Yet the people who administer the institutions built to enforce this code frequently answer to no code at all. They chair federations that resemble sporting bodies on paper and political fiefdoms in practice, where authority is measured in votes cast at an Annual General Meeting rather than runs scored or matches won.
The Meghalaya Cricket Association (MCA) offers a local case study precise enough for a governance classroom, and it is far from unique. In recent months, years of accumulated dysfunction have finally come into the open. Media reports have shown how audits uncovered failures that had little to do with cricket and everything to do with money: tax obligations left unmet, GST filings falling short of statutory requirement, procurement processes meant to secure competitive rates instead producing unusually inflated vendor bills that went unscrutinised, association funds flowing disproportionately toward the home district of one office bearer while other districts struggled for funds. Worse still, a sexual harassment complaint and its alleged cover up, and an attempt to challenge a Supreme Court backed dispute resolution mechanism meant to examine such matters, timed inconveniently close to when it began doing exactly that. Amid this pile up of discrepancies, one name recurs across nearly every thread: that of the now-suspended MCA Secretary, Rayonald Kharkamni.
In circumstances where accountability might have served far better through simple humility, the response was not contrition but litigation, a means of clinging to power rather than answering for its use. If these accounts are accurate, an institution built specifically to protect athletes found itself contested in court at almost the exact moment it had begun doing precisely the job it was created for. The irony is unsurprising, but it says something enduring about how unchecked power behaves when finally confronted with its own conduct, questions of morality aside.
What recent reporting makes clear is that this has become depressingly familiar across sporting bodies in India. The tragedy is that, in the face of needed change, the tyranny of the corrupt closes ranks against anyone who attempts reform. Tightening procurement, insisting on audits, and empowering dispute redressal mechanisms are rarely met with quiet acceptance. They are met instead with slow campaigns to recast the reformer as the aggressor, and with smear efforts designed to disengage stakeholders away from anyone trying to fix what is broken. The result, inevitably, is governance failure at the top translating directly into vulnerability for young athletes at the bottom, with protections arriving late, if they arrive at all, whenever leadership is more occupied contesting the legitimacy of oversight bodies than answering to them.
Meghalaya's cricket administration is, in this sense, a regional chapter of a national story repeated across nearly every sport India plays. The Board of Control for Cricket in India spent much of the last decade under the shadow of the 2013 Indian Premier League spot fixing scandal, in which the son in law of the Board's own president was found to have passed information to bookmakers, prompting the Supreme Court to install the Lodha Committee and force through reforms the Board had resisted for years: age and tenure limits, cooling off periods, and a genuine separation between team ownership and administrative power. The 2010 Commonwealth Games produced its own enduring symbol of the problem in organizing committee chairman Suresh Kalmadi, whose tenure became a byword for procurement fraud and cost overruns at a global event the country had hoped would serve as a showcase rather than a cautionary tale. Football fared no better: in 2022 the Supreme Court dissolved the All India Football Federation's executive committee after its president overstayed constitutional term limits.
Wrestling supplied the most searing recent example. Allegations by top women wrestlers against the Wrestling Federation of India's president led to sustained protests and a police chargesheet on charges including assault, sexual harassment and stalking, alongside a temporary suspension of the federation. A Delhi court acquitted him in the criminal case in August 2026, a reminder that a trial verdict and a governance failure are not the same inquiry. Whatever the criminal outcome, the episode had already exposed how thoroughly a national federation can be built around one man's authority rather than the athletes it exists to serve.
None of this squares easily with India's position in Asia. Japan rebuilt a sporting culture from the wreckage of war. South Korea industrialised out of poverty within a single generation and turned that same discipline into world class systems for football, archery, and shooting. China, whatever the fair criticisms of its state controlled model, kept its sports bureaucracy insulated from the kind of personal fiefdoms that plague Indian federations, treating national federations as instruments of policy rather than personal property. All three carry histories of colonial pressure, occupation, or hardship comparable to India's own, yet none allowed its federations to become patronage networks answerable to loyalty rather than performance. What distinguishes them is not resources but structure: administrators there are professionals answerable to results and to law, not powerbrokers answerable to networks built over decades of unopposed incumbency.
None of this is beyond fixing, and the outlines of a solution are not mysterious. Internal dispute resolution mechanisms, wherever the Supreme Court has already mandated them, need enforcement teeth rather than paper existence: fixed terms, guaranteed budgets, and protection from being litigated out of relevance by the very officials they are meant to police. Financial audits should be published as a matter of routine rather than extracted through investigative reporting years after the fact, and procurement above a modest threshold ought to run through open, competitive tender rather than discretionary approval. Term and tenure limits, of the kind the Lodha reforms eventually forced on the BCCI, deserve to be written into every state association's constitution rather than treated as a cricket specific accident of litigation. Athletes themselves, not only administrators, need a formal voice on the bodies that govern them, since it is their careers and safety that absorb the cost of institutional failure.
None of this requires reinventing the wheel. Every element already exists somewhere within Indian sport, waiting to be applied consistently rather than selectively. What is missing is the will, and perhaps the recognition that sportsmanship is not a virtue reserved for the field but a standard administrators owe the sport as much as its players do.
That question now sits squarely with Meghalaya. The litigation triggered by Kharkamni's suspension will, in time, produce an answer of its own, not merely to a legal dispute but to a far larger one - whether due process can still deliver reform when tyranny tries to resist it, or whether, as with wrestling's long and bruising reckoning, the institution simply outlasts the scrutiny and returns to business as usual. For now, the Meghalaya Cricket Association is still waiting to find out which of those two futures it will get - a ray of hope that litigation and accountability can repair a broken house, or a slow surrender to the very tyranny that has been rotting the system from within for years and has been eating sports across India in general.
(The author is a sports-enthusiast and a legal consultant)