The BCCi’s Committee of Administrators has appointed the former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) of India, N Gopalaswami, to take charge of the board’s upcoming elections. He has been named electoral officer for the electoral process, which is set to conclude with the polling on October 22.
Gopalaswami had worked as CEC between 2006 and 2009.
The BCCI is set for elections after a prolonged tussle over the implementation of the Lodha Committee’s reforms, which was part of the fallout of the 2013 IPL corruption scandal. While the BCCI and its members – the state associations – wrangled over which Lodha recommendations to implement and in what form, the court had appointed a Committee of Administrators (CoA) to oversee the running of the Indian board in early 2017. The CoA supervised the BCCI for nearly 30 months before it announced in May that the board was ready to go ahead with elections.
Gopalaswami will perform his role as electoral officer for the BCCI out of the board’s headquarters in Mumbai. He has till June 30 to prepare the electoral protocol for the elections, in consultation with the CoA, and communicate it to the state associations. Then, in the next step of the process, the states will need to appoint electoral officers of their own and hold their elections by September 14 at the latest. The states will then send the BCCI their list of representatives, and the list of candidates for the BCCI’s election will need to be finalised by September 30.
It remains to be seen which of the current lot of office-bearers at the state and BCCI levels are eligible to contest the elections, given the cap on number of years in office and cooling-off period introduced by the Lodha Committee. As per the new rules, an office-bearer can work for 18 years as long as the cooling-off period of three years, which comes into play after two consecutive terms of three years each, is exercised.
Source: ESPN Crickinfo