Olympics-The India Story

by Boria Majumdar

  That Olympic Gold Quest is clearly focussed on the job at hand is evident from the following report published in The Hindu:

  With exactly a year to go for the London Olympics, Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ) announced that it was putting together the best possible package to help the athletes in their pursuit for the gold medals. Addressing a press conference, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OGQ, Viren Rasquinha, said that five select athletes would get the support of ‘performance and mental strength’ coach, Abha Maryada Banerjee. Rasquinha mentioned that a personal masseur, Kassenova Kacehoba of Kazakhstan would help the shooters, who often complain of back and shoulder stiffness.29

  Come August 2012 and the CWG legacy will be put to its sternest test. If India can double its medal count achieved at the 2008 Beijing Games, it will give an unprecedented fillip to Indian Olympic sport. A failed effort at London, on the other hand, organizationally and with regard to medals won, will mean that the lush promise of CWG and Asian Games 2010 will be confined to sports history books by the time of the next Olympics at Rio in 2016.

  London, may well be a watershed event in the history of Indian sport. A successful Olympics will propel India to the forefront of Asian sport and may even translate into an Olympic bid a decade down the line. A failed Games experience on the other hand will mean Olympic sport taking a backward step and the country losing all momentum built at the Delhi CWG and the Asian Games at Guangzhou.

  Epilogue

  There are lies, damned lies and Indian sporting officials with their mouths open in front of microphone. They are the Caliphs of the Cliché, the Princes of Platitudes, the Viceroys of Vacillation. Personally though I prefer the Barons of Bullshit.

  —Rohit Brijnath1

  In 2000 the weekly magazine Outlook heralded the arrival of sting journalism in India with an operation that laid bare the dark secrets of match-fixing in cricket. It was an operation that nearly killed the BCCI’s golden goose—sponsors for some time withdrew money from cricket like rats deserting a sinking ship2—a few players like Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja and Nayan Mongia were banned and India saw the spectacle of World Cup winning captain Kapil Dev crying on national television to protest his innocence.3 Indian cricket soon returned to normal; in a world where billions were riding on the consumer economy of the game, the dark spectre of match-fixing was quickly forgotten, relegated to the status of a bad dream. But the idea of the sting camera operation as a powerful new tool to uncover the darkest secrets of the republic remained like a ticking time bomb in India’s newsrooms. The targets ranged from the noble to the ridiculous: BJP president Bangaru Laxman grubbily counting bundles of notes under the table; Jaya Jaitely discussing defence deals in Defence Minister George Fernandes’s house; senior Army officers expressing willingness to fix defence deals for a bottle of scotch whiskey; the BJP’s Dilip Singh Judeo raising bundles of notes to his head saying ‘money is god’; MLAs in U.P. using their official cars for the smuggling of drugs; the Gujarat riot accused boasting of their crimes on camera; and actor Shakti Kapoor’s embarrassing disclosures of the casting couch in Bollywood. At a time when television channels live and die by weekly ratings, the sting operation has not always been applied with the most honest of intentions and it has raised many ethical questions about privacy and the rules of journalism but there is no doubt that it symbolizes the intoxicating power of the new media like no other. So it was no surprise that when every other avenue to induce a transformation in the moth-eaten corridors of Indian hockey officialdom had failed it was the sting operation that unlocked the doors of change.

  When the Indian men’s hockey team failed to qualify for the Beijing Olympics, the failure unleashed a national witch-hunt and catharsis in the national media of the kind that in recent times has only been rivalled by India’s humiliating first-round exit in the cricket World Cup of 2007. India’s hockey teams had long ceased to be world beaters but as one article noted, not qualifying for the Olympics was the ultimate humiliation: ‘This was like Brazil not qualifying for the World Cup Football. This is like West Indies not qualifying for World Cup Cricket.’4 The festering wounds of Indian hockey, bleeding away for decades, had finally burst and could not be ignored any more. Following the 2—0 loss to Britain in the qualifiers that cost India a place at Beijing, anyone who was anyone in the system called for a complete overhaul of Indian hockey. It emerged, for instance, that administrators had hired Australian Ric Charlseworth as a consultant coach but he was not even given a ticket to accompany the national team to Santiago for the qualifiers. Former players blamed hockey administrators, fervently appealing for them to be sacked, former Sports Minister M.S. Gill made it clear that it was time for IHF chief K.P.S. Gill to bid goodbye and numerous media commentators asked the Sports Minister and the IOA to intervene. Yet K.P.S. Gill, the man who was given the sobriquet of ‘super-cop’ for his work in ending the Punjab insurgency in the early 1990s, and the czar of Indian hockey since 1994, refused to budge. As he said in an interview to NDTV:

  No other sport in the country has won as many titles (10) as hockey in all age-group tournaments in Asia, since I took over in 1994. Why has no newspaper or television channel bothered to highlight the achievements of the Indian hockey teams at the Asian level?5

  Forget about taking moral responsibility, anyone who saw that interview on NDTV was left with no doubt that Gill actually believed he had done a good job. What infuriated many observers was the fact that the poor showing had not even induced a process of introspection among hockey mandarins, many of whom considered themselves indispensable. As IHF secretary general K. Jothikumaran announced: ‘I want to know where our detractors were when India won the 2007 Asia Cup with a stylish performance. Was there a felicitation for us then? Our conscience is clear.’6

  It was Jothikumaran’s conscience, or lack of it, that Headlines Today/Aaj Tak targeted in the aftermath of the Olympic disaster. When the channel’s reporters approached him, posing as prospective organizers of an international hockey tournament, they secretly recorded the mustachioed apparatchik asking for a bribe to get a player included in the senior team and ‘seed money’ of Rs 5 lakh to initiate talks about the proposed tournament with the IHF’s marketing company, Leisure Sports Management.7 Headlines Today called the sting ‘Operation Chak De’. It reported that the selection process in hockey was not ‘always fair, the current administration is highly corrupt and that IHF President Gill is oblivious of the corrupt practices of his colleagues.’8 It was claimed that after receiving a cash payment of Rs 2 lakh and taking a promise of another Rs 3 lakh to be given to his man in Delhi, Jothikumaran gave assurances about getting a certain player picked up for the senior national hockey team for the Azlan Shah hockey tournament in May.9 The ‘bribe money’ was reportedly paid in a Delhi hotel on 10 and 11 April and when the tapes were released on television on 21 April, including telephone transcripts of conversations during which Jothikumaran allegedly made the deal about team selection, the IHF secretary general resigned within hours, but not without protesting his innocence:

  I was genuinely under the impression that a proposal for conducting a big tournament on the lines of Azlan Shah tournament was being debated with me by the reporters of ‘Aaj Tak’ and ‘Headlines today’. At no point of time did I raise anything about selection… The money they allege that I had taken was in my opinion to meet the initial expenses for organizing the event in India on the same lines of Azlan Shah tournament.10

  He may have been forced to quit but Jothikumaran went on to sue Aaj Tak for Rs 25 lakh for libel, arguing in the Madras High Court that the Aaj Tak tapes did not show any money-exchange for player selection.11

  The denial notwithstanding, once the tapes were released on television, the reverberations were felt all the way down from the International Hockey Federation’s headquarters in Lausanne to Delhi. Former Olympian Dhanraj Pillay went on to claim that Jothikumaran had similarly pushed Adam Sinclair in the 2004 Athens Olympic team using his clout: ‘I can tell you t
hat this boy did not know how to hit the ball but Jothikumaran got him in and the then coach Gerard Rach tutored him thrice a day to teach him the basics.’12 This was an explosive disclosure but with the IHF digging its heels in—an adamant K.P.S. Gill told one TV editor that he had thrown Aaj Tak’s reporters out thrice when they came to him with the same proposal as Jothikumaran, so why was not that shown on TV13—what ultimately tilted the scales against it was the explicit threat to withdraw funds by the Federation of International Hockey (FIH). In a terse letter to the IOA, FIH’s secretary general noted the sting operation and asked for immediate action:

  The recent allegations in the Indian press concerning alleged improper conduct by the Hon. Secretary General of the Indian Hockey Confederation [sic] are a cause for very great concern. The FIH has invested very significant resources in the project ‘Promoting Indian Hockey’. If the allegations are true, there would be negative impact on the project and the decision by the FIH to consider holding the men’s World Cup in 2010 in Delhi, would be placed in serious jeopardy.. .

  The FIH believes that immediate and decisive action on the part of all authorities in India, especially the IOA, is required to ensure that the whole matter is investigated and appropriate action taken.…

  Time is of essence, FIH urges IOA to intervene and ensure that appropriate action is taken to guarantee the administration of Indian Hockey Confederation [sic] and Indian hockey. FIH remains committed to the success of the project and supports you in your actions.14

  The FIH could not have been more explicit. Facing the possible end of the FIH’s showpiece project to rejuvenate Indian hockey as well as demise of plans for the 2010 World Cup in Delhi; hemmed in by the Union Sports Minister and angry Members of Parliament15—all demanding intervention—the IOA had little choice. In an emergency meeting of its executive body in Delhi, the IOA in a historic decision suspended the IHF, creating a five-member ad hoc body of former players to run Indian hockey.16

  Not that this made much difference. The world cup was held in India as was the CWG. But Indian hockey continued to be plagued by internal dissensions and rifts. Things went to court and the sports ministry tried to get the two warring factions, IHF and Hockey India, to the table on multiple occasions to resolve the dispute. Things finally turned dire when the Champions Trophy was withdrawn from India and the Olympic qualifiers too were under threat. Though the qualifiers did take place the hockey scenario continues to be grim and faction ridden with the Competition Commission of India investigating disputes over World Series Hockey.

  This intervention in 2009 was the second time the IOA had thus intervened in Indian hockey. The difference was that when the IOA similarly took over hockey in 1973, the FIH firmly opposed the move, siding with IHF administrators and ultimately forcing the IOA to back off. This time, though, the FIH chose to directly take on Indian hockey officials. It seemed worried, in strategic terms, about the possible dissolution of the world’s largest hockey audience if Indian hockey was to plummet further. The big question, of course, is whether the IOA itself can do anything significantly better to improve Indian hockey. Its own record, after all, is not exactly glorious.

  K.P.S. Gill’s unceremonious ouster from the IHF was made possible because of the international threat to reign in the global purse strings. Irrespective of value judgments about the successes, or lack thereof, of his reign, the deeper issue here is of the longevity of his 14-year tenure and its meaning for Indian sport. If the hockey team had qualified for the Olympics, even if it had finished last in Beijing, it would have been well nigh impossible to press for his ouster. Gill’s career as hockey chief is illustrative of a deeper trend in Indian sporting officialdom. Virtually every sporting body is controlled by a politician or a bureaucrat, and once entrenched most manage to stay on for years, if not for decades. The list is long: Congress MP Suresh Kalmadi, President of the Athletics Federation since 1989 continued to rule the IOA till he was finally jailed on charge of alleged misappropriation of CWG funds; BJP MP V.K. Malhotra, President of the Archery Federation since 1972 is now the IOA boss; Congress MP Priyaranjan Dasmunshi was President of the Football Federation since 1989 till the time he suffered a massive cardiac attack and former Congress MP K.P. Singh Deo is President of the Rowing Federation for 28 years.17 In addition, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha has been running the Tennis Federation since 2000, V.K. Verma was in charge of badminton since 1998 before his arrest in connection with the CWG scams, the INLD’s Ajay Chautala has been running table tennis since 2001 and Samata Party’s Digvijay Singh has headed shooting since 2000 till his untimely demise in 2009.18 Little wonder then that one of the forgotten initiatives of the late Sunil Dutt, as Sports Minister in 2004, had been to try and act against long-serving association heads. At the time, Congress leader Jagdish Tytler had been the chief of the Judo Federation for about 12 years and Himachal Congress chief Vidya Stokes had been heading the Indian Women’s Hockey Federation for 12 years.19 This is apart from the complete dominance of cricket bodies by politicians. To name just a few, at the time of writing, the NCP’s Sharad Pawar is head of the ICC, the BJP’s Arun Jaitely runs the Delhi Association, Chief Minister Narendra Modi heads the Gujarat Cricket Association and National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah is in charge of Jammu and Kashmir cricket. The RJD’s Lalu Prasad Yadav used to head the now de-recognized Bihar cricket association. Cricket governance is no different from that of other Indian sports. It is just that despite sharing these features with other games, it has managed the new economy of television better and emerged as the pre-eminent Indian game (Chapter 9).

  So why are politicians or bureaucrats attracted towards sport? This was the question raised at the 2008 Oxford Olympic legacies conference where we first presented our research on a public platform. Historian after sport historian in Oxford questioned why Indian sportsmen are largely absent from the firmament of sport administration. Is the preeminence of the politicians yet another example of Indian exceptionalism, deeply linked to the cultural forces that shape Indian society or is this a management system that has dangerously veered out of control, at variance with its avowed aims of sporting excellence? These are subliminal questions that lie at the heart of this book. What then, are the answers?

  It must be emphasized that the pre-eminence of societal leaders in sporting bodies is not a uniquely Indian phenomenon. As was pointed out at Oxford, power politics at the top of domestic sporting bodies is a persistent feature of British sport as well, where most bodies are run by titled social elites.20 The difference is that in India, these social elites have been replaced by that most pre-eminent of Indian societal figures: the politician. This suggests that Indian sporting structures, set up initially by the British, have largely followed the power patterns set by the Empire builders, except that the politicians who replaced the imperial officers have gradually replaced them in the sporting field as well.

  Yet, by itself, this is too simplistic an explanation. For a more nuanced answer the clue lies in the early history of Indian Olympism and the attributes needed by sports administrators, as identified by Sir Dorabji Tata, the founder of the IOA. As Chaper 1 details, in 1927, when the IOC pressed Tata to recommend an Indian successor, he pushed for the Maharaja of Kapurthala, citing one major reason: that Kapurthala had the personal means and influence to visit Europe frequently. Tata’s own commitment to Indian sport accrued directly out of a deep commitment to Indian nationalism. Yet, he argued in favour of a prince with the resources and the leisure to network with European society. This, in his view, was crucial to keep tabs on international developments and to coordinate with the IOC. Sir Dorabji Tata repeatedly emphasized that a regular presence in Europe was a necessary precondition.21 Tata’s arguments are revealing because they point to the fact that sporting structures were initially set up by political and moneyed elites. Only someone with the influence and power of a Tata or a prince in pre-independence India had the means to incur the expense required for running a national sporting body.
India’s emerging sporting structures were part of a fast-emerging global sporting network, and locked together as they were, in a relationship of power and patronage, only the elites could apply in the initial years.

  After independence, as Nehruvian India grappled with the challenges of welding together a polyglot nation-state, many princes sought to integrate themselves even more with sports governance. Deprived of their kingdoms, the princes saw sport as one of the few arenas of power and social capital still open to them. While many princes became power-brokers or direct participants in the new game of democratic elections, many continued to see sport as a simultaneous site of social dominance. This, for instance, is why Patiala continued its pre-independence patronage of Olympism with an even greater vengeance and the house of Patiala has had an almost permanent presence in the higher structures of the IOA since 1947. The corollary to this argument is the fact that, at a time when sport was a low governmental priority, only the princes or a few handful of philanthropic Indian industrialists had the resources to devote themselves to sport. The middle class was still to emerge as a major social category and the post-libelarlization monetary avenues its emergence opened for popular games like cricket, for instance, were still in the distant future.

  As the politician emerged as the pre-eminent dispenser of favours within the license-permit raj, his gaze shifted towards the sporting arena as yet another virgin territory of power and patronage. While India’s experiment with democracy yielded new networks of power and created new social groups, it also threw up a new breed of sports administrators. In line with the changing equations of democratic India, powerful and ambitious politicians cutting across the spectrum gradually managed to usurp control over sporting bodies. Echoing Dorabji Tata’s argument in favour of princes in 1927, V.K. Malhotra in 2004 was to argue for politicians citing precisely the same reasoning: means, power and influence. ‘Being a politician helps in getting things done… It’s easier to organize sponsors and get clearances from government since we are influential,’ says Malhotra.22 The argument was echoed by former hockey player Zafar Iqbal, ‘The cost of running a federation is high. And players have to run to netas to get things done. Since they are influential and can get things done faster, politicians are preferred as federation heads.’23 He did not, of course, mention that in the true traditions of the license-permit raj system, sporting control has also come to be seen as yet another avenue for the perks of office, influence, hogging the limelight and international travel. Summing up the arguments of many, Sharda Ugra wrote: