The never-ending, forever appearing BCCI case in the Supreme Court will be up for another hearing on Thursday, February 20. The hearing which is slated to begin at 3 pm today, will have plenty of points to discuss, the most important being reviewing the status report which was submitted last October by the Committee of Administrators (CoA) asking the court to prevent non-compliant states from voting and finalise a timeline for the BCCI to conduct elections.
It should be mentioned here that back on July 18, 2016, the court approved the reforms recommended by the RM Lodha Committee and asked all the state associations and the parent body to adopt all the recommendations. However, catering to the request of the few state associations, the court modified the request. Till date, however, none of the state bodies nor the parent body has implemented the recommendations in totality.
The CoA now wishes for an election to be conducted within 90 days from the court's ruling and has also asked the courts to approve a specific timeline for the same.
All the state bodies have to comply with the Lodha-recommendations
In order to conduct elections, all the state bodies and the BCCI, in general, have to adopt all the recommendations mentioned by the Lodha committee. However, not one of the bodies have done so - CoA listed seven states as being "non-compliant", while the rest fell under the "partially compliant" and "substantially compliant" categories.
The state associations are not too thrilled with the recommendations pertaining to the cooling-off period, disqualification criteria, and selection panels. Also, they want the court to go over their ruling on the nine-year tenure limit set for office bearers in the new constitution.
However, this hearing could well be a significant step as the court could direct the CoA to bar non-complying state associations from holding elections. It could also clip their voting rights with the BCCI and their fundings could be frozen.
On Thursday the bench will comprise Justices SA Bobde and AM Sapre. Also, it does not help that the CoA is quite divided and their squabbles, following the KL Rahul-Hardik Pandya controversy, is out in the open.
