The proposed sports competition has triggered debates. —AFP/File Photo

BY this time next year the Commonwealth Games would be over in Delhi and the city’s beggars would heave a sigh of relief. Until then, as part of the sprucing up under way in the Indian capital, the city’s estimated 60,000 alms-seekers and some 100,000 street children would remain banished from its precincts.

As for the citizens’ participation in the arriving extravaganza, Delhi Social Welfare Minister Mangat Ram Singhal had a piece of advice. Delhiites who spot beggars can reach the mobile courts through a control room, he declared. The courts would reach the spot and take away the beggars. Such alacrity is not available to deal with terror attacks. Are we making progress?

Prone to tautology, Singhal recently told reporters: ‘To make the national capital beggar-free before the 2010 Commonwealth Games, we want to finish the problem of beggary from Delhi.’

Someone forgot to ask the minister why in fact he should not be tried for allowing so many children to roam the streets when the federal government had recently decreed that education was their fundamental right. Why are the children not in school instead? Why are so many adult men and women begging out there in the first place? What has happened to all the promised social safety nets that were flaunted when India was coerced to accept neo-liberal economic policies two decades ago?

Beggary is considered an offence and can lead to imprisonment for up to 10 years. Yet among the abused and marginalised children a discerning eye can catch a glimpse of a potential Nadia Comaneci, the teenaged gymnastics sensation of the 1976 Olympics. Unlike the beam that catapulted Comaneci to fame, there are little Radhas, Sunitas, Shardas walking the tightrope with gusto on busy Delhi streets to win a few coins from passersby.

However, class and caste barriers are virtually impregnable, so the government would not pick out the children who otherwise have every potential to become major sports assets. Instead young Ranjan, like so many eight and 10-year olds on Delhi’s street earns a small amount from his calisthenics, which includes passing his body through an impossibly narrow hoop. Under the operation to broom them out of city limits these men, women and children are all headed to be doomed for the next year or so.

The proposed sports competition has triggered debate on at least two counts. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the sports minister himself, expressed one view, before he lost the elections last year and his job too shortly before that. Aiyar says the coming ‘circus’ may address India’s class issues but comes nowhere near being relevant to the masses.

The 2010 Games will cost Rs70bn ($1.64bn). The city was also in the race for the 2014 Asian Games and the 2016 Olympics. But, said Aiyar in his now famous observation, ‘Whether you organise the Commonwealth Games in Delhi or in Melbourne, the state of people living in the colonies right opposite the Games site [on the banks of Yamuna in Delhi] will remain the same.’

Another view is equally blunt. It asks: what is the point in aspiring to host the Olympics anytime soon when the nation’s current capability promises no more than two to five gold medals? India must perform better at international levels before putting its cap in the ring to host expensive events, goes the argument. The fact is that several African countries, including Kenya and Ethiopia, routinely outperform others, including India, but they have kept a low profile as far as their ambitions to host galas are concerned.

In its last major role as host when Delhi staged the Asian Games in 1982, India came fifth in the gold tally, behind North Korea, which won 17 against the host’s 13. The irony is that it was in Delhi in 1982 that China had for the first time overtaken Japan in sports, winning 61 gold medals against Japan’s 57. There’s a lesson to be learnt here.

Way back in 1993, we were visiting Beijing with Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s entourage. I asked the Chinese translator accompanying the Indian media if all the buntings and colourful flags fluttering along the route were meant to welcome our prime minister.

‘No. Sorry. This is for our Olympic campaign,’ came the blunt reply. The Chinese had been preparing for the Olympics from before 1993. That’s not the only reason why no one would dare to think of matching what Beijing gave to the Olympics in the foreseeable future.

India’s sports administrators might wish to explain why every now and then, like last Sunday, for example, an unassuming African runner wins the half marathons organised in the city. In fact given our sociological make-up, there is a greater tradition for developing countries to follow the African example. Emulating the Chinese may not work. Limba Ram, the Indian ace archer who won the gold medal in Beijing in the 1992 Asian Games, belongs to a poor tribal family.

It was just sheer luck and determination that he went on to become the most successful Indian sportsperson in his discipline.

In a way Limba Ram reminds me of Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila who became the first black African to earn an Olympic gold medal. Bikila won the marathon, running mile after mile through Rome in the same way he had run from village to village as a youth – barefooted.

Long banned from international competition because of its policy of racial segregation, South Africa made its return to the global stage at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, when Jan Tau placed 25th in the marathon. That autumn, David Tsebe won the Berlin marathon and Willie Mtolo won the New York marathon. India drew a blank in Barcelona. An elderly lady in Lucknow blamed the poor show in Barcelona for the demolition of the Babri mosque that year!

Apart from being a runner, Willie Mtolo is an elder to whom villagers turn for guidance. To compete abroad, Mtolo had to ask his village for permission. Not many, including his father, understood what air travel was and he was only allowed to go when he made it clear that to run to the venue of the competition would take him a year!

Who knows how many potential Mtolos will be banished from Delhi before the city realises that its priorities are misplaced. There is hope though from the Delhi High Court’s ruling last month that evicting the beggars forcibly was against the fundamental rights.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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