Special Correspondent
Hyderabad: At long last, some sanity appears to have returned to the Hyderabad Cricket Association (HCA). The truncated apex council, already mired in allegations of corruption and chaos, has postponed the Special General Body Meeting (SGM) scheduled for September 14. The move, though overdue, is a tacit admission that the proposed SGM lacked any legal or moral standing.
Let us recall the facts. The HCA’s elected body today barely exists—reduced to two office-bearers and a councillor: Vice President Daljit Singh (now Acting President), Joint Secretary Basavarju, and Sunil Agarwal. The President, Secretary, and Treasurer remain suspended after their arrest by the state CID in connection with an alleged IPL ticket scam and other financial irregularities. Ironically, this suspension itself was ordered by the same truncated committee.
Yet this crippled council has in the past convened an AGM and even taken key decisions, including appointing a Director of the Cricket Academy. As if that were not enough, it now dared to call an SGM to push through more decisions, despite knowing well that such actions would inevitably face legal scrutiny.
Unsurprisingly, several club secretaries cried foul when the same council arbitrarily suspended the arrested office-bearers even before they were proven guilty. President Jaganmohan Rao, Secretary Devraj Ramchander, and Treasurer Srinivas were indeed arrested by the CID but later secured bail. As per Indian jurisprudence, they remain accused until proven guilty by a competent court.
With threats of legal challenges mounting, at least one petition questioning the council’s authority to convene an SGM has already been admitted by the High Court. The writing on the wall was clear: going ahead would have been legally indefensible and institutionally disastrous. Postponement, therefore, is not wisdom but an inevitable retreat in the face of judicial scrutiny.
This is not the first time the council has backtracked. Its earlier decision to revoke the ban on 57 club secretaries—allowing them to participate in the last AGM and push through controversial resolutions—was hastily reversed once legal scrutiny loomed. Social media rightly mocked these flip-flops as another example of arbitrary decision-making. Had the SGM proceeded under such shaky authority, the fallout would have been even more humiliating than the debacle of the previous AGM, where rushed decisions like appointing a Cricket Academy Director and constituting committees are now under challenge.
It is alleged that the apex council has not even consulted retired Justice Naveen Rao, appointed by the High Court as a one-man supervisory committee, on some decisions. Instead of seeking his guidance, the Acting President and Joint Secretary appear to be taking cues from “outside masters,” some of whom themselves face legal scrutiny. This is not just poor governance—it borders on contempt for the rule of law. If the HCA leadership wishes to salvage any credibility, it must defer to the court-appointed authority, not to vested interests operating in the shadows.
The postponement of the SGM is thus only a reprieve. The HCA stands at a crossroads: either it cleans up its act under judicial oversight, or it will continue sliding into irrelevance—remembered more for scandals and courtroom battles than for cricket.
