Cricket’s absorbing self-interest allows N Srinivasan to retain power and control

The ICC chairman Srinivasan remains strongly rooted on the Indian board, which allows him to continue with his rule-manipulation and disregard of any propriety, writes Osman Samiuddin.

Narayanaswami Srinivasan. Mal Fairclough / AFP

One of the very few in-depth profiles of N Srinivasan, the chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC), was published in August last year by Caravan, an Indian monthly journal.

In itself, it is revealing both of Srinivasan and how the world of cricket operates that so little is known about him and how he rose to become, until recently, the most powerful man in

cricket.

A telling anecdote emerges of his early years in India Cements, the company he heads and which has placed him in his current predicament.

In 1979, as deputy managing director, Srinivasan came under scrutiny from the company over what was seen as a questionable business deal.

A shareholders’ meeting was called to vote on Srinivasan’s future. But at the meeting, shareholders wasted time enough for the meeting to end without an actual vote. The meeting had been worked that way by Srinivasan, wrote Rahul Bhatia.

“This battle, and the complications that followed, bore several hallmarks of Srinivasan’s style — rule-manipulation, a talent for persuasion, and persistent allegations of political influence bolstering his business.”

It is tales such as these — and his career is littered with more — that explain why the day Srinivasan is forced out of cricket still seems unforeseeable.

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He should, of course, even if he is not directly involved in the corruption that has seen Chennai Super Kings (CSK) suspended for two years from the Indian Premier League.

He has overseen that debacle in three capacities: as head of India Cements, as owner of CSK and as the head of the Indian cricket board. He has also had uncomfortably close familial relations to one of the main culprits.

The ICC has not yet commented on the findings of the Lodha Committee, or the implications for its head.

Most likely it will continue to not comment. At a stretch it may offer a non-comment comment: “it is a domestic matter on which we do not comment,” or some such guff.

The ICC is not alone. No full member will say publicly that their organisation should not have such a man as its head.

In that same profile, a former board official who had worked with Srinivasan offered this nugget. “He knows only two things: He is either here ... ” he clutched his feet, “or here ...” he feigned a two-handed chokehold.”

That switch between oily obeisance and menacing domination is reminiscent of Zia ul Haq, the Pakistani army general who wormed his way up in the estimations of prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and then deposed of him, politically and mortally.

Srinivasan has both bought and bullied the silence of cricket. Would he have been allowed to in another sport with even a slightly aligned moral compass?

In cricket he has gone deeper into a truth that other administrators before him unearthed, that the way its economy is, the way it is run, its size, its history are all easier to manipulate than putty.

In men such as Giles Clarke, the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), Srinivasan found not enablers but colluders.

It is a sport so ridden with self-interest that serious and deep issues of conflicts of interest and corruption are not cause for concern. See, as just one instance, the reaction of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to the findings of the Lodha Committee.

They formed a working committee to study those findings and report back. In six weeks. This for a case that has been roiling under their noses for over two years now, with several police investigations, one of their own and two independent investigations by supreme court justices.

Corruption in cricket, this thinking seems to say, is almost inevitable: no urgency is needed to deal with it.

It says, in fact, all that needs to be said about cricket that the only threat to Srinivasan’s position in the ICC comes from within the politicking churn of the BCCI.

It has no basis in any moral argument that it is not right for an ICC representative so tainted to continue.

The only way he was going to be removed was if the BCCI did not appoint him as their representative come September.

As a dispensation ostensibly hostile to Srinivasan has come into control, his removal was an active possibility.

Instead, recent reports seem to suggest that a compromise may have been worked out, which will allow Srinivasan to stay on for another year. It is the way of Srinivasan, and cricket does not mind one bit.

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