The paperwork in the Ajit Chandila case carries a date from the early days of the affair: a Delhi Police Special Cell file, Case Crime No 20/2013, registered on 9 May 2013. By 17 May the BCCI had suspended him pending inquiry. It then took nearly ten years for the board to finish with him.
Chandila, S. Sreesanth and Ankeet Chavan were the cricketers at the centre of the 2013 IPL spot-fixing scandal. The BCCI handed all three life bans. The episode caused a major upheaval in Indian cricket, according to India Today, and led the Supreme Court to step in and change how the game is governed in the country.
Sreesanth: guilty, but not for life
Sreesanth took the longest route. A criminal court had acquitted him, and he argued that this should clear him with the board too. The Supreme Court disagreed on 15 March 2019. A bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and K M Joseph said an acquittal does not wipe out disciplinary findings, because the standards of proof differ. A criminal case needs proof beyond reasonable doubt; a disciplinary inquiry turns on preponderance of probability.
The judges found no flaw in the BCCI committee’s conclusions on corruption, betting and receiving gifts. “There are no grounds for this court to take a different view,” the bench said. They did throw out the life ban, though, because the board had not weighed aggravating and mitigating factors. It was told to decide the punishment afresh within three months and to consider his clean disciplinary record and young age.
The bench also had a line on the sport itself. Cricket, it said, is a synonym for gentlemanliness, and there should be zero tolerance towards foul play. Under the BCCI code the minimum penalty for corruption is a five-year ban and the maximum is life. For betting, the range runs from two years to five.
Chandila’s turn
Chandila was banned for life by the BCCI’s disciplinary committee on 18 January 2016. On 22 February 2023, India Today reported that BCCI ombudsman Vineet Saran had cut the sentence to seven years, counted from that date. He accepted Chandila’s representation of 4 November 2019, which asked for parity with Sreesanth and Chavan.
The arithmetic is simple. Seven years from 18 January 2016 ends on 18 January 2023, so the ban had already run out by the time the order was reported, and Chandila was free to return to the field. Sreesanth went on to play for Kerala. Chavan went back to his club side in Mumbai.
India Today also noted that the Kerala High Court had overturned the BCCI’s life ban on Sreesanth in 2017, a ruling the Supreme Court later set aside in part.
Sources
- IPL spot-fixing case: Ajit Chandila's life ban reduced to 7 years – India Today
- Supreme Court upholds Sreesanth's guilt but sets aside life ban by BCCI – Times of India
