Medal-less Machismo

With its magnificent ‘sporting glory’ in  Olympics, Indian sport, including cricket, is a national disgrace

Vikram Bedi Delhi

Growing up in the pre-cable television, pre-liberalisation India of the 1980s, one read and heard about India's 'sporting glory' at the Olympics. Not a single medal since the 1980 Moscow games (a facile hockey gold, thanks more to the absence of hockey's new elite — Australia, the Dutch, because of a NATO boycott)! Sure, there was much hand-wringing, even indignation in the Press but I don't remember us feeling too humiliated or ashamed. So levelled had our expectations become that we took sporting failure for granted.

But that wasn't all. There was more to our insouciance. There was also the sense that cricket was really the only game by which to judge our national sporting worth, and, further, a marginality of Indian sport (cricket excepted) at school, college, in the Press, in families and even among friends.

There is much truth, then, to the claim by frustrated Indian 'sportspeople' that cricket has suffocated other games by monopolising the nationalist sporting imagination. This phenomenon dates from the 1980s -- with the World Cup win in 1983, other notable individual and collective successes, and the coming of live one-day cricket on Doordarshan. The surplus romance and charisma of international cricket exploded, colonising even the small-town, the rural, the impoverished, and regions like Bengal, Goa and Kerala where the game had always been at a relative discount to football. By the time the cable-TV and advertising revolution of the late 1990s was here, with live, souped-up coverage of practically every international cricket match of any consequence. Other sports in India had all but disappeared from the nationalist affections of young Indians.

Equally, there is no denying the singular lack of competition offered to cricket by other sports. Indian hockey, to the mortification of old-timers, nostalgic for the days of eight consecutive Olympic golds, was quickly becoming embarrassing. Indian athletics, post-PT Usha, resumed its poverty at the Olympics, now steadily infecting performances even at the Asian Games grade (especially among men). India's exceptional-for-a-poor-country tradition in men's singles tennis didn't survive the retirement of Vijay Amritraj and Ramesh Krishnan (never mind Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi in doubles). The examples can be endlessly multiplied, with rare, individual exceptions (lately, Anju Bobby George, Pulela Gopichand…) that only prove the rule that Indian sport, largely, arguably even including cricket, is a national disgrace.

The cultural effect, though, has been the emotional disinvestment of Indians from domestic sports. In any case, sports were never either quite that important in Indian nationalist narratives of modernity nor in the narratives of regional or caste assertion. We, in India, have unfailingly always exulted at our occasional sporting successes, have never actually invested culturally in sports, like, say, the Ameri-cans, Australians or Caribbean folk have done. Res-ultantly, our political elite has never seen sport as integral to their popularity or ideological vision. That is why the State-centric pattern of sports facility provision, sports federation funding and administration et al (unlike in committed, hyper-nationalist states like the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and, most irritatingly for us, currently, China), have been paltry in both input and output.

The other ideal-typical mode of governing sports is market. This has obviously been a non-starter for all sports other than cricket and golf in an impoverished economy like India, notwithstanding the boom of the last 20 years. In any case, this market model is, as in other sectors of the economy, really a utopian one that exists only on paper (and no, not even in America). The consistent successes of western countries in general, and the Americans and Australians in particular, have stemmed less from commercial interests and more from serious State support for various sports at school and college level, and from a historical legacy of community-funded local clubs and leagues that have fed off local, sub-national patriotism as well as, more recently, the taste for alternate sports-centric lifestyle sub-cultures (boxing, judo, cycling, roller-blading, motocross…).

It is to be noted, then, that if there is one state in India that approaches this western ideal-type of sports governance, of an ecology for grassroots sports, it is Kerala with its well-endowed government and State-aided schools, and its vigorous local civic life. And sure enough, of all Indian states, it is Kerala that, by some distance, has the best and most consistent sporting record, especially in athletics and women's sport.

Instead, already disadvantaged by poverty, culture, and for many sports, by diet and genetic endowments, Indian sports have had to suffer administrators, politicians and ministers who have been indifferent at best and corrupt at worst. There have never been any sports associations in India, in any sport, at any time, that have not been characterised by factionalism, entrenched, personality-centric regimes with little accountability, and patronage as the sole logic for the appointment of coaches, trainers, selectors and talent-spotters.

From archery to football to wrestling and even cricket, professional party-politicians in India, unlike in the West, have not hesitated to colonise ostensibly autonomous sports federations in order to satisfy their infinite greed for the 'big/strong public man' status. Callous administrators have led even earnest young sportspeople to either drop out early or become cynical in working the system for that 'sports quota' college seat, public-sector job, or a government award.

This has ensued because the public is, except for cricket, tuned off domestic sport, having (mostly) long ago given up on it. Only more so, nowadays, what with so many top-quality international events available on cable-TV — from Wimbledon to the Tour de France. Indeed, the by-international-standards low TRP ratings for all non-cricket events on television, other than for English football and golf (this is only among the elite), shows that the serious sporting public in India is, relatively speaking, tiny.

Isn't it fair, then, to claim that, in general, Indians have in recent years let films, soap operas, tabloid TV-news and other commercial performance genres displace and discount sports from public culture and affection? This is most unlike public culture in successful sporting nations like the US, Australia, or China. Consequently, the amateur sports-club scene for adults is feeble even in middle-class India.

Sports are expensive (in time and money) to play at a non-frivolous level. That is why the overall poverty of a country expresses itself in poor results at international contests. But then, how does Cuba manage consistent Olympic success, and how do African nations regularly make their mark in athletics?

'Bad management' is what technocratic, corporate types would say to explain the phenomena. But that's a truism that begs the question. The tragedy of Indian sport is that it is trapped in a vicious cycle of low standards, low participation, low spectatorship, weak or missing markets, and brazen administrative-infrastructural inefficiency and poverty.

We must hope that as Indian governments finally turn their attention to better provision of primary and secondary schooling, sports are seriously integrated into the educational vision. We must hope that the new, now-prosperous middle-classes do not discourage their children (especially their daughters) from serious, time-consuming sport in the name of 'academics first'. The hope is that the brash generation of post-liberalisation youth discounts television, films, and fashion enough to give strenuous, proper sport its due.

Pious, forlorn hopes? Probably, but the recent results in golf and shooting suggest that the sporting future is not all that dark.