We just won the gold

While Asiad 1982 became Rajiv Gandhi’s great launchpad, the CWG 2010 has become the UPA’s first act of nationally acknowledged and self-inflicted incompetence.

A 2010 Commonwealth Games venue in New Delhi | Commons

If you look at bare facts, the end of our most brilliant monsoon in a decade ushers in an even more brilliant sporting season. We won a great Davis Cup tie from 0-2 against Brazil in Chennai this week. The Champions League enters its last-four stage in South Africa. And in another week, an India-Australia series, a rivalry bigger than the Ashes now, begins in Mohali, just around the time the Commonwealth Games begin. Yet the mood is gloom and doom, recrimination and buck-passing, shame and self-pity. It is so bad, you even feel that India’s favourite sport is self-flagellation.

For weeks now, we have played that game with such self-defeating panache. We love to abuse and curse ourselves. But we are even happier when foreigners, particularly the white Western types, do it. So every bit of scorn heaped on us and our capital by English and Australian tabloids is being celebrated. We have the new prime minister of Australia more or less predicting (if not wishing) a terror attack in New Delhi, a fact that she forgot to share with her cricket team before it came here. We have assorted New Zealanders, Welshmen and even Scots turning up their noses. All we do is unquestioningly play these up as if they were certificates of great accomplishment.

Nobody asked the preening-with-delight Australian Olympic Committee dude, who lamented that the Games had to be given to Delhi because the Commonwealth Games Federation was under-funded, why he could not get one of the more civilised members of the Commonwealth to save the only thing that reminds their old subjects that such an anachronism still exists. Did we ask the Scotsman who wasn’t sure his contingent would come if he, as the host of the next CWG, knew what would happen if India retaliated? Maybe because some Mr Kalmadi found his country too cold, too wet, too small, whatever (of course we’d never complain about the Scotch)? And does anybody ask the big-mouth Australians if they would give the same advice to their cricketers for next year’s World Cup being staged in the subcontinent? Unless, of course, they do not care so much for their lives and limbs after their recent performance. Or how come they never complained when their remarkable hockey team lifted the World Cup in New Delhi earlier this year?

You have to be particularly aghast that South Block, which reacts with horror and alarm the moment any Pakistani even scratches his chin looking eastwards, has kept quiet while all this has gone on. Hear the Australian prime minister’s speech again (it continues to be repeated every hour as if it was the nicest compliment somebody sent to India lately), and you will know what I mean. Nobody can guarantee there won’t be a terror attack in India. But can Obama and Cameron guarantee there won’t be one in their countries? Can Julia Gillard guarantee there won’t be one in hers? I hope to God there is never one there, but her country even sent its troops to fight alongside the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There has to be a limit to gratuitous, patronising nonsense, but who is to draw the line? Or when you seem to enjoy all this abuse so much, probably only because you do not like Suresh Kalmadi’s face. The only thing that made you proud this week, and you have to thank Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for it, is that he refused to give time to Mike Fennell who is such a nobody that, if you Google his name, the second entry would be about someone else, an obscure customer care manager by the same name. The high point on his very brief CV is the chairmanship of Air Jamaica. He should be lucky to get time with India’s cabinet secretary.

Though, if we really wanted him to earn his living, we would confine him for a full working day in a room with our sports minister instead, who will bore him to death describing how he was the finest cricketer, boxer, athlete, etc, etc, etc (was lawn bowling invented then?) in his twenties when he was also conquering all the mountains that were still left to climb.

Forget the foreigner for a moment. We have to ask ourselves why we love so much to have muck thrown at us. Of course, we have messed up big time in preparing for the Games, and we must hold our government at all levels accountable. This was too important a project for the buck to stop as low as with Kalmadi (and no puns intended). The UPA inherited the Games bid, but never put its heart behind it. It handed over the sports portfolio to Mani Shankar Aiyar, who called them evil and wasteful, tried to withdraw and delayed preparations by two years. He is entitled to his view, and he may well be right, but if India had decided to host these, how can you explain letting him hold that portfolio for two years?

And then you gave it to Gill, who, at 75, justified running the ministry of sports and youth affairs by claiming he could get the Games on track. He even earned himself the full cabinet rank for the only reason that it would help him cut the red-tape. But did he? If holding these Games was his main KRA (it could not be winning more medals, or squatting on Indian hockey’s management and throttling that game so brutally), then he needs to be the first to go in the next reshuffle, which better happen soon. A mere reprimand from the prime minister, duly, and deservingly, leaked to the media, is not enough.

The next one is S. Jaipal Reddy, our urban development minister who we all love as a great parliamentarian but who gives a close run to one of his senior-most cabinet colleagues for the gold medal in indecision. The truth is, everybody curses Kalmadi, because he looks every bit a usual suspect, and Sheila Dikshit, because she at least has both the courage and the compulsion to be in front and take the rap. But much, in fact most, of the responsibility for the construction of the infrastructure and stadiums lay with Gill and Reddy who, so shrewdly, have stayed safely under the radar. And we blame poor bureaucrats for buck-passing. Most of us have seen that SMS joke about how Kalmadi decided to hang himself in shame, but the ceiling collapsed. The fact is that the false ceiling that collapsed was built for Gill’s sports ministry by Reddy’s CPWD. Of course you do not expect them to remind you of that.

But let’s return to the larger question. It is one thing for the prime minister to crack the whip now, but why was it not done all these years? Could it be that in the post-India Shining disaster mood, the UPA somehow marked out CWG as some kind of an elitist, urban pursuit that did not deserve too much time or emotion but, because it was unavoidable now, kept throwing money at it? When the prime minister, Sonia Gandhi and other top Congress leaders look back honestly, they may have to admit to themselves that they erred in distancing themselves and India’s national pride from these Games. This is so utterly contrary to how Indira and Rajiv Gandhi had treated Asiad ’82. That’s why Asiad ’82 became Rajiv’s great launchpad and CWG 2010 the UPA’s first act of nationally acknowledged and self-inflicted incompetence.

You can’t pull off great acts like these unless you wrap them in national pride and commitment. On the contrary, it is because we vainly pretended that we were merely carrying out a job outsourced to us that the world is laughing at us, as if they have found the devil of realism behind the Great India Story. Yet, why so many of us, particularly in the media, seem to enjoy this, still beats me.

 

Postscript: Story goes that telephones were so bad in Indira Gandhi’s time that once she got furious and decided to sack C.M. Stephen, her telecom (then posts and telegraph) minister. But when she tried to call to fire him, the phone lines were down. By the time they were restored, her anger had subsided. So Stephen survived. You will be told the reason Gill and Reddy can’t be dropped right now is that the Games are on. And who knows, by the time these conclude hopefully brilliantly, the anger with them would have also cooled. Only question is, Indira Gandhi could have survived with one C.M. Stephen in her cabinet. Can Manmohan Singh survive with so many?