April 5, 2003	Saturday	Safar 2, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, April 4: India has yet to confirm if its delegation would attend the April 10 meeting of the South Asian Sports Federation (SASF) due to take place either in Rawalpindi or Islamabad.

The Executive Committee meeting has been convened to decide the fate of the 9th SAF Games which were postponed last month for the third time since 2001.

While the Olympic committees of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Maldives and Afghanistan have assured the organisers they will come to Islamabad, there has been no word from India.

India had decided to boycott the Games that were to open in Islamabad on March 29 and Pakistan had decided to go ahead and stage the show even without them. But the War in Iraq led to a sudden postponement.

There were reports earlier that India might attend the SASF meeting but there are doubts now about their participation.

“The Pakistan Olympic Committee has not heard from them so far,” an official of the SAF Games Organising Committee (SGOC) said Friday.

The SASF meeting was originally pencilled in for April 1 during the course of the Games that would have concluded on April 7.

But following the postponement, the meeting was rescheduled.

Meanwhile SGOC officials say that they are ready to stage the Games if the South Asian Sports Federation executives decide to go ahead with this 9th edition in Islamabad.

“Everything is in place and we have taken care of even the minutest details,” one of the officials said.

“Our preparations are such that if we are asked to organise the Games two weeks from now, we’ll be able to do that.”

The Games however have run into problems for no fault of the organising committee.

First, they were postponed just days before the opening in October 2001 because of terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the United States and the subsequent war on Afghanistan.

Again in 2002 they had to be put back because of heightened tension between Pakistan and India over the disputed Kashmir region. But who knew the event would see yet another postponement.