Greg Chappell coached Indian team from 2005 to 2007.
Fans were ecstatic about his hiring because he is regarded as one of the greatest players in history, and they anticipated seeing him collaborate with celebrities like Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, and Sachin Tendulkar.
In an interview with the Prakhar Gupta Podcast, Harbhajan called those times "the worst days of Indian cricket" and charged that Chappell had implemented a "divide and rule" approach within the team.
"The way Chappell behaved with Dada (Ganguly), and whatever he did with the Indian team during those days, it was one of the darkest and worst chapters in the history of Indian cricket. Appointing him as head coach was one of the worst decisions made by the Indian management. He implemented a divide-and-rule policy, where he made the players fight among themselves while acting as the ruler," said Harbhajan.
"He spoiled the entire team. The players who played together in the 2003 ODI World Cup and shared such great bonding were no longer talking to each other. Our team was one of the strongest and most closely knit teams, and he literally broke it apart," he added.
Given that India was one of the few teams that could regularly challenge Australia at the time, Harbhajan speculated that Chappell might have purposefully caused conflicts within the dressing room to weaken the team.
"In my opinion, Chappell's main strategy was something else. In those days, India was the only team that consistently challenged Australia. It's possible that he tried to divide us so that we couldn't play as a united team on the field and would eventually lose matches. The same thing happened during the 2007 World Cup," he said.
India had reached the finals of the 2003 World Cup and was one of the strongest teams going into the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies. However, India lost to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and were eliminated in the group stage.