As a former Union minister of sports (2006-08), I am deeply distressed to hear of India’s bid to host the 2036 Olympic Games. I witnessed with my own eyes the ghastly corruption that the much smaller Commonwealth Games engendered; the false promises and outright lies that made it possible for the Games to be awarded to India; the humungous expenditure, estimated at Rs60,000 crore by well-informed observers; the giddy egotism of those running the organising committee; the mess they made of it; the ill-repute that India won internationally from all the shenanigans; and the consequential termination of the outstanding political career of the chief minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit and the less regrettable ending of the career of the principal heavyweight, Suresh Kalmadi. It was also the Commonwealth Games that signalled the beginning of the end of the Manmohan Singh government. Fortunately, for me, I opted out by begging to be relieved of this ministerial post before irretrievably staining my reputation.
Illustration: Bhaskaran
I feared this bid was in the offing when the prime minister, congratulating the 100 or so medal winners in the Asian Games, announced that this showed India had become “a sporting nation”. It has not. As one of our most impressive international gold medal winners, the champ shooter Abhinav Bindra, put it, “If we as a nation are going to embrace sport”, we cannot look at it through “just one prism: winning medals”. We need, above all, to devise ways and means of enabling our children and youth to have easy and affordable access to sports facilities in every panchayat and every mohalla of our vast country. The Tamil Nadu government, back in Karunanidhi’s day, had demonstrated how as many as seven different games and sports can be taught and played in a single acre of land. That will never happen countrywide so long as the Union government prioritises the meretricious hosting of international games events over spending even a fraction of the munificent amounts involved in starting playgrounds and appointing coaches in every one of our 2.6 lakh village panchayats and uncounted lakhs of urban bastis and mohallas. That is where the sporting talent of India lies hidden. What talent we are now finding is almost accidental. Our sporting icons are found by chance, not by systematic scientific search for talent over a wide spectrum of sports in every nook and corner of our country, and then assiduously training and investing in them till they emerge as world champions.
If we invest enormous resources in becoming a “sports-hosting” nation, the ones who suffer the most would be our children and youth who could well use that humungous expenditure to truly use “the power of sports to take it to communities and build character through the medium of sports,” as Bindra so tellingly puts it.
PM Modi does not seem to have seen the irony of his hosting the Olympics on the very centenary of Adolf Hitler having hosted the Berlin Olympics in 1936. American journalist William Shirer said, “No previous games had seen such a spectacular organisation nor such a lavish display of entertainment… Goring, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling parties for the foreign visitors…(the) “Italian Night” gathered more than a thousand guests in a scene that resembled the Arabian Nights”. You can bet that is the PM’s aim. British historian Alan Bullock said, “Germany’s new masters entertained with a splendour that rivalled the displays of the tsars of Russia”. To go by the sheer ostentation of G20, we can be sure our government will match the tsars display for display. That is the object of the bid. We, as a nation, would be foolish to fall for it.
Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.