The Asian Games became the catalyst to change all that. After independence, Indian television had been tightly controlled by the state for two reasons: it was envisaged as a modern tool for development and a medium for welding the nation together. Broadcasting was seen as a powerful tool of political and cultural control; a unique portal, in a Foucauldian sense, for entering the homes of its citizens daily with the audio-visual message of its idea of India, conflated often with the idea of the ruling party.8 Doordarshan was the state’s own theatre, an arena where the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’ were omnipresent, an organic whole, existing in perpetuity and the centre of all activity. Classically Nehruvian in its intellectual pedigree, this was, however, an un-Nehruvian policy in the sense that Nehru himself never saw any use for broadcasting in this fashion. The state’s attitude towards broadcasting during his premiership in the early years of independence was to dismiss it as a luxury for the affluent; after all, electricity had to come before television. It was not Nehru, but his daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv Gandhi who drove the use of television as a mass medium to further the state’s political and economic objectives.9 Television was consciously turned into a mass medium in the 1980s as a political/developmental strategy, kickstarted partly by the need to package it as India’s show window on the international stage during the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi.
The development of a national television network after the Asiad created a national market for advertisers for the first time. It was a development which augmented the creation of a new ‘consumer class’ and this formed the basis for a new notion of collectivity expressed as ‘the middle class’.10 There are deep linkages between the expansion of television, the growth of Indian advertising and the creation of a new consumer economy centred on the middle classes. Advertising is the herald of capitalism and its expansion in India is intrinsically linked with the spread of television. Advertising was looked upon with suspicion in the rhetoric of the newly independent Indian state until well into the mid-1980s even though it was allowed on All India Radio in 1967 and on Doordarshan from 1976.11 Yet, the volumes of advertising remained negligible until the creation of the national network after the 1982 Asiad gave advertisers access to a truly national market of consumers.
Television has been central to the fortunes of Indian advertising and it expanded exponentially in the 1980s, hand-in-hand with the setting up of Doordarshan’s national television service. Television advertising played a crucial role in the creation of a consumerist ethic and the Indian middle class. Television advertising rose by an astonishing 31 times between 1980–81 and 1990–91, from Rs 80.8 million to Rs 2,538.5 million. Total advertising on all media in this period, 1981–89, rose by five times.12 By 1992, India had 34 million television sets; it was the centre of a large television economy that provided the bedrock for the satellite television revolution of the 1990s that was to turn it into the third largest television market in the world, home to the largest number of satellite networks.13
None of this would have been possible without the turning point of 1982. This was the true legacy of the 1982 Asian Games. And like the 1951 Games, these Games fell under the rubric of the Olympic movement.
THE ‘INDIRA GANDHI’ GAMES:
THE POLITICS OF THE 1982 ASIAD
‘The IX Asian Games of 1982 could well be called the “Indira Gandhi Games” for it was her foresight, inspiration, dynamism and drive that rescued the Games from what could well have been oblivion, to a successful staging that is unanimously regarded as the greatest ever Asiad.’14
So wrote Buta Singh, the chairman of the Asiad organizing committee and a minister in Indira Gandhi’s government.15 As sycophancy goes, this was well in tune with the flavour of the times—every government achievement was linked directly to the leader. It was the kind of statement that Congress leaders are prone to make, every great success being attributed in fawning prose to the ruling scion of the Gandhi family. Moreover, Buta Singh was writing in the official report of the Asian Games, published a year after Indira’s assassination and at a time when her son Rajiv Gandhi had just attained power in the greatest mandate in Indian history, greater even than his grandfather, Nehru’s. Buta Singh himself was a cabinet minister and could not but have recounted the official version of the Asiad in this manner.
Yet, on this occasion, his uninhibited praise for Indira Gandhi was not entirely without cause. More than anything else, the 1982 Asiad was an Indira Gandhi show. Quite unlike her father, who patronized the 1951 Games but stopped short of direct government intervention or financing, the 1982 Games were entirely run by her government. It was a grand festival of India, designed for a global audience, and choreographed by a prime minister who was desperate to regain international legitimacy. Indira Gandhi had just returned to power after a stunning victory in 1980 but the opprobrium of the 1975–77 Emergency remained. Indeed, on trip after foreign trip, she strained to regain her pre-Emergency international image, on one occasion telling reporters in London, ‘I hope you will stop calling me the Empress of India now’.16 It is no coincidence that a full eight months in 1982 were also devoted to a Festival of India in the United Kingdom, featuring everything from the ‘high and classical to the earthy and folky’. It was promoted and partly funded by the Government of India and Mrs Gandhi visited the UK during the Festival, emerging as the ‘star of the show’, a welcome change from the image of an ‘ogress’ that had plagued her after the Emergency.17 Not surprisingly, similar Festivals of India followed in the US, the USSR and France. As Ramachandra Guha has noted, ‘Mrs Gandhi was deeply concerned about the battering her image had taken in the West. Now that she had returned to power via the ballot box, she was determined to repair the damage’.18 At such a time, what better occasion to showcase the new India, and the new Indira, than the Asian Games. This is why the 1982 Games became so important for the prime minister, the Asiad and the Olympic movement playing a big part in her international resurrection.
It is impossible to separate the politics of Indira Gandhi from the story of the 1982 Asian Games. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that India wanted to use the Asiad to make a bid for the Olympics. As early as 1981, Raja Bhalindra Singh, the president of the IOA, wrote to the IOC’s Juan Antonio Samaranch putting on record India’s desire to host the 1992 Olympics Games. As he explained, with the staging of the Asiad, ‘New Delhi would have the required sports infrastructure as well as the organizational capability to handle a “sports festival” of the type of the Olympic Games’.19 Indira Gandhi played a pivotal role in the Indian desire to use the Asiad as a springboard to host the Olympics. In fact, the archives of the IOC are full of cordial personal dispatches between Samaranch and the prime minister’s office through 1980–84, exchanges that are testimony to the importance that Indira Gandhi placed on her equation with the IOC.20
Soon after the 1982 Games, at the 86th Session of the IOC held in Delhi, Samaranch was to confer on Indira Gandhi the rare honour of the Golden Olympic Order—rare because she was only the seventh person, the first Asian and the first woman to receive it.21 Samaranch, whose visit to India was treated like a state visit by the Indian government, publicly announced that by supporting the Asiad and the Olympic movement, Indira was only emulating Nehru, ‘following closely in her father’s footsteps, not only being the Prime Minister of India, but also by her attitude toward sport’. For a leader who after the Emergency had faced the strongest criticism from her father’s international friends about betraying his legacy—indeed Ramachandra Guha has even speculated that it was this personal criticism that may have been pivotal in her decision to ultimately revoke the Emergency22—these words would have been sweet music as she tried to repair her international standing. The prestige of holding an Olympic event would put the icing on the cake. Indeed, Samaranch virtually endorsed Mrs Gandhi’s desire in Delhi, going so far as to equate her with the nation itself in an eulogy that would have made Debakant Barooah—the man who first coined the term ‘India
is Indira, and Indira is India’—proud. Sample these words from Samaranch:
Her [Indira Gandhi’s] devotion to and interest in, the organization of the Ninth Asian Games greatly contributed to its brilliant success. India has shown that it’s capable of successfully organising the most important sports event in the world—the Olympic Games…
Mrs Gandhi has continuously fought for the broadest cooperation, friendship and understanding, between peoples, and for the peace of the nations no less, since she has been elected the chairperson of the Non-Aligned Summit.23
Her international standing was as important to Indira as it had been to Nehru. Olympic diplomacy played as big a part in this as her diplomacy within the non-aligned movement and the Commonwealth.
It hadn’t always been like this. It is instructive that Mrs Gandhi’s aggressive wooing of the IOC only began when she returned to power in 1980. In fact, in 1974, a year before she imposed the Emergency, her government had tried to impose such direct control over India’s sports bodies that for a while a direct confrontation between her regime and the IOC looked inevitable. The bone of contention was a diktat to Indian sports bodies by the ministry of education and welfare in April 1974 to get their affairs in order. Presaging the Emergency, the circular cited as its justification ‘the growing criticism in Parliament, Press and otherwise, of the low standard of sports and games in the country and the manner in which these are organized’. The ministry made it clear that henceforth governmental aid would only be given to sports bodies that fulfilled stringent criteria: no person could hold office in such bodies for more than six years at the most, annual accounts would have to be audited, coaches would only be appointed with prior approval of the All India Council of Sports.24 The ministerial fiat was in line with Mrs Gandhi’s notions of statist intervention and the role of sports in her worldview. Two years later, at the height of the Emergency, she was to make this clear in a stern message to Indian athletes participating in the Montreal Olympics:
As an old civilization, India has its own sports and traditions of building strength and stamina. Some epic figures like Bhim and Hanuman symbolize these qualities. But it is high time we also look to contemporary sports and strained every nerve to attain international standards. Nothing worthwhile is achieved without singleness of purpose, dedication and continuous effort…This is what our young men and women must do in order to improve their performance and bring a good name to our beloved country.25
True to its word, the government acted quickly. O.P. Mehra, who had retired as air chief marshal, was appointed president of the IOA in 1976 as the government’s nominee, and the powers-that-be refused permission to Indian members to attend IOC meetings.26 For the IOC, an organization which prides itself on amateurism and keeping away from governmental intervention, the ministry’s guidelines and the threat of a funding squeeze were like a red rag to a bull. Indeed, it violated Article 8 of the IOC charter which calls for complete absence of government interference in sport. Sure enough, IOA officials wasted no time in complaining to the IOC about the ministerial diktat, asking for succour. Through 1974 and 1975, the IOA continued to resist governmental moves to dilute its autonomy, blaming governmental agencies instead for the poor state of facilities for sport.27 The declaration of the Emergency on 26 June 1975 further complicated matters. At a time when Mrs Gandhi’s political opponents were being arrested across the country, IOA officials saw the ministerial intervention as ‘only the thin end of the wedge’ and were so filled with ‘fear and apprehension’ that they were even loath to put down all details of their interaction with government nominees on paper. Raja Bhalindra Singh rushed to Montreal in 1976 to apprise the IOC chief of the latest developments because as an IOA official noted, ‘certain aspects of the matter are highly confidential and need personal discussion’.28
In a sign of the times, except for one instance during the Emergency, IOA officials themselves did not take the risk of complaining against Mrs Gandhi, lest the letters be intercepted. Instead they cleverly got their friends from other countries to take up their cause. And so the IOC was flooded by indignant missives from places as far apart as Nairobi and Lahore, all complaining about the Indian government’s high-handedness, and demanding IOC intervention at the highest levels. Note, for instance, this missive by four concerned gentlemen from Nairobi to the IOC president:
… if no action is taken by you immediately this disease is going to spread in all the Asian and African Countries and will finish the accepted principles of the Olympic movement in these countries…..
The Indian people are helpless and could not send this letter to you owing to the declaration of Emergency in the Country as every letter is censored before it leaves the country.29
The letter urged the IOC to disaffiliate India immediately if the government did not back off, as ‘a lesson to others’. There is evidence to suggest that these were not just some well-meaning Kenyans writing on their own accord to the IOC and that the hard-hitting letter was sent at the initiative of Indian sports officials. The fact that the letter was accompanied by a copy of the original and confidential government missive to the IOA and other sports bodies implies that it must have been smuggled out of India to the sympathetic Kenyans.
The IOC archives also contain another fascinating anonymous letter from Pakistan. It was, in word and spirit, almost a copy of the Kenyan plea, and posted just five days later from Lahore. Five years ago, in 1971, Indian forces had dismembered Pakistan in a humiliating feat of arms that helped create Bangladesh but this letter took up cudgels on behalf of Indian sportsmen who it claimed were being oppressed by a government hiding ‘behind an iron curtain’.30 It too contained the same plea—the same complaints about the Emergency and the same call for urgent action:
It is all the more important that immediate action and enquirs is [sic] made so that an example is set for other countries in Asia who may be tempted to follow the example of India if the open defiance of IOC rules is not curbed and nipped in the bud.31
Our anonymous Lahore correspondent(s) may not have enjoyed the same refined typist and proof-reader as the Kenyans, but the message was the same. And this letter too was accompanied by a photocopy of the Indian government’s confidential circular that started the confrontation. IOA officials clearly knew how to get around the censors to get their message out. At a time when the freedom of the press was severely curtailed in India, this was nothing less than IOA adopting Russian style samizdat, or the techniques of the anti-Soviet underground, to circulate its messages to the outer world. The Emergency and the international condemnations of it further strengthened the moral legitimacy of Indian sport officials as they portrayed themselves as the victims of an anti-democratic regime.
This wasn’t just a bureaucratic battle being fought on the side in the corridors of global sport officialdom. What gave it urgency was the fact that the Asian Games Federation awarded New Delhi the IX Asian Games in 1976. There isn’t sufficient material in the IOC archives to piece together the government’s response to the publicity battle that was being fought against it at the IOC. The official report of the Delhi Games was to note later, that at one stage, ‘there was a real possibility that the IX Asiad would not be held in Delhi at all.’ The report claimed that this was because of the change of government in Delhi. Indira Gandhi lost the general election in a landslide after revoking the Emergency in 1977 and the writers of the official Asiad report in 1985 implied that the new Janata government that ruled India between 1977 and 1980 was disinterested and ‘delayed progress’ in preparing for the Delhi Games. But the claim must be seen in light of the fact that in 1980 Indian sports officials, who had locked horns with her during the Emergency, believed that nothing was worse for the Games than Indira Gandhi’s surprise return to power. In fact, the IOA had used the freedom of the Janata regime to remove the officials appointed by government diktat, like the former air chief marshal. In a sign of the changing times, a BJP member of Parliament, V.K. Malhotra, was appoint
ed the president of the IX Asian Games committee. So it was not surprising that as late as April 1980, Ashwini Kumar, the secretary of the Asiad Organising Committee and an IOC member, wrote to the IOC chief about his apprehensions about Indira Gandhi:
As you know there has been a new Government elected at the Centre in India. Some years back, you will remember Government tried to dominate the sports scene, and came down heavily on those members of the National Olympic Committee who were for autonomy in sports…
A similar situation seems to be brewing up again…[we fear] the [National Olympic] Committee [would] become a handmaiden of the new Junta…I don’t think the new Committee will find favour with the powers that be, and some of the old members like Air Chief Marshal (Retd.) Mehra may again be on their old game, and intrigue with some of the ruling Parliamentarians and Government functionaries, to reduce the power and prestige of the National Olympic Committee.32
Olympics-The India Story Page 23
