Dubai: It’s back to square one with Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) rejecting all major recommendations of the Lodha Committee, approved by the Supreme Court of India. The BCCI’s special general meeting on Wednesday has agreed to adopt Lodha panel reforms only partially, especially rejecting recommendations on good governance like age-cap, tenure and cooling off period for its officials.

An upset Justice RM Lodha, who heads the three-member panel that suggested the changes, expressed his shock at BCCI’s rejection of major reforms. He went on to state that BCCI has once again shown a lack of intent a year after the Supreme Court had directed it to implement the recommendations.

The BCCI has also virtually humiliated Committee of Administrators (CoA) headed by Vinod Rai through their decision.

This committee, which was supposed to carry the reforms, looks helpless and seemed to have been able to do anything.

The BCCI had insisted from the beginning that every member above the age-group of 70 years should be allowed to continue. They also did not approve the cooling-off (three years after each term) and tenure (cumulative 18 years in state and BCCI) for officials.

Veteran administrators N. Srinivasan and Niranjan Shah may thus continue to stay relevant despite disqualification. BCCI even do not want the recommendation of one state one vote reform.

For three years between 2015 and 2017, the Supreme Court has been deliberating on this case and till now nothing has come out of it. Through an order on July 2016, the Supreme Court had even given the BCCI six months to implement the Lodha Committee recommendations.

Lodha has hit out the BCCI’s latest decisions: “I don’t understand where is the possibility of changing the recommendations when all the review petitions have been rejected. There is no point in deliberating when the verdict is already given by the Supreme Court.”

The BCCI special general meeting even took an aggressive stand by preventing its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Rahul Johri to attend the Special General Meeting. The reason they started was that they were strictly following the Supreme Court order of letting only office-bearers attend the meeting and not a paid employee.

The meeting also debarred Odisha and Punjab from the meeting stating that the representatives were not office-bearers. Interestingly, the peeved CoA is understood to have served a notice to top BCCI office-bearers, including acting president CK Khanna for not allowing Johri to attend the SGM.

It will be interesting to watch whether BCCI can openly defy a legally binding order of the Supreme Court. It is likely that Supreme Court may come down heavily on the BCCI and if so, the consequences will be anybody’s guess.