Jagmohan Dalmiya's comeback shows BCCI just doesn't learn

Inside the dark corridors of power inhabited by the high and mighty of the Board of Control for Cricket India (BCCI), there is a saying that "the harder you fall, the higher you bounce". But even the smart alec who appropriated this adage from a faux Confucius-style Chinese proverb would not have accounted for the rise, fall, disappearance into oblivion, and phoenix-like resurrection of Jagmohan Dalmiya.

For someone like me who followed the machinations of Indian cricket closely in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it once seemed Dalmiya's mischievous grin, and the glint in his eyes as he tackled a series of difficult situations, would continue to rule Indian cricket forever. Back then he was a physical manifestation of everything that was wrong with how the sport was run - the lack of transparency, the honorary office-bearers who revelled in their titles rather than their performance, and the tyranny of favours that kept the flock together. If the BCCI was the Death Star, Dalmiya was Darth Vader.

But while India saw him as a symbol of the establishment, for the rest of the cricket world, run from the posh Long Room at Lord's or the airy balconies of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Dalmiya was not just an outsider; he was a usurper. As India woke up to its potential as cricket's premier economic power, defiantly taking on the ICC at the drop of a hat and licking its lips in anticipation of the next opportunity to fling the gauntlet, Dalmiya was seen by the international media as an icon of India's designs of world domination. He was not a "Lord" or a "Sir", he was Jagguda - a Marwari builder who once kept wickets for Rajasthan Club in the Calcutta maidans and cricket's old gentry would not have that. They wanted to give him "a jolly good boot up his derriere, preferably into the Indian Ocean". But contrary to his perception of being a madman in the quest for absolute power, Dalmiya was shrewder, more charming, and more flexible, than the rest of the world realised. His mission to globalise cricket could not be argued with. And his hold over the associate members, coupled with his ability to convince the original members that, like it or not, cricket's financial future lay in the East, transformed the sport forever.

Dalmiya's fatal flaw, as with most tragic heroes, was that while he was reaching for the stars above, he did not realise that the ladder was being pulled from under his feet. He had made Indian cricket so big so suddenly that other interested parties could no longer let him keep it all for himself. What followed was his removal in 2005 at the hands of Sharad Pawar and his underlings led by the now-ostracised Lalit Modi. As Dalmiya battled court cases, criminal proceedings and smear campaigns, he became persona non grata in the BCCI - destined to crawl into his cave until the people who had knocked him over would, eventually but inevitably, turn on each other.

So almost ten years later, when Indian cricket is going through another churning following the Mudgal committee report and a Supreme Court order cutting its overbearing lord and master N Srinivasan down to size, almost by default Dalmiya has stepped into the spotlight once more. Now 74, slower and less boisterous than he was in his heyday, it's ironic that he has emerged as the messiah at a time when Indian cricket needs to be saved from a culture he had himself created. The conflicts of interest and financial muddle overseen by Srinivasan & Co is just the worst-case scenario of a system that Dalmiya had put in place. The only difference, perhaps, was that while he understood "cricket" was more important than "control" in the BCCI abbreviation, his successors somehow forgot that.

While he may have been slightly better than those who followed him, Dalmiya's return to the helm only takes Indian cricket back to square one. It is a remarkable story of perseverance and discretion in valour, considering he has been nominated by roughly the same set of people who had ousted him, but it also means that there is little hope for the BCCI-an unscrupulous, insular behemoth that laughs in the face of reform and cocks a snook at transparency. A new culture can be put in place only by new people who think differently. A cricket board where faces never change, only circumstances do, will forever be doomed to opaqueness and tyranny.

(This article first appeared in India Today.)