Lele shaky as campaign gets hot at home

ROHIT JOSHI

VADODARA, SEPTEMBER 18: THE move to oust Jaywant Lele as secretary of the Baroda Cricket Association (BCA) reached fever pitch on Monday night with about 250 members demonstrating outside the venue of the managing committee meeting, vociferously demanding his resignation on moral grounds.

The meeting, with ominous portents for Lele, was hurridely convened after 190 members signed a letter on September 11 demanding the holding of a special general meeting within one month, particularly as the secretary had failed to reconvene last year’s adjourned AGM even after the lapse of a year and the date for the next AGM too passing by, to express ‘‘lack of confidence and trust’’ in him and to ‘‘remove’’ him as secretary of BCA and managing committee member.

Incensed members said they wanted to bar Lele for life from holding any position in the BCA. The show of strength was necessitated, members said, when just a day before the managing committee meeting Lele had said all their signatures on the letter demanding his resignation were ‘‘fraudulent.’’

They came, then - not 190 but well over 250 of them - they said, so Lele could physically take a headcount if he so desired. Over the years, an election-year AGM of the BCA has rarely had a strength of more than 450 members - though on record it has about 1800 members - and 250 of them shouting slogans against Lele and his ‘‘arbitrary, arrogant and deliberately misleading’’ way of functioning was a fair indication that he has lost the majority support of the association over which he has reigned supreme for more then three decades.