Saturday 11th November, 2023

The incumbent office-bearers of Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) are facing a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in their path in the form of a resolution Parliament unanimously passed on Thursday, calling for their ouster. This is something unprecedented, and different interpretations of the resolution have been made. The SLC administrators have chosen to remain silent.

Deputy Speaker Ajith Rajapakshe has told this newspaper that the parliamentary resolution is nonbinding. Some legal experts however are of the view that Parliament should officially convey the resolution to the Attorney General for action including the intimation thereof to the judiciary. The state prosecutor is far from independent. There’s the rub. The Attorney General’s Department is widely considered an appendage of the President’s Office.

The beleaguered cricket administrators backed by the powers that be are not likely to take it lying down, having regained control over SLC, albeit temporarily, by means of an interim order. They will try every trick in the book to remain in their current positions which they cannot bring themselves to give up for obvious reasons. But it will be a huge mistake for them and their political masters to ignore the parliamentary resolution, which reflects public opinion. They have apparently pinned their hopes on ICC (International Cricket Council), which, they think, will ban Sri Lanka’s membership due to what they call political interference with cricket administration. Hope is said to spring eternal.

But Sri Lanka has had more than a dozen interim committees, and in Pakistan and South Africa cricket is currently being administered by interim committees. So, ICC, which itself is on a campaign to rid cricket of corruption, will not be able to act selectively in respect of Sri Lanka, much less justify any move that will be construed as being favourable to the current SLC office-bearers under a cloud. More importantly, neither SLC nor ICC nor any other outfit should be allowed to undermine Sri Lanka’s legal sovereignty under any circumstances.

Speaking in Parliament on Thursday, Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, an ardent supporter of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, urged the tainted SLC officials to resign. He said they had to respect public opinion, which had prompted Parliament to intervene to call for their ouster. This is what the SLC administrators who are on a sticky wicket ought to do if they are to avoid further trouble and refrain from perpetuating the cricket crisis.

Politicians do not hesitate to ditch those who become too embarrassing for them to shield. The fate that befell the Treasury bond racketeers who had links to the UNP-led Yahapalana government is a case in point. The UNP benefited from their largesse and defended them for some time but eventually left them in the lurch.