After Ramachandra Guha resigned from the Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators on Thursday, his letter to panel chief Vinod Rai touched upon the reasons for his exit and bluntly highlighted the problems with Indian cricket administration.

Guha was part of the committee that was supposed to oversee the proper functioning of the Board of Control for Cricket in India after the intervention of the Lodha panel. But his resignation after just a few months shows how murky the inner workings of Indian cricket administration are.

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One of the primary points of the letter was the “superstar culture” in Indian cricket, which allowed popular players to get away with bending the rules. Guha called out various Indian players for using their star status to skirt regulations, especially the blurred lines where conflict of interest is involved. He didn’t spare anyone in his forthright letter, naming and alluding to the top Indian players who hold multiple positions in Indian cricket, and how nothing is done to rectify it, even by the COA whose job it was to bring in transparency.

“The “superstar” culture that afflicts the BCCI means that the more famous the player [former or present] the more leeway he is allowed in violating norms and procedures,” Guha wrote. These superstars included the likes of Rahul Dravid, MS Dhoni, Sourav Ganguly and Sunil Gavaskar.

Here’s how Guha called out the conflict of interest by these Indian cricketers:

MS Dhoni

The former Indian captain was named to in not one but two places for two different reasons. Firstly, his association with a sports management company while captain of the Indian team was questioned. Dhoni held shares in Rhiti Sports, which managed a few of his India teammates, including Suresh Raina and Ravindra Jadeja. While the parties clarified that Dhoni had only briefly held shares, he was widely criticised for his involvement in the controversy.

The ‘superstar’ culture that afflicts the BCCI means that the more famous the player (former or present) the more leeway he is allowed in violating norms and procedures. (Dhoni was captain of the Indian team while holding a stake in a firm that represented some current India players.) This must stop – and only we can stop it.

— Guha in his email to COA, which was reproduced in his letter.

Dhoni getting a Grade A contract from BCCI, despite giving up the Test format in 2015, was also a point that Guha sought to highlight. Although a top run player by virtue of his record, Dhoni has given up the longest format of the game, and in fact, played very little international cricket in the home season gone by that saw Indian play 13 Tests. The annual retainer amount in this category is 2 crore, and the players currently in it are Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni, R Ashwin, Ajinkya Rahane, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ravindra Jadeja, Murali Vijay. It should be noted that while not all of them play all three formats of the game, no one has retired from a particular format.

Unfortunately, this superstar syndrome has also distorted the system of Indian team contracts. As you will recall, I had pointed out that awarding MS Dhoni an ‘A’ contract when he had explicitly ruled himself out from all Test matches was indefensible on cricketing grounds, and sends absolutely the wrong message.

— One of the points mentioned in Guha's resignation letter

Rahul Dravid

No person under contract with an India team, or with the NCA, should be allowed to moonlight for an IPL team too, Guha wrote.

While not explicitly names, a large chunk of Guha’s letter addresses the fact that players hold “dual loyalties” coaching both the national and a club (IPL) side. He stressed on how coaching contracts were tailor-made for a period of 10 months, leaving the two months of IPL free and how this was not only blatant conflict of interest, but also affected the national team. Guha also gave the instance of how a training camp at NCA didn’t have the national coach as he was on IPL duty. All of this evidence points to Rahul Dravid, who is both the coach for Indian A and Under-19 as well as the mentor for Delhi Daredevils, and has held these posts for two years now, with 10-month contracts both years.

The BCCI has accorded preferential treatment to some national coaches, by giving them ten month contracts for national duty, thus allowing them to work as IPL coaches/mentors for the remaining two months.

On the 11th of March, I was told that that there was a camp scheduled for young players at the National Cricket Academy but at least one national coach was likely to be away on IPL work and might not attend the camp.

— Guha calls out the the dual role of national and IPL coaches in his letter

Sourav Ganguly

Once again, Ganguly was not directly named in the letter, but referred to in the conversation about rampant conflict of interest in the State Association.

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One famous former cricketer is contracted by media houses to comment on active players while serving as President of his State Association.

A commentator who runs a state association. How many people come to mind with that description?

Sunil Gavaskar

Guha straight up named Gavaskar and his involvement with a player management company that represents cricketers in the current Indian team.

Sunil Gavaskar is head of a company which represents Indian cricketers while commenting on those crickters as part of the BCCI TV commentary panel. This is a clear conflict of interest. Either he must step down/withdraw himself from PMG completely or stop being a commentator for BCCI.

— Guha on Gavaskar's conflict of interest

This was in response to a news report that said that Professional Management Group (PMG), which is chaired by Sunil Gavaskar, has signed Shikhar Dhawan for a three year period in April 2016. Representing a cricketer’s professional interests, a cricketer one might be in a position to praise/critique during live matches, is indeed shaky ground, as Guha rightly pointed out.