New Delhi:
In an exclusive interview to NDTV's Barkha Dutt, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, who is on the Governing Council of the Indian Premier League (IPL), indicates that if Lalit Modi skips Monday's critical meeting, as Modi has indicated, he's out.
"If he doesn't come to the meeting, I suspect the BCCI will take a very strict view. Lalit is playing very hard to get. I am not sure what Modi is up to," said Pataudi. He added that there's unlikely to be a need for a formal vote against Modi.
A meeting of the governing council is scheduled for Monday, where members have suggested that Modi will be asked to quit. Modi, however, has emphatically refused to resign. He has also challenged the validity of Monday's meeting, suggesting that only the Chairman of the IPL can call a meeting.
Pataudi added that if Modi shows up at the meeting and asks for an extension to prepare his defense, the council will likely sanction his request.
Monday's meeting has been convened by N Srinivisan, who is the secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). The fact that Srinivasan owns the Chennai IPL team has recently been raised as a contentious issue hinged to a conflict of interest.
Modi's "biggest failure is that he has been doing it all alone...he doesn't want anyone else involved...that is his biggest strength and his biggest weakness. His style puts people off," said Pataudi.
The product is good, and the product is good for cricket. I don't agree with those people who say it is too commercial. This is a crisis (the game) has to go past," he emphasized.
Modi unleashed one of Indian cricket's biggest controversies earlier this month when he released, on twitter no less, the stakeholders of the group that bought the Kochi team last month. The tweets pointed out that then minister Shashi Tharoor had inappropriate links with the consortium because Tharoor's girlfriend, Sundanda Pushkar, was gifted equity worth 70 crores. Tharoor was forced to resign from the government as a result.
When asked about the plethora of controversies now surrounding the IPL- most of them related to financial irregularities, - Pataudi conceded that the governing council has not done its job. "It has been a failure...we should have been aware of what was happening. The fact that we didn't question anything is because we were carried away with how well everything was going," he said. "I saw the crowds, the IPL was very popular...the dirt that has been attached to it is sad...but as long as the product was good, I was happy," he conceded.
When asked about his son, actor Saif Ali Khan, who lost a bid he made for an IPL franchise, Pataudi was candid. He said that though Saif had told him that he was interested in a team, he did not confirm to his father that he was going to make a formal bid. Pataudi said that ideally, Saif should have sought permission from the BCCI before making his bid. "I don't know if he did or did not," he said.
Pataudi said that perhaps Saif assumed that since the BCCI's Srinivasan owns the Chennai Super-Kings, the association would not have any objections to the actor trying to buy a team, even though his father is a member of the IPL Governing Council.