NEW DELHI: Two top officials of the Indian cricket board quit yesterday over an escalating spot-fixing scandal, reports said.
Sanjay Jagdale, the secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and treasurer Ajay Shirke submitted their resignations to the board president, the NDTV news network and other channels said.
“I don’t want to give any reason, I have sent my resignation to the BCCI President,” Jagdale was quoted as saying by NDTV.
The resignations of Jagdale, the No.2 in the board hierarchy, and Shirke were likely to pile on more pressure on president N. Srinivasan to quit.
Sources have said that all five vice-presidents of the BCCI — Arun Jaitley, Shivlal Yadav, Chitrak Mitra, Niranjan Shah, Sudhir Dabir — are expected to send in their resignations by tonight.
Srinivasan has been under fire to resign after his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan was arrested last week for allegedly betting on Indian Premier League (IPL) matches.
Meiyappan, an executive at the Chennai Super Kings IPL team, which is owned by Srinivasan’s group India Cements, is being probed by a three-member BCCI commission.
Meiyappan’s arrest came after Test paceman Shanthakumaran Sreesanth and two teammates in his IPL franchise the Rajasthan Royals — Ankeet Chavan and Ajit Chandila — were also taken into custody.
The trio, who deny any wrongdoing, are in jail in New Delhi after police accused them of deliberately bowling badly in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars after striking deals with bookmakers.
Ankeet Chavan, who was arrested on allegations of spot-fixing, was yesterday released from Tihar Jail, a day after a court granted him bail to solemnize his marriage.
“Chavan was released from Jail No. 1 at 8:05 PM,” Tihar Law officer Sunil Gupta said.
Bowler turns witness
A bowler has turned witness for police probing a spot-fixing scandal in Indian cricket and his evidence could be used in a case against his teammates, an officer said yesterday.
Paceman Siddharth Trivedi has recorded testimony for police who are trying to link bookmakers to three of his teammates arrested as part of the corruption probe into the Indian Premier League (IPL), the unnamed officer said.
“His statement is important because he has told us he has information on some of the bookies arrested by us,” a police officer, who is part of the investigating team said on condition of anonymity.
“Trivedi’s statements will be admissible as evidence in the court. It will definitely make our case stronger,” the Special Cell officer said.
Local media reports yesterday said uncapped Trivedi, who also plays for the Rajasthan Royals, had turned down an invitation by Chandila to attend a party allegedly arranged by bookies.
“He had also refused money and gifts offered by the bookies,” the Press Trust of India news agency said.
Emergency BCCI meeting
Meanwhile an emergency working committee meeting of the BCCI may be held on June 8 might just be the last nail in the coffin for N Srinivasan. Some of the BCCI officials, led by joint-secretary Anurag Thakur, were demanding for an emergency meeting where they wanted to ask the BCCI president N Srinivasan the questions that had been going on in the media for a while now.
The president was not keen to convene the meeting till Friday evening, but the pressure became so much that he wasn’t left with too many options but to give the go-ahead. It’s understood that the joint-secretary Thakur, secretary Sanjay Jagdale and treasurer Ajay Shirke had gone to the extent of threatening that they might quit from their posts if this emergency meeting is not convened.
Political turn
Meanwhile, IPL chairman Rajeev Shukla appears to have got into serious trouble with his party.
Sources revealed Congress President Sonia Gandhi was annoyed by the growing perception that the political class had ganged up to protect the corrupt in the BCCI and asked the party not to be guided by Shukla’s vision in this matter, according to a newspaper report yesterday, in Kolkata’s, The Telegraph.
Rahul Gandhi took the initiative to control the damage, telling the younger ministers that such scandals cast the government of the day in negative light and any impression about a Congress role in saving the guilty should be fought with full force.
Rahul’s intervention resulted in two quick responses that succeeded in insulating the Congress from other politicians who were seen to be supporting or were silent in the ugly controversy surrounding fixing in cricket.
Jyotiraditya Scindia, the president of Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association and Union power minister, was the first to ask for Srinivasan’s ouster. Sports Minister Jitendra Singh took the exceptional step of asking for the resignation of the head of a non-government body.
Shocking says Tendulkar
Batting superstar Sachin Tendulkar yesterday called cricket’s betting and spot-fixing scandal “shocking and disappointing,” becoming India’s first big-name player to speak out on the issue.
“The developments in the last two weeks have been shocking and disappointing,” Tendulkar, the world’s leading scorer in both Test and one-day cricket, said in a statement.
“It has always hurt me when the game of cricket is in the news for the wrong reasons.
