The Indian Cricket Board has always functioned like a private club of 30 individuals, each with voting rights. The members have changed over the years, they’ve fought with each other almost relentlessly for control, but despite the differences, their hallmark has been the ability to stick together — impenetrable in defence and united in attack — when faced with an external adversary.

The latest fight within the BCCI over the premature termination of the IPL contract with the sports management firm IMG, however, seems to have opened a strange new chapter in the Board’s functioning. For the first time, those inside the BCCI are seeking support and forming alliances with people outside, thereby giving the tussle a more public dimension, and highlighting the fragile balance that has been created with the extension of cricket’s largesse to influential stakeholders who can no longer be ignored.

What until three years ago would’ve been an internal battle between IPL commissioner Lalit Modi and Board secretary N. Srinivasan has now transformed into a war or words involving some of India’s leading industrialists, actors and politicians — most of them not members of the BCCI, but all of them seemingly in a position to demand why changes are being made without their approval.

In a letter, for example, Mumbai Indians owner Mukesh Ambani has written: ‘I am personally shocked at the unilateral decision of doing away with the services of IMG... It is also worrying for me that such a significant decision in relation to IPL has been taken without even so much as consulting the franchisees.”

The sentiment is that the new franchisees feel they have the right to demand answers about how cricket in India is being run. And in a Board that has never been faced with such a problem because of its ‘independent’ nature, not everyone is sure how to react in this novel situation.

So while one side is waving letters — from Ambani, Shah Rukh Khan and even former Board chief Sharad Pawar — to oppose the dismissal of IMG, which was praised so lavishly by Modi at the end of the second IPL; the other side’s old-school BCCI survival instincts are considering this a sign that the exclusivity of their private club is in danger of being breached forever.

“Today, they (franchisees) are saying which company should be the IPL’s promoter, tomorrow they will want so-and-so to be the league’s commissioner, and the day after they’ll say we want this man as Board president,” a top BCCI official said on Tuesday, clearly expressing his faction’s biggest fear. “This is not proper.”

A major problem going forward is that the leaders of both groups are somewhat compromised. While Srinivasan himself owns the IPL’s Chennai Super Kings, which is a natural conflict of interest considering all the league’s finances are cleared by him in his capacity as Board secretary, Modi’s drawback is that losing the Rajasthan Cricket Association presidency has left him vote-less, effectively making him an ‘outsider’, in the BCCI’s election politics.

The IMG contract issue is just the trigger that has made this conflict public — the tip of the iceberg that has surfaced after almost a year of internal rumblings and back-biting from members on both sides. What makes this battle so evenly matched is that while the most important question in the BCCI used to be ‘how many associations are with you’, now ‘how many franchisees are with you’ is becoming equally relevant.

kunal.pradhan@expressindia.com