'BCCI election process is a joke'

New Delhi: Indian cricket, reeling under one controversy after another, gets some words of advice from the former chief election commissioner, M S Gill, under whose stewardship the 2003 Jammu & Kashmir elections took place.

Gill says that a handful of people and only 30 votes to elect the governing body of the most popular sport in a democratic country as large as India makes a mockery of the system.

The man, credited with conducting a fairly peaceful election in one of the most violence-prone states, says that the Board of Cricket Control of India's present electoral process is both a shame and a joke, and adds that the major change that needs to be made is in the number of votes controlled by certain states.

"It is ridiculous that a state like Maharashtra has four votes: Mumbai, Maharashtra, Vidarbha and the Cricket Club of India (CCI). Similarly, Gujarat, which doesn't have a great cricket tradition, has three votes ? Gujarat, Baroda and Saurashtra ? and Andhra Pradesh two votes (Andhra and Hyderabad)," he says.

"But bigger states like Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh have just one vote each," he adds.

As the BCCI gets ready to elect its new president and members of the governing body on November 29 and 30, Gill blames the board and its officials for the consistency with which they have allowed chaos to creep in.

Gill also wants that the practice of interested parties in the BCCI going to court at the time of the election must be stopped.

He adds that it is almost funny that when the election takes place in the south, somebody files a petition seeking a stay in a Mizoram court and if the polls are conducted in the north, somebody else goes to a court down south.

This, he says, is nothing but a way of buying time to manipulate things to one group's advantage.

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"When the Election Commission can handle 68 crore voters and nine lakh polling booths across the country, handling 30 votes should not pose any problems. The problem lies elsewhere," he says.

He adds that the best way to sort things out is for the Supreme Court to intervene in the matter and order reform.

The meeting of the board to be held in Kolkata will be handled by his former colleague T A Krishnamurthy, and Gill says that his appointment was the best thing to happen.

Meanwhile Krishnamurthy, who is to oversee the BCCI elections, indicated on Wednesday that some changes in the nomination procedures are being contemplated.

Krishnamurthy made this observation after meeting the representatives of 13 associations in Chennai, individually and later on in a group.

All these steps are being taken with a view to making the elections 'fair and transparent' he adds.

The BCCI elections are to take place in Kolkata. The associations which made representations are Bihar, Karnataka, CCI, Vidharba, Punjab, Delhi, Saurashtra, HP, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, UP, NCC Kolkata and Hyderabad.

He also says that any one can contest from any where and this ruling by him has come as a boost for the Mumbai Cricket Association chief and Nationalist Congress Party leader, Sharad Pawar, who narrowly lost the battle last year while contesting as the Punjab Cricket Association nominee.

Only two days are left for the state associations to declare their representatives to Krishnamurthy, who will begin the process of preparing the voters and nominees list on November 27.

Krishnamurthy also declared that Bihar and Rajasthan had the right to vote.

Former BCCI president Jagmohan Dalmiya had disaffiliated Bihar, a member of the Board since 1945, on the grounds that Jamshedpur, where it was headquartered, lay in Jharkhand after the bifurcation of states.

The post of BCCI president with a term of three years is rotated among five zones and the present term is that of the north. Incumbent Ranbir Singh Mahendra who represents Haryana has already been debarred from filing his nomination or having a vote as chairman for the elections.

The BCCI elections were not held during its Annual General Body Meeting in September after the two-day meeting was adjourned as different factions filed court cases seeking a direction on the way the AGM and the elections were held.