After the fashion week in Delhi in spring 2008, I went for an old ritual – eat at Rohit Bal’s lavish apartment in leafy Defence Colony in south Delhi.

Over curd chicken and spicy dal, we discussed his business plans. I sniffed at testers of a new perfume he was going to launch and we spoke about Bal Bacche, a kids line he has always dreamt of doing.

Then conversation turned to the FDCI where Gudda (Bal) has considerable influence – as a founding member and one of the Indian’s fashion’s greatest talents ever – and we discussed the board.

I told him that night that this board would be ruinous for the industry. Gudda smiled a little sadly and said he was hoping that everybody would see the bigger picture.

One of the incessant criticisms of that veteran designers face is that they hog all the attention. It’s not always a fair accusation since usually their work is the grandest and certainly most evolved and there have been regular breakthroughs by new talent like Sabyasachi Mukherjee, FighterCock by Abhishek Gupta and Nandita Basu and Gaurav Gupta.

But this criticism usually worries senior designers.

Gudda said his hope was pinned on Ashish Soni, a senior designer who had taken over as head of the board and the only real big name left on the board of the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI).

That evening on a piece of white paper, Gudda and I wrote down our assessment of what was the worst that could happen under the new board.

In a few weeks, the worst has come true.

Sumeet Nair, brought in to take charge of the board, is fighting allegations of financial misappropriation. Even as I write, he is fighting a law suit.

But that evening Gudda and I had foreseen this.

Hoping for new blood (most veteran designers and founding members of the FDCI had stepped down), the FDCI, it seemed to me, has stabbed itself.

Most names on the list are non-entities.

Designers like Karuna Khaitan, Jattinn Kochhar and Bobby Grover have little standing in the industry. In creativity and business, they are at best fringe players.

Now they were set to run the apex body that would determine the future of fashion in India at a time when the industry was reaching an inflection point in its history. At a time when finally Indian designers were showing signs of business prudence and foresight, finally some of them were getting global attention everything it seems is in wrong hands.

The revenge of the gawky is here and the best of fashion are fighting with their backs to the wall.