AHMEDABAD: This was the last Congress bastion Chief Minister Narendra Modi had set out to conquer. On Friday, his trusted lieutenant and MoS for home Amit Shah, managed to wrest control over Central Board of Cricket, Ahmedabad (CBCA), a key to controlling the cash-rich Gujarat Cricket Association (GCA).
This marks the end of a 16-year rule of Congressman Narhari Amin, a former deputy chief minister, at GCA. It is clear Modi now wants a say in the national cricket body, Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), say sources. That Shah addressed the waiting media in Hindi after his panel of candidates swept the polls rightly reflected that the end of this chapter is quite a few pages away.
The CBCA, which had 180 voting members, most of them from clubs and educational institutions, had added another 50 members who donated Rs 25,000 each in 1996. A faction of the CBCA backed by Shah had last year legally challenged voting rights of these donor members.
The Amin group challenged the lower court’s decision first in the Gujarat High Court and later in the Supreme Court. Following the directions given by the apex court, election was held under the supervision of a Gujarat High Court-appointed receiver Justice (Retd) SD Dave. After the disqualification of one institute and demise of another individual, 178 members cast their votes for the 19 institutional and three individual seats. In the final analysis, the Shah faction defeated Amin group by 138-30 votes. Ten votes turned out to be invalid.
Interestingly, the Shah-backed faction contested in all the 19 seats and won them by a sizeable margin giving the individual seats a miss.
Later Shah said: “Cricket (administration) doesn’t have much to do with individuals.”
The victory is significant considering the fact that the 22 elected members, along with the two co-opted members and an ex-officio member, will select 11 members who will represent the CBCA on the GCA board. The GCA executive committee is a 25-member body with four votes each from Surat, Valsad and Kheda and two from Gandhinagar.
For Shah, the flight from CBCA to GCA is just days away. “After this defeat, it becomes a moral responsibility of the earlier body to quit,” said Shah.
Amin, who was graceful in defeat, said that though there is no provision of moving a no-confidence motion in the GCA constitution yet if the executive committee wants to remove him, he would happily step down.
Talking to TOI minutes after the results were out, Amin said: “If all the members in the committee think that way, I will happily quit.”
| Source: IndiaTimes |
