User:Ravibhojakadv/Sanjay Dixit

Sanjay Dixit shot into fame by defeating Lalit Modi, the IPL Chief in the recent electios of the Rajasthan Cricket Association for the post of President. On 1st March 2009, the wheel turned full circle for Modi, who lost the election 13-18 to Dixit and with it a lot of clout in the BCCI. Sanjay Dixit is an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, the elite service of India, a membership of which guarantees topmost jobs in the Indian bureaucracy and also guarantees a status of being the creme de le creme of the Indian Society. Sanjay Dixit qualified for the IAS in 1986, after doing a stint with the Shipping Corporation of India as a Marine Engineer and in the process becoming the first merchant mariner to join the elite service, and was allotted the Rajasthan cadre. A voracious reader and innovator, he has also picked up master's degrees in vocal Indian classical music, Economics and Software, besides a degree in law after joining the service and is presently pursuing a Ph.D.. He is well known and respected in the bureaucratic and social circles as a fighter for just causes. His association with sports as a player and administrator has a long and chequered history. An extremely talented junior cricketer in the late seventies in Uttar Pradesh, he had to give up his sports career for studies. He mentions that he might have gone very high up in cricket as a player if he had not been as good in his studies as he was. As things turned out, his career in sports took a fresh birth after he gave up sailing and joined the IAS. As the Collector and District Magistrate of Barmer, tales about him are legendary. As an administrator, culture lover and a sporrtsman, he left such an indelible mark in the District that the public named a stadium (the Sanjay Cricket Stadium) and a theatre (the Sanjay Rang Manch) after him after he was transferred out of the District and made him the President of the Barmer District Cricket Association. As Sports Administrators recall, it was the golden age of sports and arts and culture in Barmer under him. State championships of almost every major sport, such as Cricket, Tennis, Table Tennis, Soccer, Athletics, and Volleyball took place in Barmer in that period and the District got its first Athletics track, soccer field and Cricket Stadium with the rare sight of grass on the field in the desert. He is also credited with the birth of the Thar Festival, which celebrates the fusion of classical and local culture and music. Even today, his love for the area ontinues and he is heralding an agricultural revolution in the area by introducing Date Palms in his capacity as the Chief of the Horticulture Department of Rajasthan. He was requested by the various Sports Associations to help them with his administrative acumen and became the Vice President of the Rajasthan Table Tennis Association and the Secretary of the Rajasthan Tennis Association. Sanjay Dixit built the Barmer cricket team from scratch, led it himself and won it two successive State Cricket Championships, a feat which the District could never repeat after he left. He was very critical of the Cricket Administration as it then was under the Rungta family. He began the fight against the Rungtas in 1998 single-handedly and finally had them uprooted through the instrument of the Rajasthan Sports Act, the first legislative initiative in the field of Sport in India. The Act was conceived and drafted entirely by him and a grateful Governmentenacted it without batting an eyelid. The ultimate tribute to his genius was  paid by the Governments of Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh who copied the Act without so much as a change of a comma. He had a common cause with Lalit Modi in uprooting the Rungtas and they were together in the enactment o the Sports legislation. However, he strongly opposed Modi whn he saw that Modi was trying to take an unfair advantage of the Act due to his proximity with the then Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje. This brought things to a boil and he supported the group which fought against Modi without contesting himself. His group lost narrowly, by 17-15 aidst allegations of Vasundhara Raje government rigging the elections in Modi's favour. Lalit Modi's defeat is not about a single day's glory. Behind it is brilliant electoral and legal strategy, unremitting focus, and outstanding execution - over four years. He thwarted every effort by Modi to change the composition of Districts, protecting them through the courts. He also kept Modi on the defensive by having campaigns mounted against him by a number of social groups. Lalit Modi tried every trick in the book to have the elections brought forward and have them conducted in Vasundhara's reign, but Dixit just did not allow that to hppen through his legal interventions. Ultimately, Lalit Modi had to bite the dust at his hands.