The man who had won, by a landslide, his parliamentary seat without as much as visiting his constituency even once, has had to make three attempts to finally triumph in an electorate of just 30. That is Sharad Pawar and his tenacious fight to capture the plum post of the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India.
More than a jinx, Pawar has had to fight the machinations of a maverick called Jagmohan Dalmiya, who had held sway over the richest sports body in the country for more than 25 years. After losing by a dubious casting vote last year, Pawar pressed his luck a second time in September 2005. Prediction had it that he would triumph this time, but a plethora of court cases and counter-cases had led to such an inexorable chaos that both parties agreed to adjourn the battle to another day.
Suits continued to be filed in various courts around the country. Eventually the Supreme Court intervened an appointed a neutral umpire, in the form of a former Chief Election Commissioner, to oversee the elections and set all controversies at rest. This finally paved the way for Pawar to win his just reward for some clever politicking that beat Dalmiya at his own game.
A string of a biased decisions with regard to the administration and conduct of the game, with large-scale financial implications, had thrown up needless controversies in the last year and a half, not the least of which was the one in which former skipper Saurav Ganguly was manipulated as a pawn on the chessboard of power.
The nemesis finally caught up with the man who had otherwise done a lot of work to raise enormous finances to make BCCI the richest cricket body in the world.
A majority in the cricket world may rejoice over Dalmiya’s ouster, but there will be others who may perhaps nurse doubts over the competence of the new incumbent to carry on in as successful a manner as his predecessor. What kind of a person is Sharad Pawar when it comes to heading an important organization like the BCCI? It is a body that is constantly in the public eye yet, of late, it has lacked transparency.
Pawar was the youngest in the state Cabinet of Chief Minister Vasantrao Nayak when he was appointed Revenue Minister in 1966. His only connection with sports then and cricket, in particular, was that his father-in-law was former Test leg-spinner Sada Shinde who was in the Indian team that toured England in 1946.
Pawar’s first fling in sports administration was lending patronage to state wrestlers. It was, however, through his good offices that the simple, common man’s game of kabbadi earned worldwide recognition. He himself took national teams abroad and conducted demonstration games in the United States, Japan and China. His efforts bore fruit when kabbadi was eventually included as one of the disciplines in the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing. For many years, he was the president of the Maharashtra Olympic Association, which is now a defunct body.
As his political ambitions grew beyond the state boundary, he was forced to distance himself from any sporting responsibilities. It was in 2001 that a splinter group in the Bombay Cricket Association, in order to gain strength to fighting an election, invited Sharad Pawar to support their cause. He was pitted as a presidential candidate against former India captain Ajit Wadekar, who was responsible for achieving two of the most significant Test series triumphs for India, over the West Indies and England in 1971. That election was labeled as a “Politician versus Test player” showdown. Sympathies were with the player but the votes went to the politician.
