Unsmiling Buddha

For a man who8217;d just engineered one big victory, signing a deal to set up West Bengal8217;s biggest-ever infrastructure project, you8217;d have expected him to show a bit more grace in defeat. Yet the reaction from Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to Jagmohan Dalmiya8217;s re-election as president of the Cricket Association of Bengal CAB was to call it a 8220;victory of evil over good8221; and a vow to 8220;continue the fight8221;. Coming from a keen sports fan, this just wasn8217;t cricket; coming from a CM, this was intemperate 8212; and just as unnecessary as his intervention in the CAB elections to openly back Dalmiya8217;s opponent, city police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee. Not only was that bad politics 8212; setting him against the CPM8217;s eminence grise, Jyoti Basu, whose blessings were with Dalmiya 8212; but bad administration too. His job as CM is to ensure that the police chief, a public servant, sticks to matters of security, not sport.

The irony is that Bhattacharya, as captain of a team breaking several records in the political arena, has earned widespread admiration and didn8217;t need to diversify into sport. He has already achieved much 8212; including Monday8217;s hard-fought deal with the Salim group 8212; yet has his hands full with work undone. Dabbling in the politics of sport is for those with time on their hands or for those with agendas more controversial than governance.

In the midst of the politics of the election, somebody forgot to mention cricket. Not once during his campaign did Dalmiya reveal what he would do to revive the game in West Bengal, where it is restricted largely to Kolkata and a couple of districts and which has yet to benefit from the skills he8217;s shown at the national and global levels. After the victory, he unveiled his grand agenda: fighting his foes in the BCCI. One can expect little, then, out of Bengal cricket in the days to come. Bengal8217;s politics is a better bet 8212; provided the CM sticks to the wicket he knows best.