Bindra, ex-BCCI chief, says India threw away match at Sharjah

Bindra says: “I was shocked when the four players mentioned actully ran themselves out. On my return, I informed the Board but no action was taken.”

The Board is coming under increasing pressure to cooperate with the government so that the allegations against Indian cricketers are not swept under the carpet. It is also coming under pressure to make the Justice Y V Chandrachud Committee report public. For some strange reason, the Board is reluctant to make the report public, this despite the fact that the one-man commission had exonerated the Indian players of any wrongdoing.

Union Sports minister Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa has summonned a meeting of the Board’s office-bearers and past and present players in the Capital on April 27, to elicit their views before deciding on what course of action to take. He said in Chandigarh today, that if need be, the “government would take over the probe”.

The Board itself seems to be a divided house with only its president, A C Mutthiah taking a stand that if required, “we won’t hesitate to hand over the probe to the CBI”. The rest of them speak in different languages, though most of them don’t want to make either the Chandrachud report public or want to initaite a fresh inquiry.

The one and only Jaywant Lele, the Board secretary, who said the charges against Cronje were “rubbish” said today that the Board would decide whether to make the Chandrachud report public or not only after the Board office-bearers meet the ICC president Jagmohan Dalmiya on April 18. Why after meeting Dalmiya, who does not hold any important post in the Board may sound strange, but in this moment of crisis they perhaps feel, there is no need to hide the fact that it is the ICC president who actualy runs Indian cricket.

There is a strong dissenting voice to Mutthiah’s public stand that the Chandrachud report should be made public. That voice happens to be that of Rajsingh Dungarpur — the man whom Mutthiah replaced. He told a television channel that he feels “no need for the report to be made public as it was an in-house inquiry.” He also said that at best, the “report can be placed at the Board headquarters in Mumbai for a stipulated period, for its members to come there and read it.” This can be taken as public admission of the fact that only a few Board members have seen the report and not all of them.