Sharda Ugra, widely considered India’s foremost sports journalist, recently told Karan Thapar in an interview for The Wire that the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s ego is responsible for the potential crisis facing the T20 World Cup due to start on February 7. Ugra’s observations are valuable for understanding the way the ICC has made itself an outpost of the BCCI. The full text of the interview is below. It has been transcribed by Ritvi Jain, an editorial intern at The Wire. Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to a special interview for The Wire. If Pakistan carries out its threat to boycott next month’s T20 World Cup, how much damage will that do to the event? Who is responsible for creating this crisis? And are critics right in sensing the influence of the Indian government behind the handling of Bangladesh’s demand to play its games in Colombo rather than Kolkata and Mumbai? Those are the key issues I shall raise today with someone who is widely considered India’s foremost sports journalist, Sharda Ugra. Sharda Ugra, if Pakistan carries out its threat to boycott next month’s T20 World Cup, how much damage will that do to the World Cup? And how much of the event’s credibility could be lost?Sharda Ugra: You know, I think the question of credibility is now, it’s literally out the window. Because, you know, we have arrived at this situation because it’s been so awkwardly handled. And I think the World Cup will be affected in the sense that if Pakistan pulls out, there’s a massive money that rides on the India-Pakistan match in any ICC picture, because that’s the only time these two teams meet. And they literally ensure, almost deliberately and cynically, that India and Pakistan are in the same group at every ICC event. So they play at least one match, if not two. And if they make, any of the teams makes, both of the teams makes a knockout, it becomes three. So that’s a big commercial thing for television, for ads and all the rest of it. So that is what will be affected more severely than credibility, I think, because the ICC’s credibility at the moment is, I think, at a pretty low ebb.Karan Thapar: So with the ICC’s credibility at a pretty low ebb, let me ask, who’s responsible for bringing us to this position where 12 days before the World Cup starts, Pakistan is threatening to withdraw? Who’s to blame?Sharda Ugra: I think if you look at it, these are two separate issues. The situation is, we’ve arrived at this point is because there were directions, but unwritten, unofficial to have the Bangladesh cricketer, Mustafizur Rahman, removed from the Indian Premier League. He got a very high contract and there were instructions given, but there is no official word as to who gave these instructions, where they came from. It’s all very nebulous and in the air. It started with that, with Bangladesh’s response and said, look, if it’s not safe for our player to be in India, then why should the entire team be there? And that’s just followed through. Pakistan jumping in is, I think, a little bit of a follow on from last year’s Asia Cup mess that was also created to start with when India refused to shake hands. And then it turned into this really messy situation with regards to accepting the trophy from the head of the ICC, who happens to be the Interior Minister of Pakistan and the head of the Pakistan Cricket Board. So they’ve stepped in to muddy the waters a little bit and get political capital out of the situation and say that, look, we can actually put this World Cup, almost make it seem incomplete in a way if there is no Pakistan. Never mind if there is no Pakistan and Bangladesh in the tournament. Two of the four South Asian teams are not competing.Karan Thapar: Let me go back to the start of the answer you just gave me. You say it all began with unofficial instructions being passed down the line that Mustafizur Rahman should be dropped by KKR. Who do you suspect gave those unofficial instructions?Sharda Ugra: I think it’s become an issue because the BCCI is quite entwined with the ruling establishment that it came from there because when there was this whole, you know, India, the situation between India and Bangladesh has been, politically, it’s been ramped up and amped up and heated up to a degree that there have been conversations about, you know, infiltrators and so on, the elections coming in Assam and in Bengal that are neighbouring states with, Indian states with Bangladesh. I think it came from there. But again, most probably it is instructions definitely from outside cricketing sort of logic sources. Had this instruction not come, Mustafizur would have played in the IPL without any noise and nonsense, unless it had been some social media sort of outrage would have been triggered or made viral or whatever it is. But the moment it has, you have, you’re absolutely highlighted and amplified the issue and it’s a political issue and it’s not a cricket issue. The instructions to not play him is a political issue and it definitely comes from, you know, sort of stirring up the pot when there are elections on the go in a few months in both these states that I just mentioned.Karan Thapar: Let me be blunt. The chairman of the ICC is Jay Shah. He’s a former secretary of the BCCI and he’s home minister Amit Shah’s son. The home minister is someone who regularly refers to Bangladeshis as ghuspaithiyan, as infiltrators. Many people believe that the treatment of Bangladesh by ICC is happening at the behest of the Indian government. Do you share that belief?Sharda Ugra: I mean, I certainly think that once you’ve gone down this path of singling out a Bangladeshi cricketer and then you have not been able to control what’s happened after when the entire team has said we’re not going to play. Did the ICC’s instructions of what the ICC was to do come from the Indian government? I can’t say that with any confidence. But what I can certainly say is that the role of the Indian board in this entire matter, the BCCI and its influence in the ICC and the almost, you know, obsequiousness of the other cricket boards that are on the ICC board, that has led to this crisis. I think India’s, the Indian financial muscle in its cricket is what has brought us to this point and led the ICC to take this decision to make this very clear difference between, oh, if Bangladesh protests about coming to India, if Bangladesh sees it as an issue, we shouldn’t think about it and it should become about the rules of this tournament that we’re going to have, ICC’s rules. But I think it’s a pretty flimsy, that’s a pretty flimsy argument.Karan Thapar: But do you think BCCI’s influence over ICC is responsible for the predicament we’re in?Sharda Ugra: Pretty much, because everyone now is under the open, there’s an awareness around that the ICC is basically just the Dubai office of the BCCI, you know, that it runs with what the BCCI wants, and which is what we’ve seen that its executive board as well responds in the same manner. So that’s, I mean, I’m not at all surprised that this decision came to be.Karan Thapar: Tell me this. Although, as you said, BCCI’s influence is responsible for the way the ICC has handled the Bangladesh matter, how much of the mishandling is because Jay Shah may not have the necessary experience? He may not have the deftness, he may not have the sure touch. How much of it is his responsibility as chairman of the ICC?Sharda Ugra: I don’t think there is that much control over, you know, a cricket decision when it comes to something like this. I just wanted to point out one other thing, Karan, when this Indian decision of no handshakes with the Pakistanis came, no one has actually said that so-and-so gave us these instructions. There is no specific person who is named or identified as having gone up to the Indian players and said, don’t shake hands with the Pakistanis. So I don’t think Jay Shah’s sort of control over the situation with regard to what happened after Mr. Fazul has anything to do with it. I mean, he has an office that works around him. They are pretty astute and aware people. They know what’s happening. He’s well advised at the kind of actions that he takes. Would a fair CEO of another nationality have maybe acted as a counterbalance to the kind of decisions that were being taken? Definitely. The Indians, there is an Indian CEO also at the ICC appointed by Jay Shah after he became the chairman. So you see a situation where it’s not really about actual managing of an event and taking sport and what that event means into consideration. As a young anchor pointed out to me yesterday, the crickets as being a shared cultural platform, that’s gone out of the window now. It’s just become this political battlefield in which India plays itself, its entire sort of responses to its neighbours through cricket, because cricket is such a powerful platform and such a powerful tool.Karan Thapar: Let me put it like this. Has the ICC as a whole mishandled the Bangladesh situation?Sharda Ugra: Had it been an ICC that was actually a serious sporting body, they would introspect and say, yes, we have mishandled it. But at this point in time, the ICC cannot be taken as a serious sports organisation in the manner in which it conducts its business and the inequity with which it deals with all these kinds of cases.Karan Thapar: Let me ask you another question. If India and Pakistan can refuse to play in each other’s country and the ICC always accommodates them by holding matches in a third country, why can’t Bangladesh, after the Mustafizur Rahman incident, be similarly accommodated?Sharda Ugra: The simple reason is that Bangladesh does not have the kind of clout in the cricket world. It does not have enough friends in the ICC board whom it can convince to say, listen, you have to fight this fight on our behalf. The cricket boards of Australia and England are virtually like, I call them sidekicks and henchmen of allowing the BCCI to bully its way through international cricket. And because Bangladesh doesn’t have the equity to build its own case in the game, in the fairness of all things, any other international sporting organisation would have looked at the situation, a neutral and a well-run one, looked at the situation and said, this is not right. We need to fix this. We need to get as many countries, you know, the reference I made to the shared cultural platform that cricket is supposed to be. We need to get everybody in. We need to get our World Cup happening well. Let’s make the best situation of this. In this situation, instead, they’ve just axed a team which has about 300 million, my numbers could be wrong by 100 million or so, 300 million spectators and a vast passionate following. They’ve knocked them out of the World Cup.Karan Thapar: Let me ask you a hypothetical question. If Australia or England had insisted that they will not play in India, would the ICC have taken a similarly rigid stand? Or is it simply because, as you said, Bangladesh doesn’t have the leverage?Sharda Ugra: I’m wondering about India, whether we would have arrived at that situation. Possibly, if I can make a case and say, had they said they can’t play in Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, then let me tell you the ICC would 100% have stepped up and said, OK, fine, we’ll look after your concerns and we’ll make sure that you can play at another venue. It’s a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question, but that’s the best one I have.Karan Thapar: What is the financial loss that the ICC will suffer if Pakistan boycotts the World Cup and India-Pakistan matches, which really are the source of revenue, don’t happen?Sharda Ugra: I think then we’ll be able to identify, in a way, there will be a considerable financial loss because they tell us that it’s a very big fixture. That’s why they cook these groups all the time and they fix these matches that we have to play each other. Whereas the competition and the quality of the cricket is not as intense, but they just do it because they’re able to build up this sort of inter-country venom that’s there. That’s how the broadcasters are acting. So I don’t really have the exact numbers, but I can clearly say that this will be a big, if this happens. And let us not forget that Mohsin Naqvi is also trying to play a political game. Nothing will give him more, you know, mileage in his own country to annoy the Indians and to kind of upset and topple this World Cup that’s happening. But, you know, the loss, along with the loss that is there in sort of the finances, I think that’s when the hit would actually be felt in terms of the credibility issue that you said. Like having a World Cup without Pakistan and Bangladesh in it, what does it mean? I don’t know if he’ll go that far, but certainly we’ll have to, if that situation does arise, then we’ll just have to take a very new stance to see where the governance of cricket is at the moment.Karan Thapar: What’s your hunch? Mohsin Naqvi has said that the final decision whether Pakistan participates will be taken either on Friday, possibly not till Monday. What’s your hunch? Will Pakistan participate or might Pakistan see this as an opportunity, not just to score points against the ICC, but to score points against India?Sharda Ugra: You know, what’s funny about this is when Mohsin Naqvi talks about the government will take a decision and so on, he is pretty much the government. You know, I’m told by friends, my friends in Pakistan that him and the Field Marshal are the two most powerful people. So, I think he’s going to keep playing and stringing this along for a bit. But I do think that the India-Pakistan match will happen because of the fact that it’s a big cash cow to everybody. And there might be just maybe there’s conversations about sort of dialling everything down. If that’s the beginning of dialling everything down between India-Pakistan, that’s great. But I do think the Pakistanis will play. If they don’t play, then what’s happened is that you have then essentially what Bangladesh has also done is sacrifice the ambitions and the interests of its cricket team over what is a political, what became a political issue. You want to know whether the Pakistani, whether Mohsin Naqvi will be willing to do that? I’m not so, I’m not so sure.Karan Thapar: The problem, as you pointed out in one of your earlier answers, goes all the way back to BCCI instructing Kolkata Knight Riders to dispense with the Bangladeshi cricketer Mustafizur Rehman. Was that a terrible mistake that has led directly to the potential crisis we face today?Sharda Ugra: Yes, absolutely. Without a doubt.Karan Thapar: And was it a terrible mistake to have singled out one individual from a country which is not, and I repeat that again, which is not a source of terror for India. Pakistan maybe, one can understand India’s response to playing with Pakistan. Bangladesh is not a source of terror. It is only alleged, and I repeat that one, it is only alleged by the home minister and sometimes the Prime Minister that ghuspethian infiltrators come from there. But Bangladesh is not a source of terror. So was it a mistake to have singled out a single player in this way?Sharda Ugra: This was the only Bangladeshi who was going to play in the IPL this year. He’s the only one who got a contract. And to single him out, it was really, in many ways, it was like a cheap shot that you are basically picking on the smaller guy. You know, you’re showing your power on somebody who doesn’t have any power or any authority, nor does this country. It’s a terrible mistake. As a cricket journalist, it just felt wrong. And now we’ve seen where it’s taken us to And the second thing follows, doesn’t it?Karan Thapar: That if the ICC had accommodated Bangladesh’s request, that if it’s not possible to provide security for the single player in India, how do you provide security for the whole team and all the rest of the paraphernalia that comes with the team? And if that had been accommodated and Bangladesh had been allowed to play in Colombo rather than Kolkata and Mumbai, we’d have had no problem.Sharda Ugra: We’d have had no problem at all, except the egos of the BCCI would have been severely damaged. You know, the ego, the institutional ego to say that, look, this accommodation has been made for this team. And I think the ego factor has also come into play here.Karan Thapar: That’s the problem, isn’t it? BCCI’s ego came in the way.Sharda Ugra: In the way that, you know, had the BCCI had the power to distance itself from a non-written political instruction and said, no, I don’t see it’s a problem. It’s not going to happen. You know, I don’t know. You don’t know what situation may have been caused, had Mr. Mustafizur placed. But we’ll never know now. And we are in this situation where Pakistan is threatening and you’re threatening to take out. You’ve already taken out one South Asian team and now the other one is threatening to go. So it is a bit of an administrative sort of a management khichdi and you are only to blame for it.Karan Thapar: And if BCCI’s ego was the problem, I presume it worked through the person of Jay Shah. He’s a former BCCI secretary. He’s the home minister’s son.Sharda Ugra: You would think so. You would think that had the ICC handled the situation and said, OK, we’ll let them play. What would have been the response to the ICC chairman from the Indian side? You know, had the Indian, had the ICC’s chairman not been an Indian and the situation would have arisen, I think the response would have been different. But now when you look at it and say, look, Jay Shah is an Indian and had this gone and he said, no, fine, we’ll paint Colombo, what would the consequences have been for him? So in many ways, it’s literally like they painted themselves into a corner when they started, when the BCCI started with this whole Mustafizur incident.Karan Thapar: And all of this suggests, and I’m underlining that word suggest because we can never have proof that the influence of Jay Shah’s father lay behind the decision that the ICC has taken as well, because there’s no person in India that’s taken a higher profile stand on claiming that Bangladeshis are ghuspaithiya than Amit Shah himself.Sharda Ugra: You would have to, I can’t assume it. I don’t know if there are any sort of, there’s a trail that you can find what it is. You can assume that there has political influence been involved, particularly when it comes to the ICC decision. But they’ll say, look, the board has said that in this situation, we don’t need to change the venue. And they’ll always cite the board. And so their own board, which then shows you how rotten at the core, the ICC’s institutional function is at the moment at the very top.Karan Thapar: How much damage has the ICC done itself?Sharda Ugra: Considerable, but it does damage like this on a daily basis. And as long as there’s Indian money in the game, they think nothing happens. They don’t worry about it at all. It doesn’t bother them in the least.Karan Thapar: My last question, they say sports and politics should never be mixed. Isn’t that exactly what’s happening in the case of Bangladesh and the T20 World Cup?Sharda Ugra: Oh, yes. And remember, also, current cricket is going to take part in the Olympics in Los Angeles in a couple of years’ time. And one of the things that they’re very certain about in the IOC supposedly is to say that there should be no political slash government influence. So what is international cricket looking like even to the Olympic movement? You know, it’s just looking like this really haphazard kind of random powers and, you know, random. And it’s a big money game. Cricket is not a small money game. Cricket is one of the big money games in the world. World Cup is the third highest multinational competition in terms of media rights value. But it literally functions like it’s working out of somebody’s random kitchen table and everyone’s just trying to run the game through that.Karan Thapar: Could there be question marks about hosting the cricket game at the Los Angeles Olympics, or is that unlikely?Sharda Ugra: Unlikely at the moment, but in terms of the damage done, institutional damage done to the ICC’s reputation and what’s happening, it’s not that the International Olympic Committee is not looking. They’re following it. They know what’s going on. They know the importance of India in the game as well, of course, but they also can see what’s happening and the governance model is not looking good. But let me remind you that they will always go back and say, it’s a board decision we took to say that you can’t shift the venue. People shift venues in a couple of days in cricket. It happens. It’s not a big deal to move a venue from one to the other. So this is definitely a case being done because Bangladesh didn’t have that kind of weightage behind it. It didn’t have that kind of influence, financial muscle, anything of that sort.Karan Thapar: So we conclude by saying BCCI’s ego lies behind the potential crisis facing the T20 World Cup and the institutional image of the ICC has been damaged. Absolutely right. Sharda Ugra, thank you very much for the time you’ve given me. I’m deeply grateful. Take care. Stay safe.Sharda Ugra: Thank you, Karan. Thank you.