The ticklish issue of selection politics

Prem Panicker

Due to personal commitments, I missed out on Jagmohan Dalmiya's appearance on Rediff Chat.

On reading the transcript, I realised that I didn't miss much - the answers Mr Dalmiya gave had the flavour of canned press releases, and I get on an average a dozen of those anyways...

One point Mr Dalmiya made, however, intrigued me. In response to a question, he averred that he attended selection meetings as convenor of the selection committee, that he always found the discussions fair and above board, and he had no reason to think that the selectors thought in terms of zonal, as opposed to national, interests.

What is one to think? Either, that Mr Dalmiya tends to doze off while Ramakant Desai and his merry men go through their "deliberations" and, therefore, misses all the good stuff; or that the august secretary of the BCCI was, to put it politely, trying to paper over a situation that is rapidly getting out of hand.

I mean, a Sambaran Bannerjee - who, last I looked, figures among the famous five - actually said in a media interview that he didn't want the name of a single zonal player mentioned in his presence. No zonal feelings, Mr Dalmiya?

A Kishen Rungta did his level best to insinuate Gagan Khoda into the Indian team to the West Indies, arguing that his zonal quota had not been fully filled. At a meeting, mind you, that Mr Dalmiya had convened.

Why belabour the point? Two instances will suffice to show just how "unbiased" this present five-man committee is. When the team to tour South Africa was being picked, Sachin Tendulkar as captain of the side asked for the inclusion of Sunil Joshi in the 16-member squad. The request was denied out of hand, and no reason given to the Indian captain. On that occasion, Tendulkar was miffed enough to mutter about resigning the captaincy - till certain BCCI officials and influential former Test stars asked Tendulkar to keep his cool and work within the system.

Again, when the team to the West Indies was being picked, Sachin Tendulkar made suggestion after suggestion. They were all ignored. Again, no reason was given for the turning down of his requests. Finally, an exasperated Sachin Tendulkar - normally not the sort of person who flies off the handle - was moved enough to snap: 'If you don't want to consider my requests, then why call me for the meeting and make a farce of it?'

The meeting in question was convened by none other than Mr Dalmiya.

The BCCI bigwig can deny it till he is blue in the face - but he can't convince himself, leave alone anyone else, that this selection committee has, in course of its tenure, ever been anything other than biased, and divided on zonal lines.

A friend, who had read the Dalmiya transcript, was playing devil's advocate just now, and arguing that the BCCI secretary had a point when he said that the zone-based system of appointing selectors, and a five-member committee, was the best possible system we could put in place. 'If you think you can suggest a better alternative, let's see you do it', he challenged.

Let's give it a shot - and mind you, I hope this will be a participative exercise, wherein your inputs are as valuable, even more so, than mine.

Anyways. The starting point for such an exercise has to be the question, why is our selection committee biased?

The answer is simple - under the present system, each selector is picked to represent a particular zone. Sambaran Bannerjee for East, Kishen Rungta for Central, M Pandove for North, Shivlal Yadav for South and Ramakant Desai for West.

And if you pick your selectors on a zonal basis, then how can you expect them to not think on zonal lines? In other words, if you say that Sambaran Bannerjee is the East Zone representative on the selection panel, then haven't you, ipso facto, defined his role on the committee as one wherein he represents, to the best of his ability, the interests of the zone concerned? And the best interests of each zone is obviously to have as many representatives in the national side as possible, so obviously the selectors are apt to consider only zonal interests when picking teams, right? And this in turn leads to the sort of horse trading on the you-support-my-chappie, I'll-support-yours lines that we have been witness to in recent times, right?

Simple logic indicates that the answer is yes.

Stretching that logical exercise to its conclusion, then, the answer to the question of how to do away with zonal bias in team selection is, first do away with zonal considerations in picking the selectors themselves.

How best to accomplish that? The temptation is to argue a case for the Pakistan model, circa Imran Khan. What the Khan wanted, the Khan got - in effect, therefore, he was a one-man selection committee, while the official committee's only job was to rubber stamp his selections.

For one very practical reason, that is not a system we can recommend here. India has, of late, been playing inordinate amounts of international cricket. This in turn means that the Indian captain rarely, if ever, plays domestic cricket for his own state and zone, let alone finds the leisure to keep himself au courant with the form of players from other zones. And if you don't know the form of the various players on the domestic circuit, then you won't be in a position to make the right choices - so, no one-man committee, thanks.

What then? I would suggest a five-man committee, with certain provisos:

One, the actual selection committee will comprise only three full-time members.

Two, the selection committee will comprise exclusively of people who have played sufficient amounts of Test cricket to have a fair idea of what the needs are when picking a team to tour, or take on, a particular country.

This is the first part, and before going on to the second, let's look at the whys and wherefores. By reducing the full-time committee to three, you ensure that the selectors are not picked on the basis of the five zones - and right away, you eliminate scope for zonal bias.

Then, you buttress this three-man committee with a sub-committee of say five former Test players of stature. Their job will be to witness every single major domestic fixture, and to write detailed reports about each player taking part - his pluses and minuses, his strengths and weaknesses, his potential. These reports to be regularly forwarded to the selection committee who will then shortlist say 25, 30 of the most promising players and monitor them personally.

With this exercise, you ensure that every single selector is up to date with the performances, and potential, of all national prospects - and in so doing, you ensure that they have a qualitative, and quantitative, basis on which to make their final selection.

Now to the other element of the plan - you co-opt the captain, and coach, of the national team as full members of the selection committee. In the sense that the Indian captain and coach will have equal voting rights with the three national selectors, when it comes to picking teams.

Why is this vital? Very simple - ultimately, it is the coach and captain who between them pick the playing elevens for respective games, and formulate strategies. Therefore, it is the captain and vice captain who know best what resources they need for each game, each series, each tour. And that makes it vital that they - the ones, mind you, who bear the ultimate responsibility for achieving results - have a voice in team selection.

By way of aside - you don't hear a Courtney Walsh (I name him because as of now, he is the captain of the adversarial team) cribbing that he didn't get the right bowler for the right track, do you - as Sachin Tendulkar has had to do in recent times? Why not? Because Walsh, and West Indian coach Malcolm Marshall, are fully paid up, voting members of the national selection committee, alongside the three regular members.

So there we have it - an alternate system of team selection. I don't claim that this is the solution - it is merely the one that appears to me as being the most logical, and most suited, for Indian conditions.

There may be basic flaws in my reasoning. There may be better ideas than the ones I have outlined above. So go for it, let's hear your suggestions, improvements, comments...

And hopefully, this debate will at the very least give the myopic Mr Dalmiya something to think about - other than ways to defend the indefensible.