NEW DELHI, NOV 6: Former skipper Bishan Singh Bedi and player-turned-Parliamentarian Kirti Azad have said Indian cricket was not free of match-fixing with the latter favouring a probe by a sitting Supreme Court judge into the allegtions.``The only way to sort out this problem is to initiate an inquiry headed by a sitting Supreme Court judge and decide once and for all whether our cricketers are clean or not,'' Azad said.Bedi said, ``if Pakistani cricketers are involved, I find it difficult to believe that Indian players are above it all. This is a disease of the 1990's and it needs to be rooted out before it reaches the new millennium.''Their comments, as well as that of cricket administrator Sunil Dev, came during the course of a debate The Big Fight on Star News Channel, a press release from NDTV said.Stressing the need for a panel on the lines of the one set up in Pakistan under Lahore High Court, Judge Malik Mohammad Qayyum to probe the issue in that country, Azad said he would raise the issue inthe coming Lok Sabha session.``If anyone has any evidence of match-fixing, they can place it before the commission, and then let the judge decide whether there is any truth to it,'' he said.Sunil Dev said: ``I am certain that some Indian cricketers have been involved in match-fixing'' and said he was ready to provide names if the government ordered a CBI probe, according to the release.Sunil Dev was manager of the Indian squad that toured South Africa in 1997.Both Bedi and Sunil Dev felt the assets of the players can be gone into as part of the investigations. ``What is wrong if the players are investigated? It is the only way the game can be cleaned,'' Bedi said.The three panellists felt the one-man probe committee, setup under former Chief Justice of India YV Chandrachud to go into allegations of match-fixing in Indian cricket, had not served its purpose.``How can you have a committee appointed by the board investigating allegations against itself and the players? We need a more impartialinquiry,'' Sunil Dev said.The Chandrachud panel, which gave its report last year, had held that allegations of match-fixing in Indian cricket were not true.
