On Monday, the veteran Journalist Rajat Sharma defeated the World Cup winning India player Madan Lal by 517 votes to become the new president of Delhi and Districts Cricket Association. The results of the DDCA polls were announced on Monday morning and surprisingly, Sharma’s group swept the elections winning all 12 seats. He received as many as 1531 votes while former Test cricketer Lal could only manage to receive 1004 votes. The third candidate in the fray, advocate Vikas Singh, got 232 votes only.

It was a major setback for BCCI acting president CK Khanna, whose wife Shashi, who was standing for the post of vice-president, lost the elections to Rakesh Bansal, younger brother of former DDCA president Sneh Bansal.

Rajesh beat Shashi by 278 votes while Bansal junior got 1364 votes to Shashi’s 1086 votes. The defeat might prove to be the end of the road for Khanna in DDCA, where he enjoyed supreme power for nearly three decades. 

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Sharma and his panel’s candidature got a complete support from the ruling party with the IOA president Narinder Batra throwing in all his might. Batra incidentally is a former DDCA treasurer.

As quoted in PTI, a senior DDCA official said, “The moment Sharma got blessings from a senior cabinet minister, there was no chance in hell for any other candidate to win this election. What was not expected was a clean panel sweep. It will be good that Sharma will get a free hand to run the body. This also means that CK Khanna’s reign in DDCA ends unless he strikes some deal with Sharma.”

Sharma was always considered as the favorite to win against Lal, who had a support of former India opener Chetan Chauhan’s group. With DDCA being the first among equals to go into elections after the Supreme Court appointed Lodha panel suggested path-breaking structural recommendations, the polling also witnessed abolition of the proxy system with nearly 3000 voters turning up to cast their vote.