Seven Decades of Independent India

by Vinod Rai

  If India had resumed its pre-Second World War hockey supremacy as an independent nation and caught the attention of the world in football in 1948, the results on the cricket pitch were disappointing. India’s first Test series after Independence was against Australia in 1947–48, where it lost four of the five Tests to Don Bradman’s ‘Invincibles’. The Indian team was, however, hailed by the Australian press as a beacon of hope for the newly independent and recently partitioned country. An Australian newspaper wrote that the Indian cricketers may ‘well prove the magic elixir to banish national and inter-racial bitterness’.6 Besides Hindus, the team to Australia consisted of two Muslims, a Christian, a Sikh and a Parsi. The Indian captain, Lala Amarnath, had proclaimed, ‘We come from all over India, and when we play cricket we look on ourselves as playing for all of India.’7

  The First Two Decades: Excellence in Hockey and Football

  During the first two decades after Independence, India did rather well in sports. Oddly enough, cricket was the exception with the high point being India’s victory over Pakistan in 1952 in the first-ever Test series played between both the countries. Though the series was played in good spirits, some of the tensions and acrimony that were to accompany these contests reared their head when the Hindu Mahasabha threatened to disrupt one of the matches.

  India won the Olympic gold medal in hockey in 1952 and 1956, beating Pakistan for the first time in 1956 in Melbourne. Although India lost to Pakistan in the 1960 hockey finals, it regained the gold by defeating Pakistan in 1964. The mood in the Indian camp before the 1956 Olympic finals was best described by Balbir Singh: ‘I could not sleep that night, and after tossing about restlessly for a while, I went out for a stroll. It was quite late in the night when someone called out my name.’8 Also up at that late hour was Ashwini Kumar, who took Balbir back to his room and gave him a pill to soothe his nerves. Only then could Balbir go to sleep. On the morning of the match, the Indian camp was very jittery as was evident from an incident on the team bus. Just as the bus was about to leave for the stadium an official sneezed, considered to be a bad omen by some in India. Ashwini Kumar immediately asked Balbir to get off the bus, go back to his room, and lie down for five minutes and then return. The match itself was a close one with India winning by a solitary goal scored by R.S. Gentle in the second half. Balbir, who already had two gold medals, admits that the Melbourne victory stood out since it was against Pakistan. His sentiments were unsurprising considering Balbir was from Punjab, which had borne the brunt of Partition violence in 1947.

  The sixties were the golden years of Indian football. The pinnacle of Indian football was perhaps reached at the 1962 Asian Games in Jakarta, where India won its second football gold medal but against a much stronger field than in the 1951 Asiad. The Indian team led by Chuni Goswami, and with stars like P.K. Banerjee and Jarnail Singh, beat Japan and South Korea, both future Asian soccer powers, to win the gold. The final against South Korea was played before a hostile crowd, which was incensed by India’s protests on barring Israel and Taiwan from participating in the Games.

  One of the goal scorers in the final, the turbaned Jarnail Singh, later recalled that on the way to the stadium he sat on the floor of the team bus to avoid getting the Indian team noticed.9 Goswami writes in his autobiography that the words ‘Indian team’ were erased from the bus that ferried the players from the Games village to the stadium on the day of the finals.10 Of the situation inside the stadium, an Indian official reported: ‘A very large section of the crowd of a hundred thousand persistently booed the team. Not satisfied it continued to boo when the victory ceremony to present the Gold medals to our team was performed.’11 The legendary coach of the football team, S.A. Rahim, used the adverse circumstances to India’s advantage. Before the game he made the entire team hold hands and sing the national anthem. He repeated this routine during half-time to pep up the team in the face of the relentless hostility of the crowd.12

  There were some stirring individual sporting performances in this period. While Milkha Singh’s fourth-place finish at the Rome Olympics might be the most debated non-medal track and field finish in Olympic history, K.D. Jadhav won a bronze in wrestling in 1952, which remained the only individual Olympic medal for India till 1996. In tennis, Ramanathan Krishnan charmed the world with his elegant style. Though he did not win any of the majors, he did achieve in 1959 the highest-ever seeding by an Indian player—number three—in the world rankings. In the 1952 Games, Indian women for the first time participated in the Olympics with athletes Nilima Ghose and Mary D’Souza representing India. Rita Davar was runner-up in the junior women’s event at Wimbledon the same year and in the 1954 Manila Asiad, the Indian women’s relay team won gold.

  The story of Indian sport in the fifties and the sixties would be incomplete without a mention of a unique ‘sporting’ hero, someone who was less a sportsperson in the conventional sense and much more of an entertainer: Dara Singh. Dara was the undisputed champion of professional wrestling and his bouts would often draw crowds in excess of 50,000.

  The Seventies: Highs and lows

  From the seventies, Indian performance in most sports, including hockey, plummeted. It was only in cricket, where India was also-rans earlier, that the country’s performance brought some cheer. The year 1971 was a landmark year for Indian cricket when India defeated both the West Indies and England on overseas tours. When India began its tour of England in July, it had not won a single match out of the nineteen Tests that it had played earlier on English soil, beginning in 1932. Indeed, in its last two visits, the Indian team had been soundly beaten in all the eight Tests that were played. Compared to the West Indies, the English cricket side in 1971 could also lay claim to being the top team in the world. After the first two Tests had ended in rain-affected draws, the two teams headed to London’s Oval ground for the final test. There were only 5000-odd Indian supporters in the ground to see the historic moment but they made the most of it. The London Times reported: ‘The Indian supporters celebrated the winning boundary by Abid Ali by rushing from the terraces as the players made a dash for the pavilion.’13 The iconic photograph of the joyous scene represented in equal measure the sheer thrill of beating the colonial masters at their own game and the liberation of Indian cricket from decades of mediocrity. The next day’s Times of India confirmed the significance of the win on its front page: ‘Indian cricket achieved its ultimate ambition here today—a victory over England in England.’14 An editorial the next day said: ‘Glorious to be living at this hour and to be an Indian! Days, months, years will pass, but our cricket team’s magnificent triumph over England in England will remain unforgettable.’15

  In hockey, India had slipped to the third place by the 1968 Olympics and in the 1972 Games could not better its bronze medal position. This was to be India’s last Olympic medal against a full field if the gold medal in the boycott-hit 1980 Moscow Olympics—where most of the top hockey-playing countries did not participate—is not taken into account. There was a fleeting triumph in 1975 when India won its first and only hockey World Cup before a sell-out crowd of 50,000 at the Merdeka stadium in Kuala Lumpur. In Delhi, huge crowds of hockey fans were seen standing outside banks and government offices on the occasion, listening to the radio commentary. The celebrations following the victory were testimony to the popularity of hockey, especially in north India. The Hindustan Times reported: ‘Delhi fans danced to the rhythm of drums and distributed sweets. In Connaught Circus, a huge clapping and dancing crowd followed two drummers and a group of bhangra dancers. A restaurant owner treated his customers for free when the news came out.’16 On the return of the players, 10,000 people turned up at Delhi’s Palam airport and there was a near-stampede. However, the 1975 victory proved to be a false dawn for Indian hockey. The very next year, India had its worst ever showing in the Olympics, finishing seventh in the Montreal Olympics.

  The Eighties Onwards: The World Cup Victory and Its Impact

  It was a coincidence that
just as a national television audience was coming into being, spurred by the introduction of colour telecast during the 1982 Asian Games held in Delhi, India’s greatest cricketing triumph, since the 1971 victory over England, occurred. On 25 June 1983 India caught everybody by surprise by winning the cricket World Cup. The win was completely unexpected since India had performed abysmally in the two earlier editions of the tournament and were considered novices in the limited-overs version of cricket. The image of India’s young captain Kapil Dev holding aloft the cup at Lord’s was seen by millions of viewers across the country. The viewership wasn’t restricted only to households that owned TVs. Those without television sets watched the semi-final and the final—the only two matches shown live in India—in someone else’s house or in common spaces.

  If 1983 forged a fortuitous link between cricket and an expanding television audience, it ironically hastened the decline of football and hockey. Television coverage of international football opened the eyes of Indian sports fans to the vast difference in standard between Indian football and rest of the world. This was true even in Calcutta, which was the most football-obsessed city of India. The first international match to be shown live to the Indian audience was the final of the 1978 World Cup; by the next World Cup in 1982, the entire tournament was telecast live. This had the effect of impressing on football fans the ‘gap between their own local heroes and the great international stars’.17 In the case of hockey, the introduction of television coincided with a particularly heavy defeat and that too at the hands of Pakistan in the 1982 Asian Games final. The Indian goalkeeper, Mir Ranjan Negi, was vilified18 (his reputation was partially redeemed after the success of the Bollywood film, Chak de India, based on his time as the coach of the Indian women’s hockey team) and many Indians switched off from hockey forever. Success in international hockey has dried up since, with India winning Asiad golds in 1998 and 2014, but having no success in either the Olympics or the World Cup. Thus, an editor of a national daily lamented, ‘One of the greatest tragedies of our hockey is that its most glorious phase preceded the era of live television in India.’19

  It was from the eighties onwards that the popularity of cricket reached an all-time high in India. This was made possible by and intrinsically linked to the phenomenal growth of television during this period. The marriage between cricket and television was cemented from the early nineties when the Indian economy was unshackled from decades of state control. Private satellite and cable broadcasters were allowed to enter the Indian market for the first time, breaking Doordarshan’s monopoly over cricket telecasts. The BCCI, which had a paltry Rs 200,000 in its coffers during the 1983 World Cup20 and did not even have the money to reward the members of the Indian team, was quick to spot the immense opportunities presented by the happy convergence of an ever-widening television audience and an upswing in the fortunes of Indian cricket. It even dared to bring the World Cup, which had been held in England since its inception in 1975, to the Indian subcontinent in 1987.

  It was not only the cricket board that made money. The players, who had got a pittance till the eighties, were now much sought after. The real game-changer, however, was the deal that Mark Mascarenhas struck with India’s biggest sports star and one of the finest batsmen in the world, Sachin Tendulkar, in 1996, guaranteeing him USD 7.5 million over five years. Thanks to the Twenty20 revolution, which was aided by India winning the T20 World Cup in 2007, and the Indian Premier League, first played in 2008, Indian cricketers are now raking in big money without even playing for the national side. The IPL model, where city-based franchisees compete against each other, has been applied, with varying degrees of success, to other sports, including kabaddi.

  A Vibrant Present

  The dominance of cricket in India from the eighties, despite the occasional individual brilliance of a Prakash Padukone or Pullela Gopichand in badminton, Vijay Amritraj in tennis and P.T. Usha in athletics, has often mistakenly been touted as the reason for the decline of other sports. Happily, the last decade or so have been one of the best periods for Indian sport outside the cricket field. Since Usha narrowly missed a medal in the 1984 Olympics, India has won individual medals in several disciplines beginning with Leander Paes’ bronze medal in tennis in 1996. This was astonishingly India’s first individual medal in the Olympics in over forty years after Jadhav’s bronze in wrestling in 1952. Following Paes, Karnam Malleswari won a bronze in women’s weightlifting (2000) and army man (and now Union minister) Rajyavardhan Rathore a silver in shooting (2004), before shooter Abhinav Bindra in 2008 became the first Indian ever to win an individual Olympic gold medal. In the 2008 Beijing Games, Vijender Singh and Sushil Kumar won a bronze each in boxing and wrestling respectively, before India won its largest ever-tally of six medals—two silvers and four bronze—in the 2012 London Games. The sports where India tasted Olympic success in London were wrestling, shooting, boxing and badminton. Though India could not match its performance of London in the 2016 Rio Games, for the first time an Indian woman, badminton player P.V. Sindhu, won a silver medal.

  India’s performance in the last two Olympics, looked at in terms of population, number of competitors sent and the high expectations, was ordinary. But placed in the context of India’s overall Olympic record, it was very good. There are three things to note of this sporting resurgence: first, women sportspersons, such as Saina Nehwal, Mary Kom, P.V. Sindhu, Sakshi Malik and Sania Mirza, have been at its forefront; second, there has been a decentring of sport with the smaller cities and hinterland contributing more than the metros; and finally, it is spread across several sports. India will not be a sporting superpower in the near future.

  However, if this trend continues, it might at least find itself on the medal sheet of international competitions with more regularity.

  XVII

  Civil Service Reforms in India

  S. Narayan

  The existing structure of the civil services in India owes much to the pattern of administration that the colonial rulers introduced into this country. The process of securing control over the entire geography of India, which included the areas now in Pakistan and Bangladesh, took over a hundred years. There were also subsequent annexations of Sri Lanka and Burma (now Myanmar) and even Malaysia into this empire, though the administration in those areas was managed somewhat differently.

  Pre-Independence

  In the Indian Subcontinent, the concern of the colonial administration was the extraction of revenue. Since the structure of the economy was substantially agrarian, it meant getting it from revenues on land. In the presidency areas of Madras, Bombay and Bengal, the introduction of permanent settlement1 ensured the settlement of land to the owners, rates of levy on the land as well as introduction of a machinery to collect revenues. The colonial rulers drew substantially on the experiences of the Mughals and the Muslim rulers who had come before them. Hence, rates of land revenue were fixed on criteria that had been adopted for hundreds of years. At the same time, the administration recognized the existence of large landholders and zamindars, as well as minor and major princely states that had their own systems of revenue collection. In areas not settled by the ryotwari2 system, the collection of revenues was a tax on the landowner, and the zamindar or the prince was expected to hand over a portion of the revenues to the rulers.

  The administrative and civil services structure grew out of these considerations of governance. In areas where the government was administering the ryotwari system, it was necessary to have an elaborate set of records for landholdings, land transfers and ownerships, birth and death data as well as an annual record of crops cultivated, conditions of the crops and yield, revenues due and collectible, and accounts for collection. This ensured the development of a hierarchy of officialdom that started at the village level with the village accountant and headman, through supervising hierarchies at different levels, to the administrative unit of a district, which was headed by a district collector, really the kingpin of the administration at that time.
He was not only responsible for the collection of revenues, but also for the settlement of disputes, and as a magistrate, for awarding punishments. The responsibility of maintaining law and order lay with him, and in all respects, he was the eyes and ears of the colonial rulers.

  In the zamindari areas and in the administered princely states, the role of the colonial administration was reduced to the extent that the revenue amounts, predetermined, were the responsibility of the owner. Hence, at the detailed village level the account-keeping machinery was not required to the extent it was required in ryotwari areas. Law and order, and settlement of disputes lay with the prince, who had his own administrative hierarchy.

  The colonial system envisaged an overarching secretariat in Delhi (after it moved there from Calcutta), at the peak of which was the Viceroy, assisted by members in council. Most importantly, the administration in the presidency areas was through a governor, who had all the executive powers, until the Montague–Chelmsford reforms ushered in a period of provincially elected legislatures answerable to the governor.

  After 1947

  After Independence in 1947, the system of administration remained very similar to that before, with the addition that a similar pattern was introduced in all the states. The introduction of the Indian Civil Service personnel through a series of competitive examinations (in the Gladstone era) introduced a hierarchy of English-educated, committed set of civil servants into the administration who rose through ranks in the districts as sub-divisional officers, to district collectors, and eventually to positions of policymaking in the provincial and the Central government. After Independence, the civil service became the administrative service, and was supported by the police service, recruited through similar competitive examinations. The rights and privileges of the persons admitted to these services were included in articles 309 to 311 of the Constitution, and even the removal of these persons was protected by due process in the Constitution.