Commonwealth Games: post-imperial conflict October 21, 2009
Posted by sandygordon in India, Stoddart, Brian.Tags: Commonwealth Games, India, sport
trackback
Brian Stoddart
When New Delhi won next year’s Commonwealth Games, it was rightly regarded as a “break through” opportunity much as the Asian Games were in 1982. Here was the chance for the “new” India to show its stuff, and there was considerable talk about this being the test run for a Delhi bid on the Olympic Games. That, of course, would set the national capital for a Beijing-style moment, heralding India as a genuine world power.
From the outset, though, realizing the Delhi Games would be a difficult task. The Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF), like most international federations, is a complex body with its own patterns of powers and procedures. While the host city organising committee has responsibility for delivering the Games, the CGF keeps close oversight on developments and is never shy about giving advice. Then, India’s democratic structure would never allow organizers the same power as, say, Beijing to make sweeping changes to city infrastructure, alleged social problems and budget allocations. Further, Delhi organizers would never bow to external pressure in the way some other hosts had, mainly because of the elaborate interplay between Indian sport and politics.
Delhi 2010 is directed largely by the Executive Board of the Organising Committee chaired by Suresh Kalmadi, a former Indian Air Force man turned politician and long time President of the Indian Olympic Association. The Board is a mix of nominees from the Government of India, the IOC, the Delhi government and the CGF. Thus it includes Sudhir Nath, Secretary of the union Sports Ministry; Rakesh Mehta, the Delhi Chief Secretary, P.K. Tripathy, Principal Secretary to Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit; M. Ramachandran, Delhi Urban development Secretary; V. K. Malhotra, Kalmadi’s deputy at the IOA; and Randhir Singh, another long serving Indian Olympic boss; and Digvijay Singh, politician and political numbers man. All these people and others associated have strong political connections if not actual roles.
Also included on the Board are the CEO of Delhi 2010, Kiwi Mike Hooper and President of the Commonwealth Games Federation Michael Fennell, a Jamaican businessman. Effectively, the Board has an interesting conflict – Indian members naturally want to cast the best possible light on things while the CGF seeks to guarantee a successful games, and those two goals are not automatically mutually compatible.
Concerns about Delhi’s progress towards October 2010 have smouldered for some time. The construction of facilities has not met anticipated deadlines, and that has been exacerbated by the onset of the global financial crisis. The Games village project, for example, was won by a Dubai-based developer that financed its work on a State Bank of India loan then had to seek deferment of payments, then later again asked the Delhi Development Authority for a bail-out loan. There were concerns over environmental matters, the relocation of beggars, Delhi’s social behaviour, the availability of hotel rooms for visitors, transport efficiency, and levels of planning coordination.
Those embers reached serious bushfire stage recently, drawing upon the rich fuel of a post-imperial row. The Commonwealth Games were dreamed up in the 1920s as the Empire began to wane, a cultural meeting place to replace the disappearing political ones. The organisation has largely survived as a remnant of Empire with its headquarters based in London and its business run in traditional imperial fashion. The CGF, for example, determined who would be the CEO so Hooper arrived in Delhi effectively as its representative, establishing a tension between the CGF and the local organizers. These appointments do not come cheap, and the local authorities had to meet that CEO cost, along with several other foreign appointments at individual sports level. Not only did the CGF want an ‘outsider’ to direct operations, but the locals had to pay for the privilege in their view, so performance was watched closely.
When the CGF arrived in Delhi a few weeks ago for a scheduled assembly and inspection visit, senior members like Fennell publicly expressed alarm that the city would not be ready by the time the Games arrived. This was not the first time that fear had been raised. On earlier occasions came the muted threat that the Games might have to be shifted to an alternative venue, like Melbourne or Auckland in the more ‘reliable’ parts of the Commonwealth. This time the threat was that if Delhi was unready then the Games might not happen, because alternative venues could not be found at such short notice to host thousands of athletes, officials and spectators. Things were now so bad, declared the CGF, that it thought yet another set of foreign technical experts must be appointed to ‘assist’ Delhi. Again, those experts would come from places like Australia and the UK, for the most part.
This announcement provoked an immediate row that, ironically, suppressed some factional sparring inside the Delhi Games organization. A few weeks earlier, Randhir Singh criticized Organising Committee progress even though he was a member of the Board, and that was read publicly as India’s Olympic bosses criticising arrangements perhaps in order to help insure themselves against sharing blame should things go wrong. This was the stuff of factional politics, of course, but it is doubtful the CGF people read it that way.
Once the CGF made its latest unease known, however, the factional strife disappeared and the response to the CGF was vehement. Kalmadi made it very clear that Delhi would be ready, resented the CGF criticisms, and suggested that if there were problems then at least some of them were of the CGF’s own making. That played to Randhir Singh’s earlier lament that the existence of 23 different committees as mandated by the CGF made life extremely difficult.
Then came the strongest reaction – Kalmadi called for the CGF to sack CEO Hooper, saying that “he is of no use to us”. At the same time, Kalmadi resisted the idea of yet more foreign experts coming in. Hooper has vehemently refused to resign and the CGF has refused to sack him, so the CEO remains in Delhi and will do so until at least the end of the month when yet another high level meeting will convene. It is hard to see how he can continue, but this is a stand-off of massive and culturally loaded proportions.
Lurking under all this, naturally, is a potent mix of Indian sovereignty, local style, political complexity, national pride and resentment at foreign intervention. The rhetoric is about Indian skill and resources being well able to undertake this venture, while commentators in countries like Australia continue to cast the usual and uninformed line about serious question marks hanging over India’s ability to deliver. This underlines dramatically the impasse that sees the rest of the world, the Commonwealth included, in awe of India’s economic might but convinced of her inability to overcome bureaucratic delay, local intrigue, and a combative approach.
Edward Said might have seen it as a classic Orientalist expression, but it certainly seems now that India’s need for the Games to be a success has gone up several notches.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?