One ANNA Hazare’s fight against corruption seems to have made the government uncomfortable. But it would perhaps take a hazar Annas to get rid of the malaise that has taken deep roots in Indian sport over the decades.
With less a year to go for the Olympic Games, the time is ideal to launch a revolutionary nationwide movement with full gusto to eradicate the ills afflicting sport and pick men and women of integrity as administrators to inject a heavy dose of transparency and accountability.
The disgraced chief of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee Suresh Kalmadi has become the undisputed icon of the rot in Indian sport. But the sporting woes in the country go much beyond Kalmadi and his partners in crime. A few recent incidents show how selfish and careless those who control sport are. While the policies are generally muddled and archaic, the mindset of officials’ is narrow, and their actions petty.
And there’s no place for accountability and transparency as they know they can get away with murder.
National football coach Armando Colaco is a classic example. He ordered the team not to play the friendly game against Barbados in the Caribbean last week just because they happened to face some yetto-be-explained logistical problems on their way to the island nation. He reasoned that the players were too tired to play after the long flight and would have risked injury if made to play.
Have you heard of a more bizarre reason for skipping a game? Can you visualise coach Duncan Fletcher telling the Indian cricketers, who play more often and spend more time on the field than their football counterparts, to skip a Test match citing fatigue? Surely, there is more to the Colaco episode than meets the eye.
Will the All India Football Federation (AIFF) show the guts and ask him to explain why he took the drastic step and make the findings (and the punishment, if any) public? More importantly, why did the AIFF let such a charade take place? And here we are not talking about the money that was wasted. A shame, really.
The fitness of Zaheer Khan, who apparently carried ankle and hamstring injuries into the Test series against England, is another big issue. Not surprisingly he broke down on the very first day of the first Test. Will the BCCI identify and punish person who deemed him fit? No chance.
The national cycling federation is another joke. There are parallel national bodies in place and both, unashamedly, claim that they are the authentic ones.
Bizarrely, when the president one of body (Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa) realised that he could no more carry on after crossing 70 years of age, the upper limit for sport administrators, his son coolly replaced him at the helm.
Will someone step forward and stop this sham? Parallel federations are also running and ruining hockey.
The mess is perhaps dirtier and deeper than, maybe, all other national sports bodies put together. Even appeals by legendary players to the prime minister sometime ago to intervene failed to have the desired effect.
In athletics, several states, like Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, are running parallel bodies while, in the Uttar Pradesh Athletics Association in particular, some people are holding posts for close to 30 years!
REMEMBER that the national federation was headed by none other than Suresh Kalmadi not too long ago. He is in Tihar on charges of corruption in the CWG, but the spirit in the athletics federation has not yet been broken.
The sports ministry has initiated a sports Bill, aiming to bring transparency into administration. Unfortunately, though not unsurprisingly, the move is being opposed tooth and nail by those whose existence is threatened.
Some critics are shamelessly citing the Olympic Charter and the so-called “ independence” of the federations to keep clinging to their chairs.
With Anna presently leading the campaign against corruption, how about launching a simultaneous national campaign against corruption in sport? The time for off- field action is now.
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