When Youth Questioned Power

If the BCCI today faces a situation when it has to undergo wide-ranging changes, it was one of its own administrators who unwittingly sowed the seeds of opposition. Just before India’s tour of Australia in 1999-2000, then BCCI secretary J.Y. Lele had said in an interview that Sachin Tendulkar-captained India would lose the three-Test series 0-3.

That prediction triggered a probing, nagging doubt in Shantanu Sharma, who had freshly completed graduation from Bhagat Singh College in Delhi: “I was disgusted after reading that interview. I told Rahul Mehra—my old classmate—that I wanted to do something.”

Hindu College graduate Rahul, too, felt “something fishy...smelt fixing” and wondered how a BCCI administrator could so openly predict the outcome of a series.

“I approached one of my uncles in Delhi administration and in two months we got the documents we wanted,” 43-year-old Rahul, now senior standing counsel (civil) & standing counsel (criminal) of Delhi government, tells Outlook.

Shantanu and Rahul, both products of Delhi’s Modern School, approached lawyer Prashant Bhushan to help them file what turned out to be the first meaningful PIL against the powerful BCCI and Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA). It led to the Delhi High Court passing a “favourable judgement”, making the BCCI open to judicial scrutiny under Article 226 (Power of High Courts to issue certain writs).

“For the over 75 years [of BCCI’s exi­st­ence till then], the law was that only members of BCCI could challenge it in a court of law. But after our PIL and the passing of the landmark judgment, any citizen of India could challenge BCCI and other sports bodies, as they were held to be discharging key public functions, like selection of team India etc, which are akin to state functions,” Rahul explains.

“Thus, for the first time, an ordinary citizen had successfully challenged a sports body (read BCCI) and succeeded in making it acc­ountable to Indian citizens and be transparent in its functioning,” he says proudly of their joint PIL. “Initially, we wanted a legendary cricketer to file that PIL. But none came forward. Between 1999 and 2007 simply nobody raised the [BCCI-related] issues.”

Shantanu, a businessman, discloses: “We did our homework and collected documents from people who themselves turned out to be corrupt. They tried to corrupt us, but we wouldn’t allow that to happen.” Rahul and Shantanu’s fight was against corruption and mismanagement in the BCCI and DDCA; they passionately wanted to cleanse the game.

Today, both Rahul and Shantanu take pride that their pioneering fight against corruption in sports as young men has culminated in the Supreme Court ordering the BCCI to make all-round changes in its constitution and outlook.

“I’m delighted with the judgement. It also shows, in a way, that our cause in filing that PIL in 1999 was just,” says a satisfied Shan­tanu. “When I was fighting that case, my fat­her was against it; he nearly disowned me.”

His father’s views would have changed after the historic SC judgment.