It was at this point that India took an aggressive stance. On 24 August, the day the Games were scheduled to start, G.D. Sondhi, representing India at the Asian Games Federation Congress, also being held in Jakarta, objected strongly to the Indonesian action. Arguing that the exclusion of athletes based on politics was against the Asian Games charter, he proposed that the status of Asiad be withdrawn from the Games. Sondhi wanted Jakarta to be punished by taking away the mantle of the Asian Games and turning the Games into ‘merely an international athletic and sports meeting’. The assembled delegates agreed to his first point but there were obvious practical difficulties in accepting the second. Athletes from 18 countries had already arrived in Jakarta and the Congress ended that session by allowing the opening ceremony to go on, along with a request to Sukarno to allow the Taiwanese and Israelis even at this late stage.108
The Games duly opened later that day but the political question continued to haunt the event. Sondhi would not let go and continued to press his point about the withdrawal of Asiad status at successive meetings of the AGF executive committee on 27–29 August. On 30 August, when the Indonesians officially informed the AGF that President Sukarno had refused to budge, Sondhi once again moved a resolution to ‘declare the Games in progress an Asian Games, not the Fourth Asian Games’.109 The persistence he had shown in pushing through the idea of the Delhi Asiad was once again in evidence here in Jakarta.
Sondhi’s constant badgering led to a political reaction. Representatives of a political party known as the Popular National Front called on Sondhi to register their protest. It was now a full-blown diplomatic crisis. As the official IOA report into the events of that August in Jakarta put it, Sondhi’s proposals were received in Indonesia as:
tantamount to an insult to the President of Indonesia who had declared the Fourth Asian Games Open. Djakarta newspapers took up the cry and the atmosphere became charged with excitement. The matter passed out of the realm of sport. National aggrandizement…became blatant. It got the better of sport.110
With political temperatures rising, the Indonesian foreign minister intervened, inviting Sondhi for a luncheon meeting to work out a compromise. The two came up with a bureaucratic solution familiar to even the most lay observer of Indian governance: the gambit of an enquiry committee. Sondhi agreed to withdraw his resolution on the withdrawal of Asiad status while the minister agreed to facilitate the formation of an enquiry committee to probe the exclusion of Israel and Taiwan.111
The crisis, it seemed, had ended. Both sides, however, had underestimated the powerful sentiment unleashed by Sondhi’s proposals. The compromise was just the lull before the storm. On the morning of 3 September, the Indian embassy in Jakarta was ‘stormed’ by an irate mob. Half an hour later, by 10.30 a.m., another mob gathered outside Sondhi’s hotel. They were in search of the Indian who wanted to withdraw Asiad status from the Games in their city. They searched the hotel room by room for the hapless Mr Sondhi who, fortunately, had left just a short while earlier. With Jakarta now unsafe, Sondhi flew out of the city that very evening and returned to India. Before leaving he wrote a letter to the AGF withdrawing his resolution, pending an enquiry, as was agreed. But it proved too little, too late.
Sukarno, it seems, saw the Indian action as an affront to the spirit of Bandung. That very evening he held a meeting at Merdeka Palace with his state minister and sports minister to discuss the fallout of the public demonstrations. The meeting ended with Sukarno firmly declaring his resolve to break out of the Asian Games format and create his own Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO). The Indonesian President linked this directly with the ‘spirit of Bandung’ and what he saw as Indian backstabbing:
If it is the view and attitude of the majority of the AGF, which is the representative of the 13 nations that signed the convention of Asia–Africa Bandung Conference, that the Asian Games does not truly reflect the true spirit of Bandung, then we must stage a new Asian Games, which does truly represent the spirit of Bandung. Right now, we stage a new games among the New Emerging forces at once, as soon as possible, yes, in 1963.112
This was the first articulation of the GANEFO idea. An Indian protest had given Sukarno the chance to build a new platform to project himself as the new hero of the developing world, much as Nehru had done until now. It was no coincidence that as soon as the idea was released to the press, the People’s Republic of China, which would invade India just a month later in October 1962, was the first to accord official approval and support.
The drama was still to unfold in Jakarta. The day after the declaration of GANEFO and Sondhi’s enforced escape from the city, India was playing in the football finals. But anti-Indian passions were so high that the Indian team was treated virtually like an enemy nation. As the official Indian report put it:
Unfortunately, it was worse than the worst for when we…looked like winning a very large section of the crowd of a hundred thousand persistently booed the team. Not satisfied, it continued to boo when the Victory Ceremony to present the Gold medals to our team was performed. The National Anthem was drowned in the booing.113
Ironically, India’s greatest success in international football was eclipsed by what was until then the greatest crisis to engulf India–Indonesia diplomatic relations. The booing continued even at the closing ceremony when the Indian team entered the stadium for the march past.114
Reading the evidence more than 50 years after those tense days in Jakarta, it seems that the protests were not entirely spontaneous. Certainly the Indians did not think so. The IOA official report was clear that the violence was orchestrated because:
a powerful political party stepped in with an obviously fantastic declaration that any move to change the name of the Games would be treated as an insult to the President of Indonesia and an affront to the dignity of the State. The decision of a sporting matter…was wrested from the body which should control Sport Indonesia. It passed into the hands of a political party.115
Sukarno saw a political opportunity in the Indian opposition and seized the initiative.
India Versus Indonesia:
IOC, GANEFO and Asian Power Play
The IOC responded quickly to the Indonesian decision not to include Taiwan and Israel. On 7 February 1963, the IOC indefinitely suspended Indonesia. The news was greeted with great glee in the Tel Aviv and Taiwanese press116 but India’s role in this move was crucial. This was the first time in its history that the Lausanne-based IOC had sacked a member. Sondhi played a big hand in this decision. In the mythology of the IOC, devoted as it is to the notion of amateurism, political interference is the one notion that is more of an anathema than any other. Accordingly, soon after his return to Delhi, Sondhi, also a member of the IOC, got busy writing to the president, Avery Brundage, explaining the ‘governmental’ designs in the incidents at Jakarta. As he put it:
… it is clear that the Government of Indonesia—under strong pressure from the local Chinese and the Communist Government of China—was determined not to invite the Taiwanese teams. Pressure from Arab states was likewise responsible for non-issuance of Identity cards to Israel…
All show of welcoming Taiwan and Israel representatives, prior to the Games was an elaborate hoax. The Government of Indonesia was determined not to invite these countries.117
It is no coincidence that Sondhi was among the four members of the IOC executive board who ultimately took the decision to suspend Indonesia.118 An angry Sukarno saw this as a humiliation and instructed the Indonesian Olympic Association to resign immediately. The Indonesian sport minister denounced the Olympic Games as an ‘imperial tool’ while announcing his President’s intentions to organize his own kind of Olympiad.119
Ironically, what Indonesia saw as imperialism was led by Indian officials. In fact, the Indians were so put off by the events at Jakarta that they now upped their demands. By January 1963, the IOA was demanding nothing less than a full apology from Indonesia for ‘misbehaviour with the Indian National Anthem’
and threatening the return of all medals won by Indian athletes at Jakarta.120 Indian sports officials also began to lobby global opinion in other sports bodies apart from the IOC. For instance, in September 1962, delegates at a meeting of the International Amateur Athletic Federation were convinced by the Indian representative to ask Indonesia for an apology to India and to Sondhi.121 India may not have been a powerful force as a sporting nation but its sports administrators did seem to have influence beyond its performance on the playing field.
As the Indians lobbied opinion against Sukarno, he got busy with his new GANEFO. It may have been started as a result of a spat with Sondhi but GANEFO was also a product of a particular time in Indonesia’s political history. Rusli Lutan and Fan Hong have noted that Indonesia, still striving to create a post-Dutch identity, was at the time engaged in a revolution to obtain West Arian from the Dutch, while simultaneously confronting Malaysia. As Sr Soebandrio, the state minister of Indonesia, told the Indonesian athletes at the Games:
Indonesia is now struggling to finish its revolution…GANEFO aims to finish mankind’s revolution to achieve a new world order which will be full of fairness, prosperity, safety and peace, and free from exploitation and suppression.122
Sukarno saw in the Games an opportunity to become the leader of the ‘New Emerging Forces’—all those countries struggling for a New World Order—but his biggest ally was Beijing. The Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, wrote to him expressing full cooperation and delegations of specially deputed Chinese experts began arriving in Indonesia to put the Games together. The PRC, which was excluded from the Olympic movement, saw GANEFO as an opportunity to gain global legitimacy. Maoist China pulled out all the stops ‘to persuade Asian and African countries to join the games.’ In addition, the PRC gifted the Indonesians with $18 million to organize GANEFO.123
The rhetoric of GANEFO made it explicit that the Games would be based on the ‘spirit of Bandung’ but it was also a direct challenge to India and the Olympic movement. As many as 42 countries took part in the first Games at Jakarta that began on 10 November 1963. Most of the participating countries did not send official teams for fear of being barred from the Olympics. Despite this, at the time GANEFO did seem like a major challenger to the Olympic movement. The Indians were the most vocal in their opposition and made common cause with the IOC. In letter after letter to the IOC which faced its biggest potential crisis since its formation, Indian officials rammed home their opposition to GANEFO and took a hard line against what they saw as ‘political influence’ by Sukarno.124 The ill feeling generated by the unpleasantness at Jakarta was a driving force but also at the heart of their efforts was a sense that a successful GANEFO would leave India powerless in Asian sport. As an editorial in the official IOA newsletter summed up:
The agitation against him [G.D. Sondhi]…ended in disgraceful violence, with thousands of Indonesians raiding the Indian Embassy.
The whole move behind this appears to be to form an Afro-Asian Sports body, in which India, who gave Asia the present Games, will have no say.125
Just as the Indians were scared of losing their hegemony in Asian sports management, the IOC was worried about the prospect of a rival body. When Cambodia hosted a mini-‘Asian’ GANEFO in 1966, 37 countries participated. Again the PRC underwrote the event by building a brand new stadium. Beijing had successfully turned sport into a tool of influence. As a worried IOC president, Avery Brundage, noted, the PRC was using the Games to strengthen its diplomatic linkages across Asia and Africa, giving, for instance, Congo Brazzaville a $20 million loan for sporting activity.126 The IOC’s immediate priority was to avoid a split engineered by Beijing.
The IOC need not have worried. The GANEFO initiative died a natural death with Sukarno’s relinquishing of power in 1966. The new Suharto regime was not interested in pursuing sport diplomacy at a time when the Indonesian economy was in grave crisis. Moreover, Chinese and Indonesian diplomatic relations first cooled off and then were broken. GANEFO lost its primary sponsor. Cairo was to host GANEFO II in 1966 but with the Chinese and the Indonesians not interested any more, the lack of financial resources meant that GANEFO died a natural death.127
CONCLUSION
Thus ended the battle for Asian supremacy between India and Indonesia. If the first Asiad in Delhi had sounded the drumbeats of the Indian bid for Asian leadership, the fourth Asiad in Jakarta represented in microcosm the challenges it faced from Indonesia. Just seven years after Nehru and Sukarno jointly declared their bid for Asian-African unity in the Indonesian town of Bandung, an Indonesian crowd sacked the Indian embassy, forced the Indian sports representative to flee Jakarta and booed not just the Indian football team but also the Indian national anthem. The Indian response was to get Indonesia suspended from the IOC and Sukarno responded with what was then the greatest breakaway challenge the IOC had ever faced. GANEFO threatened to overturn the Olympic movement. Indian and IOC officials had the most to lose if GANEFO succeeded: India, its Asian hegemony, and the IOC, its global control over international sport.
In the end, GANEFO was a vehicle for Indonesian and Chinese self-expression and the means to advance the political aims of both nations. Communist China used GANEFO to gain greater legitimacy while Indonesia used it to further its aim of becoming the star of the Third World. GANEFO was always dependent on these two countries and when their partnership collapsed the movement collapsed with it. It remains a perfect example of the interplay between politics and sport.
8
Appu on Television
The 1982 Asiad and the Creation of a
New Indian Public
The IX Asian Games marked the start of a new era in Indian sport-consciousness. Thanks to the television explosion, which occurred simultaneously with the Games…
—Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister of India, 19851
The IX Asian Games of 1982 could well be called the ‘Indira Gandhi’ Games.
—Buta Singh, chairman and chief coordinator, 1982 Asiad2
APPU AND THE END OF THE ‘RIP VAN
WINKLE SLUMBER’: TV, ADVERTISING AND THE
CONSUMER ECONOMY
Rarely has a sporting event so fundamentally transformed a country as the 1982 Delhi Asian Games transformed India. Most global sports events change the physical infrastructure of the cities they are held in, with positive or negative consequences in the long term. In the West Indies, for instance, the IMF says that the massive construction for the disastrous 2007 Cricket World Cup unleashed such consequences that the Caribbean islands will take years to recover.3 Similarly, the large-scale housing built for the 2000 Sydney Olympics shot up real-estate prices in Australia’s largest city to unprecedented levels after the Games and they have never gone down since.4
Like any other host city of an international sporting event, Delhi too had its share of new infrastructure for the Asian Games—new flyovers, new hotels, new buildings—that significantly changed the dynamics of the city. The Delhi Asiad also changed India because it marked the creation of a national television network for the first time. When Indira Gandhi swept back to power in 1980, she saw the Asian Games as a stage for the government to showcase a shining India to itself and to the world. Television was to be the tool. Appu, the tubby elephant mascot of the Games, was also symbolic of the advancing, prosperous nation-state, but taking Appu to the drawing rooms of its citizens required a unified national service along with an enhanced level of technology to facilitate it. While the expansion of television in the mid-1980s was the result of a confluence of factors—the creation of an indigenous satellite capability, the availability of low-cost transmitters, the coming together of various policies initiated in the 1970s—it was the Asiad that provided the trigger.
Much like the 1951 Asian Games, the 1982 Asian Games were also intrinsically linked to the internal and external politics of the ruling elite. The difference was that unlike Nehru, Indira Gandhi’s government directly took over the entire event and its organization. One offshoot o
f this direct control was the impact on Doordarshan and Indian television. As the host, India had to provide live telecast facilities to other participating countries. When an embarrassed government realized how backward its own facilities were, it started an overhaul unprecedented in the annals of television history. At a time when even Sri Lanka had colour television, it wouldn’t look good for Indira’s India to be beaming the Games in black and white, as was the norm until then. So the creation of a national service was also accompanied with the introduction of colour television. The overhaul of Indian television and the creation of a televised national service was to unleash far-reaching changes in Indian society.
In May 1982, just months before the Asian Games, an article in India Today magazine noted that Indian broadcasting had remained in a ‘Rip Van Winkle slumber’.5 Though Indian television had started in 1959, it remained an experiment restricted to just the national capital until as late as 1972.6 Despite adopting an economic model of development that relied entirely on a centralized technocratic system of allocation, Nehruvian India failed to make the most of radio and television for these purposes in the early years after independence. Of course, the spread of broadcasting would not necessarily have guaranteed developmental gains or greater national integration, as later efforts proved, but this was in sharp contrast to the prevailing ideology and other economies of the time that the nationalist elite admired. The Soviet Union, for instance, put far greater emphasis on the use of the media for furthering its goals; China founded the Shanghai TV University in 1960 to put TV sets in every classroom of the Shanghai region; Indonesia was entirely covered by radio signals from more than 20 stations by the late 1930s; the Dutch East Indies by 1942 had a highly developed pluralist tradition of radio broadcasting with indigenous stations spread throughout the main urban centres.7 In sharp contrast, India had lost the opportunity to extend the tentacles of television throughout the country in the first three decades of independence.
Olympics-The India Story Page 22
