme Court agreed to most of those proposed amendments. Most importantly, the court agreed to relax the cooling-off-period rule under which the board’s office-bearers were barred from holding prolonged unbroken tenures – thus allowing Ganguly and Jay Shah to serve another term as BCCI president and secretary.

Within weeks, in a viciously ironic twist of fate, Ganguly would be out of the BCCI. There was little lament, save for the spin given by political parties, who have surrounded him since his retirement as a player – and whom he has never discouraged. Yet there was an overwhelming sense of disappointment, of what could have been, of perhaps a huge opportunity missed.

It all seemed so sunny and rosy that October day in 2019. Ganguly’s installation as BCCI president prompted a wave of optimism, even celebration. The first India captain to head the board in 65 years, the changemaker to help Indian cricket emerge from the cloud of the match-fixing affair in the early 2000s. He’d be someone who would call a spade a shovel, who could bring in the winds of change the BCCI needed. Someone who could make the administration a player-forward entity, and not one focused on fattening its already large bank balance. Or perhaps, everyone was a bit naïve.

Because that optimism, as noted above, lasted only a few weeks. Then it went downhill and, bar a handful of pluses, never really recovered.

It has been three years without any sign of the contracts.

India’s women cricketers, who represented the country in the 2020 T20 World Cup in Australia, where they were runners-up, had to suffer an additional indignity. They received their prize money, approximately US$500,000, from the BCCI more than 15 months after the tournament ended. The board itself had received the money from the ICC around a week after the final.

You could put these down to bureaucratic delays; the red tape that hinders all Indian sport. And maybe the president is not the person to blame for organisational inefficiencies; maybe none of these things were really a priority for the BCCI. And it is also true that, unlike during Ganguly’s captaincy, where he had the backing of the BCCI president then, Jagmohan Dalmiya, he didn’t really hold much power in this post.

Yet he was president. The buck stopped with him, and part of the president’s role – as is the role of the head of any large organisation – is to be statesmanlike, deal with the big things, project an image of calm and control. In this, the optics were poor.

Nowhere more so than in the public spat with Virat Kohli last year, which effectively resulted in the BCCI president and the national team captain calling each other…

From optimism to cynicism – how Sourav Ganguly’s tenure as BCCI president

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