Kalmadi coterie offers him IOA presidentship again

Shameless Kalmadi coterie offers him IOA presidentship again

Posted : Fri, 20/01/2012 – 9:19am | SportzPower Team
Updated : Fri, 20/01/2012
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NEW DELHI: In a shameless move, as predicted by SportzPower earlier, the scam-tainted politician Suresh Kalmadi is all set to rule the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) as its president.
It just took a few hours, after Kalmadi was granted bail after a nine-month stint in prison, for the vice-president of IOA Tarlochan Singh to tell the media that there would be no opposition if Kalmadi chose to take up the post though he is the chief accused in the multi-billion rupee Delhi Commonwealth Games scam.
This move from Singh and Kalamadi could hasten the process by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to disband or de-recognise the IOA. As SportzPower reported, the IOC has not been happy with the acts of the Kalmadi group which are: annulment of the ethics committee, scrapping of the court of arbitration, and refusal to respond to the global Olympic body’s queries on action taken to remove Kalmadi as the president of the IOA. The last one is the most serious crisis within the IOA, as two of the three main office bearers are Kalmadi’s appointees and will never remove him.
The IOC has multiple options to ensure that the Indian contingent of athletes participate at the 2012 London Olympics. Technically, they can play under the IOC flag, not the Indian flag, and be referred to as Athletes from India. The IOC can also nominate a three-member ad hoc committee as the National Olympic Association, which can take command of the Games operation as the functional NOC.
The IOA secretary general Raja Randhir Singh had told SportzPower in December that no ethically wrong persons can be allowed in the Olympic movement, and suggested that the impeachment process ought to start from December-end, but mid-December, his moves to implement the IOC-mandated constitutional changes in the IOA were ‘annulled’ by voice vote in the IOA general assembly by the Kalmadi coterie.
Not so long ago, a high level sports ministry official had told SportzPower in a private, not to be quoted conversation that the sooner the IOA is banned the better for Indian sport. At the time it might have been construed as the government trying to muzzle the independence of Indian sport.
Interestingly, Kalmadi was arrested and sent to jail on 25 April, 2011, just a day after he purportedly wrote the letter appointing Malhotra as acting president, but on that date Kalmadi was very much not ‘away’, very much in Delhi and there was no certainty that he could be jailed.
“The letter was written either from the jail with a back date, or written and signed by Kalmadi when he attended the court during one of his bail pleas being heard. In any case this is a backdated letter” a source close to IOA affairs told SportzPower.
This makes it an even graver ethical issue, and shakes the basis of the authority of Malhotra holding office, being appointed by a president of IOA arrested and jailed on corruption charges, and IOC ethics committee will no doubt look into this aspect as well, sources confirmed.
Besides, if Malhotra was to hold fort for Kalmadi for three months, under which dispensation he is holding office after 24 June, 2011 becomes another issue of complete lack of transparency within the IOA, some top officials have complained. Take this in the context of the fact, first reported by SportzPower, that the IOC has been sent a letter by top former sports stars running the NGO ‘Clean Sports’, and has already sent it to its own ethics commission, and it becomes clear how grave the crisis within IOA is.
It is learnt also that apart from Malhotra, the current treasurer of IOA, N Ramachandran, is also a Kalmadi man, and thus two of the three top EC members are controlled by the jailed former OC chairman, not to forget Tarlochan Singh, another senior vice president, the noisiest in the general body meeting.
Thus, at the moment in the IOA political labyrinths, Raja Randhir Singh, who is the lone IOC member from India, is the only one promoting the IOC norms. Singh had stated that he would not stand for the next IOA elections, placing on record his having put in more time than required in the interest of Indian sport. But all that swan song was really a polite way out of the mess that he sees no way out of, unless the IOC intervenes to clear up the mess that the IOA is.