Anurag Thakur has been unanimously elected the BCCI president at the board’s special general meeting in Mumbai on Sunday. Thakur, 41, and formerly the BCCI secretary, was the only nominee for the post; he will serve as president until September 2017. He will also represent the BCCI on the ICC executive board and the Asian Cricket Council.
Thakur is the 34th president of the BCCI and after taking office he nominated Ajay Shirke, the Maharashtra Cricket Association president, as his successor as secretary. Shirke will represent the BCCI at the chief executives committee meetings of the ICC. He had previously served as BCCI treasurer, resigning the post in 2013 because he was unhappy with the board’s response to the IPL corruption scandal.
Thakur succeeded Shashank Manohar, who had stepped down as president a week ago so that he would be eligible to be elected the ICC’s first independent chairman. He had held the post of BCCI secretary during Manohar’s tenure and was seen to be the automatic choice to replace Manohar, given the support he gained since he was appointed joint secretary in September 2011.
As per the BCCI constitution, its president is elected by a rotational system where each of the five zones is given the chance to put forward candidates at the special general meeting. It was the East zone’s turn and Thakur was formally endorsed by all its six units – Cricket Association of Bengal, National Cricket Club, Odisha Cricket Association, Tripura Cricket Association, Assam Cricket Association and Jharkhand Cricket Association.
Thakur, one of the youngest BCCI presidents, is also a politician and is the BJP member of parliament from Himachal Pradesh’s Hamirpur district. The son of the two-time former Himachal Pradesh chief minister, Prem Kumar Dhumal, Thakur is also the head of the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association.
Anurag Thakur and Ajay Shirke, the newly elected BCCI president and secretary, have said they see the implementation of the Lodha Committee report as an “opportunity” rather than a challenge. They said the BCCI was in favour of reforms – “a continuing process” – even though it did not agree entirely with all the recommendations, as elaborated by Thakur’s predecessor Shashank Manohar.
“Where there is a challenge, there is opportunity,” Thakur said in his first news briefing as board president on Sunday. “It depends on how you look at the scenario – you may see it as a challenge, I see it as an opportunity that this is the time to deliver.”
In the last two months the BCCI legal counsel KK Venugopal and the lawyers representing various state associations had argued strongly against some of the Lodha Committee’s recommendations in front of the two-judge bench of the Supreme Court comprising TS Thakur, the chief justice of India, and Justice Ibrahim Kalifullah. In response the court had played hardball and told the BCCI it could not function like an exclusive club any more, and that it was mandatory to implement the recommendations.
BCCI opens application process for head coach
The BCCI has set June 10 as the deadline for candidates to apply for the role of India’s head coach. An interim coaching staff is likely to be put in place for the limited-overs series in Zimbabwe in June, with the aim of appointing new long-term coaches by the time Virat Kohli’s team reaches the Caribbean for a four-Test series against West Indies, scheduled for July-August.
The contracts of team director Ravi Shastri, batting coach Sanjay Bangar, bowling coach B Arun and fielding coach R Sridhar – who had comprised India’s coaching staff since the ODI series in England in 2014 expired after the World T20 in March.
