For a politician as sagacious as West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, this is a particularly clumsy stroke. There he is in the middle of the pitch, attempting to lay siege to the Cricket Association of Bengal. True, Indian politicians have routinely displayed an unhappy alacrity to capture sports bodies for the enormous dividends of power and money they offer, but one would have expected the West Bengal chief minister to have resisted such ultimately trivial pursuits. That, however, was not to be. The chief minister seems to have thrown himself energetically into an ugly patronage game by strongly discouraging Jagmohan Dalmiya from contesting the presidentship of the Cricket Association of Bengal. This is not at all to bat for Dalmiya, but the chief minister’s cricket ambitions are unacceptable for two reasons. First, his first and sole business is to govern the state, not to decide who the president of the cricket association should be. West Bengal is today at the cusp of an economic transformation and the government has just been voted back to power on the back of a public faith that Bhattacharjee is the man for change. The CM shouldn’t have time for silly pursuits and it does not sit well with his image as well as the substance his record so far has provided. The second worry comes from the fact that the CM has supported the Kolkata police commissioner. The close nexus between the government and the administration in West Bengal is as well-known as it is in need of serious reform. Bhattacharjee’s predecessor, Jyoti Basu, is quite right to ask whether a police commissioner presiding over the state’s cricket body would have the time and energy to devote to his core responsibilities. But the issue goes deeper — the police in Bengal has Marxist unions. This, as well as the generally over-politicised administration, is something Bhattacharjee has to change. Supporting the police chief’s bid to add to his CV won’t help this process. No, this is just not cricket, Chief Minister.
