Olympics-The India Story

by Boria Majumdar

  What happened next comes from the memoirs of the man who stepped into the breach: Anthony De Mello, a founder member and then president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. De Mello faced a gargantuan task. As he recounted nine years later, ‘It was unprecedented in Olympic and Asiad history that a major sports meet would be staged without Government aid of any sort.’ As a comparative yardstick, the Philippines government spent £1,00,000 on the second Asiad in 1954 at Manila; the Japanese government built a new stadium in Tokyo for the third Asiad in 1956 and gave a grant-in-aid of £3,00,000; and the British built a new swimming pool along with a government grant of £6,00,000 for the British empire and Commonwealth Games at Cardiff in 1958.67 The Delhi organizers had no such help.

  What De Mello had, though, was influence; his own and that of the establishment. An Anglo-Indian born in Karachi, he had been educated at Cambridge and from the 1920s onwards had become one of the big movers and shakers of Indian sport. In the late 1920s, he was central to the formation of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, becoming its founding secretary. He also founded Bombay’s now iconic Cricket Club of India (CCI) in 193368 and just before taking over the Asiad job he had set up the National Sports Club of India (NSCI) in the same city. If anyone in India could organize an event from scratch, it was Anthony De Mello. De Mello did two things as soon as he took charge. To solve the money crunch, he got his own NSCI to provide a loan of Rs 1 lakh for the Asiad.69 This was in addition to the funds he arranged from the CCI.70 This served as the seed money for the Games. Such are the ironies of history that the first Asiad was largely financed by money from two Bombay clubs: one focused only on cricket, which has never featured in the Games till date.

  De Mello’s second and more interesting move was to form an organizing committee consisting of some of India’s most influential personalities. The government may not have had the funds to spend on sport, but many in it believed in the Asiad. A way would be found. This is partly why De Mello took up the job in the first place:

  It was a challenge to Indian sportsmen—and, seeing in this light, I accepted the now vacant directorship. Not without some temerity, I may say, but I was greatly helped by the knowledge that many influential people and sporting bodies throughout India were ready to do what they could to lighten the task.71

  The composition of De Mello’s 18-member organizing committee in this context is revealing. Headed by the Maharaja of Patiala, this committee consisted of five senior Indian Civil Service officers, four royals, the Chief of Army Staff, a major general, industrialist Naval Kishore Tata and influential builder Sir Sobha Singh.

  The first result of bringing such a group of men together came when Gen K.M. Cariappa, the Army chief, immediately agreed to solve the problem of building a new Asiad village by lending two Army buildings near the proposed stadium. As De Mello put it, ‘“influence”—if you like to call it that—brought us the Asiad village for the 1,000 athletes, managers and officials’.72 The only other direct governmental support, besides intellectual patronage, came in the form of exemption of duties on the sports goods of contestants, ‘half-price’ railway tickets for their travel and cars for transportation.73

  Nehru’s government may not have had the money but many of its top officials and local notables shared a common vision. In the massive IOA documentation of the first Asiad, nowhere did we come across any note of bitterness about the lack of governmental funding. In fact, the overarching sense in the records is one of excitement, of the anticipation of what the Asiad would do for India’s standing and a general consensus that it had widespread support from all sections in India. Even Sondhi, who quit the Asiad Organizing Committee because of the huge odds, wrote sympathetically later about how Asia was ‘by and large…a poor continent’ and how it was understandable that it did not have the resources to spend on sport. Sondhi was clear that the Asian Games should not go ‘beyond our means and objectives’, and deprive ‘thousands, if not millions’ in the quest for nationalistic glory. Speaking at a seminar in the Philippines in 1961, the man who more than anyone else created the concept of the Asian Games, cautioned against incurring ‘heavy financial burdens’ in the search for prestige at the Asian Games.74 This was in some ways the true measure of Nehruvian India. The Asian Games, so crucial to Indian aspirations and so tied into the Nehruvian vision, were not put together by Nehru’s government. They were created by a loose coalition of sports administrators, elites and government officials—all contributing what they could—in the service of a common ideal. Sample this note that De Mello wrote to Nehru on the successful conclusion of the Games:

  The magic is yours (of our Supreme Captain) and I did my humble bit to make that magic work and be seen by Asia.

  You have certainly made New Delhi the Capital of Asia. The Young Athletes of Asia have now all returned to their homes and countries. They were magnetized by your interest in them in their village…75

  To be seen by all Asia, to take the lead and to build a new India at all costs: here was a man who had been forced to borrow Rs 1 lakh from his own club and who in his own words had gone through numerous ‘conferences of war’76 scrounging for the money for Nehru’s glory, dedicating it all to the old nationalist dream of making Delhi the new Asian colossus. This was the essence of Nehruvian India in the 1950s—hope, new aspirations and the spirit of service had still not been extinguished by the disappointments that were to come later.

  The Asiad, De Mello later recounted, convinced him of the power of ‘miracles’ and made him a firm believer in the ‘guidance and guardianship of Divine Providence’.77 When he took over, he had barely a year to organize the Asiad and with his influential committee, he ‘bulldozed’ and ‘prayed by turns’.78 He flew to England, where a string of hectic negotiations followed. British contractors and engineers were persuaded to complete the construction of the new National Stadium and a new swimming pool within the 300 days or so that were left for the Games. Lillywhites, an English sports goods dealer, agreed to set aside for Delhi a proportion of the most modern track and field equipment it had been preparing for the Helsinki Olympics of 1952. Another British firm, which supplied ‘such things’ to Windsor Castle and Eton agreed to send the filtration plant for the swimming pool in time.79

  How was all this done? Again, we come back to that one word that keeps cropping up in De Mello’s memoirs: influence. In building the new National Stadium, De Mello had immense support from Rajkumari Amrit Kaur of Kapurthala, then serving as the health minister. The detailed proposals and coloured drawings of the planned National Stadium were shown to Nehru himself, who ‘appreciated them’ but refused to accept the plan to name it after himself. De Mello had wanted to name his new Asiad arena the Nehru Stadium. On Nehru’s suggestion, the name was changed to the National Stadium.80

  Despite the widespread support, the core team itself was small and ad hoc. De Mello had only two others working for him full-time—a railway official who had taken time off for the project and his wife who doubled as stenographer, typist, accountant and clerk.81 The sports editor of the Tribune was roped in for help, initially on a part-time basis. Later, on a request from Patiala, he joined full-time, with support from his newspaper’s trustees.82 The Asiad team eventually moved into the military buildings provided by General Cariappa and when they were ready, they invited Rajendra Prasad, President of India, to be the patron-in-chief. Nehru and his deputy prime minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, became the official patrons of the Games.83

  Nehru himself performed the opening ceremony of the spanking new National Stadium, in the presence of 30,000 cheering spectators. In the spirit of the time, the IOA’s official newsletter saw no irony in noting later that the stadium, funded by NSCI money, ‘was a gift of the National Sports Club of India to the nation’.84 Built around the Bhavnagar stand of the old Irwin stadium, it was completed within 300 working days ‘to serve the nation’ in the Asiad.85 Over 40,000 cubic yards of earth were excavated to form a sunken arena and to raise
embankments. The embankments were then covered with some seven miles of concrete stepped paving to provide seating arrangements for 30,000 spectators. It made for a picturesque sight; the brand new stadium, with its new six-lane cinder running track, its new 450-metre concrete cycling track, its new Olympic standard swimming pool and club house, all in the backdrop of the majestic ruins of the Purana Qila.86

  When the 600 contestants of the 11 participating countries finally marched into the new stadium, bursting with 40,000 cheering spectators, for the opening ceremony on 4 March 1951, many of those present read a great deal of symbolism into the event.87 President Rajendra Prasad, the old nationalist, told the assembled audience that the Asian Games would only ‘promote the realization of understanding and friendship’ and ‘cement the ties between the peoples of Asia’.88 The chief organizer felt the Games had done even more:

  I believe that no event outside the field of sport has done more to further Asian unity than the Games at New Delhi…These Games, drawing together widely differing races and people from a great continent, were a perfect example of the power for good contained in sporting contests and the part it can play in making the world a finer place for our children and theirs to come.89

  How valid were these sentiments? On the plus side, Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaya, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand participated. On the negative side, Pakistan refused to attend. Vietnam was absent because of Indian’s refusal to accept its government. Syria and Iraq stayed away as well. The politics that plagued the Asian Relations Organization played out at the Asian Games as well.90

  Yet the Asian Games marked a new beginning in many ways. The Chinese, for instance, did not participate but in a little known footnote of history, the People’s Republic sent 10 special observers as goodwill ambassadors. Crucially, they were the first official Chinese representatives to visit India after independence, and their presence was given due importance in Delhi, with the prime minister receiving them for breakfast at his own residence.91

  Philippines and Japan were technically still in a state of war, their governments still not having signed a peace agreement. Their teams were deliberately assigned quarters adjacent to each other in the Games village. ‘By the end of the Games they had reached such a state of intimacy that cameras were being exchanged for guitars and kimonos for bush shirts and moss shirts.’92 In fact, Japan, still reeling from World War II and the atom bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, only just made it to the Games. If the Games had not been postponed, the Japanese delegation would not have been able to participate. But it came first in the medals tally, with 11 golds in a total medal haul of 32, India following closely with 27 medals, 10 of them gold.93 Two of the Indian golds came from the spikes of Lavy Pinto, the Bombay athlete, who became the fastest man in Asia, winning the men’s 100m and 200m races.94

  The overwhelming sentiment at the Games was one of a new start and of hope. Little wonder then that Rabindranath Tagore, that great exponent of Asian-ness, was quoted at the closing ceremony:

  Thou has made me known to friends

  Whom I knew not;

  Thou has given me seats in homes

  Not my own;

  Thou has brought the distant near

  And made a brother of the stranger.95

  The bonhomie on display at the Asian Games lifted a great deal of the gloom that had engulfed proponents of Asian-ness after the fissures that became apparent at the Asian Relations Conference of 1947. As one scholar summarized it, ‘The [Asian Relations] conference marked the apex of Asian solidarity and the beginning of its decline’.96 By 1950, Nehru himself had been disillusioned enough by the fruitless quest for pan-Asian solidarity to firmly assert that Asia was not a political entity and that all Asian conferences were useless.97 Yet, a year later, standing in Delhi’s new stadium, with Countess Edwina Mountbatten beside him—she had flown in especially for the event98—watching the multi-nation parade, Nehru’s inaugural address once again reflected the hope that typified his brand of internationalism:

  [The Games] bring together the youth of many countries and thus help, to some extent, in promoting international friendship and cooperation. In these days when dark clouds of conflict hover over us, we must seize the opportunity to promote understanding and cooperation among nations.99

  He was speaking in a city, ‘all’ of which was ‘caught up in the wonderful spirit which prevailed’ at the Games. Connaught Place, the main shopping arcade, was ‘gaily decked up’ in the flags of all the competing nations for ‘eight wonderful days of sport’.100 Nehru, who was so closely involved in the Games, could not but have been untouched by the optimism of the time. The man who just a year before the Asian Games had dismissed all Asian conferences as ‘useless’ would four years later play a crucial role in the Bandung Asia–Africa conference with Indonesia and Burma, working together with China to project the emergence of Asia and Africa as an independent force in the world. Although it failed much of its promise in later years, Bandung was an important milestone in Indian foreign policy, the precursor even of what was to become the non-aligned movement. A number of scholars have drawn a direct link between Nehru’s Asian Relations Conference and Bandung.101 The narrative that we have pieced together in this chapter shows that the Asian Games of 1951 was the missing link in this story. The 1951 Asiad is a forgotten episode in the story of independent India. It was, however, a crucial marker of new India and its self-image as it set about carving a new identity for itself.

  THE STORMING OF AN EMBASSY:

  GANEFO AND THE FIGHT FOR ASIAN LEADERSHIP

  The Asian Games was organized, and continues to be organized, under the larger umbrella of the International Olympic Committee. They are Asia’s mini-Olympics and as in the story of the Olympics itself, the Asiad is the playground of international power play and diplomatic one-upmanship. If the Delhi Asiad was about India staking a claim to Asian leadership, the fourth Asian Games at Jakarta in 1962, followed by Sukarno’s revolt against the IOC with his Games of the Newly Emerging Forces (GANEFO) in 1963, were about Indonesia laying claim to that legacy. The story of GANEFO is the story of Sukarno’s efforts to do a Nehru and become the pre-eminent leader of the post-colonial countries of Asia and Africa. India was central to this fascinating interlude in the global Olympic movement. When Indonesia failed to allow Taiwanese and Israeli athletes to take part in Jakarta, it was Indian officials who took on Sukarno’s regime and the resultant confrontation led to Indonesia’s expulsion from the IOC. Sukarno, with Chinese support, responded with the creation of GANEFO, explicitly linking it to his global leadership aims. Again, it was Indian officials who lobbied the hardest against him at the IOC. China, which had just humiliated India in the border war of 1962, played a crucial role in funding and supporting Sukarno. Seven years after the bonhomie of Bandung, the Asian Games became the arena for the fight for Asian leadership, India and Indonesia being the protagonists and China the silent mover in the backdrop.

  Indonesia’s bid to host the fourth Asian Games was indelibly linked to Sukarno’s politics. Ever since independence, he had turned athletic performance and sport into outlets for a new Indonesian nationalism. For instance, sports like korfball and kasti, which were considered part of the Dutch colonial inheritance, were abolished from physical education programmes at all school levels and indigenous Indonesian sports like the martial art form pencak silat were revived.102 Sukarno saw sport as a ‘summing up of many revolutions in one generation’ and insisted that the main motive for Indonesia’s hosting of the Asiad was its ‘self-confidence’ and ‘physical and mental strength’ because of its colonial past.103 The problem was that by the early 1960s, the Indonesian economy, much like the Indian economy in 1951, was in too weak a shape to invest in a sporting event like the Asiad. Inflation had reached 600 per cent per annum and there was a heavy burden from the Dutch period, government debt having reached a figure as high as $1.1 billion.

  But it would take more than a financi
al crisis to stop a leader hoping to use the Asiad to strengthen his position among the newly emerging countries of Asia and Africa. He banked on communist support, asking the Soviet Union to loan him $12.5 million to build the required infrastructure.104 Sukarno was taking advantage of the Soviet need to build allies in the Cold War and was also relying on a great deal of Chinese support. As we shall see, the alignments within the Sino-Russian bloc would play a crucial role in the politics that unfolded at the Asian Games and at GANEFO.

  Jakarta was refurbished like never before for the Asiad. The money that poured in was used to build, among other things, a brand new sports complex, Gelora Bung Karno; the city’s ‘first modern international hotel’, Hotel Indonesia; a big national monument; the first modern shopping centre with an escalator, the ‘Sarinah’; and a new highway bypass.105 The gleaming new Jakarta was to be Sukarno’s show window to the world.

  The problem arose over Israeli and Taiwanese athletes. Both countries were recognized by the IOC—the People’s Republic of China did not become an official member of the IOC until 1979—but not by Indonesia. Both Israel and Taiwan were also recognized by the Asian Games Federation (AGF) under whose aegis the games were organized every four years. Indonesia could not refuse them entry openly, so it resorted to subterfuge. Athletes from these countries were invited but their packets containing identity cards, it turned out, were full of blank cards instead!106 Considerable intrigue surrounded the participation of these two countries even before the Games started. There was talk that the participant identity cards could be used as substitutes for official visas and they may be given over on entry at the Jakarta airport. Israel, for instance, had already cabled the Indonesians to keep their cards ready and a plane was on stand-by to fly to Jakarta as soon as assent was received. As things turned out, the identity cards were never sent and things came to a head on 21 August 1962 when a Taiwanese official was returned from the Jakarta airport. His plane was not even allowed to land and it seemed that Indonesia had finally drawn the line with this refusal.107