New Delhi: In 2020, Bihar Cricket Association (BCA) president Rakesh Tiwary and ‘suspended’ secretary Sanjay Kumar had selected separate teams for the T20 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy.
Four years on, a similar scene played out at Patna’s Moin-ul-Haq Stadium when two cricket teams representing rival BCA factions arrived for the 2023-24 season-opening Ranji Trophy match against Mumbai.
For a cricket association established way back in 1935, the scenes that played out in Patna on 5 January are symptomatic of a tussle that has stricken Bihar evidently after Jharkhand’s creation in November 2000.
The lessons are not learnt even exactly six years after the Supreme Court’s reprieve in 2018 when it directed the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to allow Bihar to again compete in the Ranji Trophy and other official senior national cricket tournaments.
At Moin-ul-Haq Stadium, Mumbai made short work of the team selected by the Tiwary-led faction, winning by an innings and 51 runs. The weather gods came to rescue as Bihar saved the match against Chhattisgarh. The match with Uttar Pradesh also ended in a tame draw.
Ironically, this new low comes after Bihar emerged champion in the second rung of the Ranji Trophy, Plate Division, last season, and earned a promotion to the top level. But now its campaign is derailed.
Cricketers left in the lurch
It needs no saying that the cricketers are the biggest losers in this ongoing feud. So, the natural question in the Bihar imbroglio, too, is: What will happen to the players generally, and specifically to those picked by the Amit Kumar faction?
Kumar had named a 26-member squad for the first match. Later, one of the cricketers, Lakhan Raja, was suspended for six years by Tiwary. Some of these players would surely be talented and must be nursing the ambition of representing India. Will they be ever considered eligible again and get picked? Or, will they be labelled ‘rebels’ forever?
Bihar cricketers have already suffered a lot for the 14 years (2004/05-2017/18) when the eastern state was ostracised from the Ranji Trophy and other senior tournaments for no fault of theirs.
Some powerful administrators allegedly played favourites to deny cricketers of India’s third most populated state their rightful due. Although Bihar continued to compete in the junior categories, it effectively had no meaning as all roads to progress were blocked after a point.
Many talented cricketers’ careers would have ended before blooming due to a long period of uncertainty in Bihar. And after the BCCI snatched away its full-member status in 2003-04, some talented cricketers migrated to other states.
Take the case of former India skipper M.S. Dhoni and explosive wicketkeeper-batsman Ishan Kishan. Dhoni played junior tournaments for Bihar, but when Jharkhand got the nod, he chose the new state — and rightly so. Ishan has represented Jharkhand throughout his career, despite his parents having a house in Patna.
Bihar’s top order batsman Babul Kumar Singh, 31, is from the generation that grew up at a time when there was no scope to progress. Thanks to the support of his parents, he represented Jharkhand in age-group competitions and played the Ranji Trophy from 2012/13 to 2017/18 and then returned to Bihar.
“Initially, my parents accompanied me to Jharkhand for the first trials when I was young. Later, I started going alone and when I would get short notice, I’d travel by the government bus from Patna to Jamshedpur for camps. It was a bit tough for about two years, before I made friends in Jharkhand,” Babul, who has captained Bihar, tells The Print.
Leg-spinner Samar Safdar Quadri (2009/10-2017/18) and right hand batsman Shasheem Sanjay Rathour (2013/14-2017/18) played for Jharkhand before returning to Bihar.
On the other hand, former Bihar captain Tariq-ur-Rehman left after the 2003-04 season and represented Tripura (2004/05) and Jharkhand (2006/07). Patna-based Raju Vals (1991/92-1998/99) played all his first-class cricket for Tripura, while his younger brother Sunil Kumar represented Bihar (1989/90-2001/02) and then Jharkhand (2004-05).
Currently the coach of Bihar Under-16 team, Vals vividly describes the vagaries of selection and migration. “After representing Bihar and east zone in U-19 tournaments in the mid-1980s, I got disheartened when I wasn’t picked for the Ranji Trophy while I watched my contemporaries play. Fortunately, someone from Tripura approached me to play club cricket in Agartala, with the assurance that if I did well I would be picked for the Ranji Trophy. I grabbed the opportunity,” says 55-year-old Vals, who has also coached the Arunachal Pradesh junior team.
Discarded top order batsman Mridul Kumar, who made his Ranji Trophy debut in 2019, goes berserk on the ills plaguing Bihar.
“The problem starts at the grassroots level. In fact, corruption is prevalent from top to bottom — and it is no more a secret. Whoever comes into the association seems to get caught in a corruption whirlwind. There is corruption in selection; there’s no transparency. There are no proper trial matches to select the state teams. Teams are picked based on net sessions. In the absence of trial matches, how can players put up their cases?” the 35-year-old Patna-based player, who represented Jharkhand in age-group tournaments, told The Print.
“Also, there are no district matches to build one’s case for selection, if one doesn’t have a source among the higher ups. If I’m not performing, drop me. But don’t snatch the process through which I can stake my claim for selection again with a good performance. Patna, which has a history and legacy, is a classic case of mismanagement: an ad hoc body is managing the district cricket for about five years.”
A prominent former Bihar batsman-turned-coach says Jharkhand initially welcomed several Bihar players. “After Bihar lost its Ranji Trophy status, almost two generations of its cricketers were impacted. Some players tried luck outside the state. Most of them represented Jharkhand while some played for Bengal and Tripura. Jharkhand was liberal at the time and accommodated several of them.”
Jharkhand began competing in the Ranji Trophy from 2004-05. After competing in the tournament until 2003-04, Bihar returned in 2018 following the Supreme Court order in a case filed by Aditya Verma, secretary of the Cricket Association of Bihar (CAB), one of the several claimants to be the official body.
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Missing infrastructure
Besides politics, infrastructure remains Bihar’s biggest bane. The BCA doesn’t have a stadium of its own and has to take grounds, like Moin-ul-Haq Stadium and Urja Stadium in Patna, on lease. The former was in the news for its poor maintenance during the Bihar-Mumbai face-off.
In the ensuing two decades, Jharkhand has built a world-class stadium which hosts international matches. The JSCA International Stadium Complex, Ranchi, will be hosting the fourth Test between India and England from 23 February.
Despite the BCA’s internal battle, the BCCI continues to provide funds to the Association. It also provides infrastructure subsidies up to Rs.100 crore to its affiliates. The BCA too has received a portion of the subsidy; some figures are mentioned on the BCCI website, but no one knows exactly how much of it has been spent on infrastructure. Clearly, there is none to show.
In 2023 alone, the BCCI gave the BCA at least Rs 12.46 crore — an amount displayed on the Board website. And between 2019 and 2022, the BCCI transferred Rs 20.21 crore. In 2009, the BCCI had disbursed Rs 50 lakh for infrastructure development and cricketing activities. But the BCCI is said to have not received the audited accounts and/or utilisation certificates for a large sum of the funds it transferred over the years.
Some of these funds are shown under the BCCI’s mandatory monthly declaration of payment of Rs 25 lakh or more to parties, including players’ and match hosting fees. The actual sum that the BCA has received could be much more. In 2010, the BCA managing committee was dissolved, largely due to the alleged financial irregularities and litigation, and an ad hoc committee was constituted.
In October 2015, then BCCI president Shashank Manohar commissioned Deloitte to conduct an audit of all its affiliates as part of the ‘Project Transformation’. The damning audit report showed all associations neck deep in financial irregularities, but apparently no action was taken against anyone.
Deloitte, in a nutshell, reported the following about the BCA:
— Fixed assets of Rs 28.77 lakh not maintained in register.
— Records and documents from a former secretary not received. There is no custodian of records and there was no supporting document attached with payment vouchers that were retained.
— Incomplete member’s register wherein some members have a comment saying “No trace”.
— No inventory records of cricketing equipment maintained.
— No I-T returns have been filed with the income tax department.
— No internal auditor appointed by the association.
According to its 2021-22 balance-sheet, the BCA has a net worth of Rs 4.51 crore. But the accounts for the 2022-23 are missing from its website.
More recently, in October 2022, the BCCI appointed its joint secretary Devajit Saikia as an observer for the BCA, following allegations of mismanagement in election and other issues. “I was not supposed to look into the Bihar players [issue]. There were some anomalies going on there. So I had to go there and report [it back to the BCCI]. I did that about seven-eight months ago. My role was over after that,” Saikia tells The Print.
Unabated litigation
The BCA president-secretary battle began September 2022, when the elections took place for a three-year term (2022-2025). Both Tiwary and Kumar were together at the time of election, and their entire panel was elected unopposed. But there was a twist soon after a complaint was filed with the BCA ombudsman, claiming that the names of Tiwary and two other office-bearers were not in the voters’ list.
The ombudsman ordered that the three “should be removed from their post at once and they are restrained to perform any act of BCA in future (sic)”. However, they are continuing in their posts and how — it is a long saga of litigation, technicalities, and allegations that need a separate story.
Tiwary agreed to talk, but didn’t receive calls at the given time.
The split was so sudden, Kumar claims, that he could not even take charge and was ‘suspended’.
“Tiwary has hijacked the BCA secretary’s email ID and the association website,” alleges Kumar, who has launched a parallel website after his suspension. “Tiwary filed fake papers of financial fraud against me.”
Both the functionaries have been at loggerheads and engaged in constant litigation. The unending litigation clearly underlines that it is a battle of supremacy and one-upmanship, with large funds involved (from the BCCI) and a struggle to remain in power. In other words, it is a case of clash of egos.
In the six years since the restoration of the official association in 2018, court cases have been filed from lower courts to the Supreme Court.
There have been numerous instances of purported audio and video recordings of people associated with the BCA discussing money for players’ selection going viral, a testimony that something is deeply rotten in the state that has never won the Ranji Trophy. Bihar reached the final only once, in 1975-76.
Today, the BCA is allegedly without a secretary, though the name and photo of Ziaul Arefin can be seen in the secretary’s post on the website controlled by Tiwary. The parallel website, run and maintained by Amit Kumar, claims that he remains the secretary while showing Tiwary, Dilip Singh (vice-president), and Priya Kumar (joint secretary) to have been ‘stopped from work’.
Besides running parallel websites, both factions have different selection committees as well.
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Complicated mess
Evidently, these are extremely complicated issues. The Tiwary faction alleges that the ‘elected secretary’ has been ‘suspended’ for his ‘irresponsible and anti-association activities’.
After the chaos and drama at Patna, Amit Kumar didn’t announce a parallel team for the second Ranji match against Chhattisgarh. “I informed the BCCI and sent the same email [that he had sent earlier] that the same team would play against Chhattisgarh. The BCCI hasn’t replied – it doesn’t reply to my emails,” Kumar tells ThePrint.
He further says, though unconvincingly: “But this time I didn’t send the players to the ground because I didn’t want Bihar to become a laughing stock. The BCCI match referee had accepted my team list for the first match. But there was a lot of shoving and pushing and eventually the OSD to Tiwary filed an FIR against me, saying I had raised a fraud team. But I am confident this FIR will be quashed.”
BCCI’s questionable role
Amid all this drama, the BCCI has remained diplomatically silent — not just in the present scenario, but it has maintained the same stand over the years vis-à-vis Bihar.
This, according to a former BCA official, is a tactful way of not resolving the infighting, clearly with the aim of not annoying either party for votes.
The BCCI had taken a similar stand when another set of rivals were at war. In 2013, the then BCCI secretary Sanjay Patel, in counter affidavit in the Supreme Court in another case, had said this: “…the BCCI is governed by its own MoU and Rules and Regulations and as per the same, the BCCI was not empowered to resolve any inter-se dispute between two factions of the state body.”
By all accounts, Bihar’s issues continue to linger. Will the BCCI take action based on the report that Saikia submitted, or will it be also swept under the carpet like all reports? Importantly, what has Saikia said in his report, the contents of which are not known.
Story of resumption
Verma had filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court seeking to declare void a “flimsy probe” that the BCCI was about to conduct in the 2013 IPL betting-fixing scandal.
After getting only partial relief, he had moved the Supreme Court and also sought an order in Bihar’s favour so that it could again compete in the Ranji Trophy.
In 2016, a SC bench restored BCA, an associate member, to the full BCCI member, but rejected claims of Verma’s rival association. Verma, whose son Lakhan Raja has been suspended, had termed it as an “excellent” judgement that “exceeded my expectation”.
He said that the court had granted his only wish — to see Bihar compete in the Ranji Trophy again.
Besides, the bench broadened the scope of the case by ordering reforms in Indian cricket administration, and that led to the constitution of the Lodha Committee, which recommended wide-ranging changes in the existing BCCI constitution.
The writer has covered cricket for over three decades, based in New Delhi. He tweets at @AlwaysCricket
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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