Sporting declaration

Howsoever scandalous the management of our sports, it's wrong to believe that if only we fixed it we would become a sporting superpower while we rank 134 on Human Development Index.

File photo of Congress leader Ajay Maken addressing a press conference outside the Fairmont hotel, Jaipur | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint

In a political power structure that runs mostly on wind energy, you would trust one of the most energetic young ministers (and my friend, I should disclose at the very outset) in the UPA cabinet to discover the most formidable windmill to tilt at. This is the saga of Sports Minister Ajay Maken taking on the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Now, the BCCI is the richest and most successful cricket body in the world. In fact, it drives global cricket now, a fact underlined by Sharad Pawar being the second Indian in a decade to serve as ICC chairman. Its key office-bearers are not just Maken’s seniors (Pawar, Farooq Abdullah, C.P. Joshi, etc) in the cabinet, but also his peers (Rajiv Shukla, Jyotiraditya Scindia). There is no way he is going to get anywhere in this totally futile, self-destructive battle, no matter how much hurt outrage he spews on TV channels. But this is not the full story.

First of all, if you know Ajay Maken, you know he is no Don Quixote. I heard him for a couple of hours in my office, explaining the new masterplan for Delhi (in his last job as the junior minister in the urban development ministry) and he came across as a brilliant and passionately well-meaning public figure. So how has this irrational frenzy taken control of him, a sports law that will set new, state-mandated norms for associations running all the sports in India and, most significantly, give the government controlling powers over sports that would be totally unprecedented in any democracy? But even more importantly, if his bill is passed in its proposed form, it would immediately get India disqualified from participating in any Olympic event. That, incidentally, would include the Asian and Commonwealth Games as well. Is the idea, then, to enact this law and rid us Indians of all the shame and embarrassment of returning from the Olympics with the wooden spoon or of CWG-type scandals for ever?

Just as Maken would make an unlikely Quixote, we do not exactly have any evidence of a Sancho Panza having gotten hold of him. But something/somebody has. And let me hazard a guess. Could that be the bureaucracy of the sports ministry? Because you can trust Indian bureaucracy to create a job and power for itself where none should exist. And the ministers just respond to the yes ministers. Which other reasonable democracy, for example, even has a modern-day anachronism called the sports ministry? Sports around the world now are autonomous and run by voluntary associations. It is only in the still-socialist, unchanging Indian establishment that ministries like civil aviation, information and broadcasting, and sports, exist. In India, they get some sympathetic attention from people because we do so poorly in most sports. So the usual suspects are the associations and the officials who run them. It also helps if the most prominent among them, for decades, happens to be Suresh Kalmadi. So every time Indian sportsmen return from a tough event with an empty scorebook, popular anger is directed at the officials. The media, of course, orchestrates it: there are always stories about there being more officials than players, about junketeering, corruption and so on. But is the solution what is being proposed? A Central sports ministry armed with a draconian legislation? Or, in other words, can you trust a government, which runs among the lousiest schools and hospitals in the world, a most corrupt tax system, a railway that belongs to the 1950s and the lousiest airline ever and a scam-a-day in its infrastructure ministries, to clean up your sports and start producing medals?

Of course, we get furious every time our teams perform poorly and even more furious when our officials are seen having a ball, jumping and dancing with abandon at Olympic Games closing ceremonies where they outnumber the mostly medal-less athletes anyway. But is jumping into the government’s lap, or inviting the sarkari kiss of death, any solution?

So touchingly ludicrous is the idea that a mere law would lift us from the bottom of the medal tally to the top that it is a waste of time and space to dissect its merits. But look at a couple of points. It puts an age and tenure limit of 70 years and three terms on those seeking election to sports bodies. Can a government do it when its prime minister, at 79 now, is still the youngest of the last three, and when a venerable veteran of the BJP is not ruling himself out of the race in 2014 when he will be 87? Bringing in the youth through legislation is a great idea but only if you begin with politics and government first. In any case, such a law would never clear the Olympic charter and would get India fully disqualified from participating anywhere.

This is not to say sports officials are not corrupt or free-booters, or don’t spend most of their associations’ money on themselves instead of the sportsmen. But are our bureaucrats any better? Partly because of the great Indian weakness for personalising even our calamities, it was just Suresh Kalmadi who took the rap for the CWG the sports ministry escaped fully, and undeservingly.

You thought only elected officials spent all their money on themselves? The sports ministry has a budget of Rs 302 crore and consumes 60 per cent of it on its own salaries and allowances. Junketeering: in the hate-Kalmadi campaign the story that the ministry bureaucrats made 90 trips overseas to gather knowledge to hold the games got fully buried. Of course, they visited countries as far apart as Cuba and China, Korea and Kuwait. After all, knowledge gathering can’t be confined to just Commonwealth countries.

And callous waste: see how they look after your sports infrastructure. Delhi’s showpiece Nehru Stadium, Wrestling Hall, Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium, Yamuna Velodrome have had no event since the CWG. A 300-bed hostel built for athletes at the Nehru Stadium lies locked up as Maken’s ministry cannot decide who would maintain it. And the National Stadium, where you saw the Hockey World Cup? Well, it will soon become an office complex as the sports ministry bureaucracy moves here from Shastri Bhawan.

Howsoever scandalous the management of our sports, it is wrong to believe that if only we fixed it, we would become a sporting superpower while we rank 134 on the Human Development Index. As history of sport and mankind will tell you, there is a direct correlation between the health and quality of life of a population and its sporting achievements. So here is something the government can do: just fix our governance matters so we move up that index and correspondingly on the medals tally.

And because that may take a long time, here is something for Maken to do: write to the prime minister asking that the totally inconsequential ministry of sport be abolished. Many ways can be found to fund amateur sport, including allocation of proceeds from government-run lotteries, as happens in many European countries. The Sports Authority of India should be renamed the Stadium Authority of India and corporatised so it is forced to utilise its facilities and earn from them. If all this is not possible, then at least, he should ask to be relieved of this hopeless sinecure which was so far in the UPA reserved for really old people who were utter lightweights in politics and had no future to look forward to. Maken, at 47, is young, bright and a successful streetfighter, having twice won New Delhi, probably the toughest constituency in India. The sooner he gets off this kerb, the better for him and Indian sport.