Sreesanth and Harbhajan in New Delhi on Monday. Picture by Ramakant Kushwaha

April 28: Match referee Farokh Engineer has done his bit by banning volatile Harbhajan Singh for the rest of the Indian Premier League’s inaugural edition.

Now, the Super match referees — specifically the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) brass — will be getting into the act.

Harbhajan’s very public apology (telecast live in fact) for the slap on Sreesanth notwithstanding, more bad news awaits him in the near future.

The BCCI is, of course, following procedure before disciplining India’s most successful off-spinner, but the mood among many within is to ban him for a substantial length of time.

Some, according to The Telegraph’s sources, are even talking of keeping Harbhajan out of all forms of cricket for as long as two years.

That’s probably more of an extreme view, but it won’t surprise if the BCCI’s disciplinary committee (headed by an angry president, Sharad Pawar) bans Harbhajan for a minimum of three months.

Such punishment would mean Harbhajan having to miss the short tri-series in Bangladesh, the Asia Cup in Pakistan and the Test series in Sri Lanka.

“Only recently, we spent sleepless nights trying to protect Harbhajan… We backed him blindly during the (Andrew) Symonds controversy, but look at what he’s done… We’ll be the laughing stock if we don’t act firmly,” is what a key BCCI official said.

The BCCI has appointed one of Ahmedabad’s leading lawyers, Sudhir Nanavati, as commissioner to make the “preliminary inquiries.” Nanavati, who has been associated with cricket in Gujarat for long, has to submit his report to Pawar “within 15 days.” The ball will then be in the disciplinary committee’s court.

Harbhajan has also apologised in his reply to the showcause from the BCCI, but that’s just not good enough.

Whatever the punishment handed out by the disciplinary committee, it’s unlikely that the intra-team wounds will heal completely.

Clearly, irrespective of the Harbhajan-Sreesanth handshake, the Team India dressing room won’t quite be the same again and Anil Kumble (the Test captain) and Mahendra Singh Dhoni (at the helm in ODIs) surely can’t be the most relaxed men around.

Sreesanth is no saint either and was warned by the BCCI before he headed to Australia for the one-off Twenty20 International and the tri-series this year.

After the Harbhajan-Symonds tamasha in the Test series, which almost forced a premature end to the tour, Pawar and Co. didn’t want another nightmare, this time involving Sreesanth.

For the record, Engineer gave Sreesanth a “stern warning” during this afternoon’s hearing in New Delhi.