October 15, 2010

INDIA DECLARES COMMONWEALTH GAMES A SUCCESS

Posted by The Himalayan Voice:
[“Indians leave a lot to chance and providence,” said Dr. Monu Singh, 42, an orthopedist who attended a hockey match with his wife and son. “They always think that ultimately it will get done, so lots of things were left to be done at the last minute. It is definitely inbuilt in our culture. The country cannot change overnight.”]
By JIM YARDLEY
NEW DELHI — The Commonwealth Games, which opened 12 days ago with the world bracing for the worst, managed to conclude on Thursday without any of the predicted embarrassment or disaster. Stadiums did not collapse. Terrorists did not strike. Fears of disease went mostly unrealized. And the closing ceremony was a stirring success.
Fireworks exploded over the jawaharlal nehru stadium during the commonwealth games closing ceremony in new delhi on thursday. More photos>
Indeed, some officials who before the games fought over who should be blamed are now fighting over who should get credit. The sniping suggested that much of India’s political class, rather than being chastened by the glaring failures in preparations and the huge cost overruns, seemed inclined to declare victory, raising the question of what lessons, if any, they absorbed.
Even before the opening ceremony, one domestic commentator declared India’s performance as host as “largely acceptable,” and that seemed to equate to good enough. It was not ringing praise, but it did reflect the imperfect if face-saving comeback made by Indian officials after a games prelude so disorganized and poorly prepared that several nations threatened not to show up.
In the end, every nation came and the events went off relatively smoothly. If minor problems persisted, like flaws with the ticketing system, the public mood seemed to shift from anger at the official folly before the games to excitement over Indian athletes’ success.
“Right now, everyone seems to have forgotten about what went wrong,” said Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst in New Delhi. “Now the mood is that the government did well.”
On Thursday, The Times of India reported that Delhi’s lieutenant governor, Tejender Khanna, had complained in a letter to Prime MinisterManmohan Singh that too much credit for the “turnaround miracle” in cleaning up the athletes’ village was going to Delhi’s chief minister, Sheila Dikshit.
To many analysts and critics, the self-congratulations were misplaced, and opposite lessons should be drawn, as the Commonwealth Games demonstrated the inability of India’s bureaucracy to efficiently deliver, even on a project intended as a show piece to the world.
“All the worst elements of the government system have been showcased,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst who teaches at Delhi University. “Will they learn a lesson? I don’t know.”
International sports competitions have become branding events for rising powers like China, Brazil, South Africa and India that are muscling into the top tiers of the global economic order. Staging an athletic event is a tool for instilling national pride and for testing the ability of a government to manage a huge, complicated undertaking as the world watches. But predicting what lessons will be drawn from the success or failure of an event is tricky at best.
Many analysts predicted that the 2008 Beijing Olympics would have a liberalizing influence on authoritarian China and might lead to an expansion of civil liberties and a reduction of the power of the state, much as the 1988 Seoul Games accelerated change in South Korea. Instead, the Beijing Games were regarded as such a logistical and athletic success that the Communist Party concluded that changing the state-dominated system made little sense. Reforms remain stalled.
India’s messy staging of the Commonwealth Games has only reinforced the widespread perception of governmental dysfunction. Yet, judging from different commentaries in the Indian news media, no consensus seems clear on how to address the root problem, with some people arguing that the unorthodox is central to the Indian method.
Jug Saraiya, who wrote of the largely acceptable performance, said India overcame poor planning by its officials and “snatched victory” by invoking its rule-bending, improvisational spirit. Others argued that India’s bureaucracy merely reflected a culture conditioned by a fatalism reflected in the Hindi expression “sab ho jayega,” or, roughly put, “in the end, all will be done.”
“Indians leave a lot to chance and providence,” said Dr. Monu Singh, 42, an orthopedist who attended a hockey match with his wife and son. “They always think that ultimately it will get done, so lots of things were left to be done at the last minute. It is definitely inbuilt in our culture. The country cannot change overnight.”
Like many others, Dr. Singh wants change, especially greater government accountability and efficiency. The prime minister and Sonia Gandhi, president of the governing Indian National Congress, have promised full investigations now that the games have ended. Audits have already highlighted immense waste and poor planning, and corruption investigations are expected against the head of the country’s organizing committee, Suresh Kalmadi, and others.
During an otherwise exuberant closing ceremony, where the president of the Commonwealth Games praised India for staging a “truly exceptional event,” the crowd jeered Mr. Kalmadi.
Mr. Rangarajan, the political analyst, said a failure to address the waste and huge expenditures — estimated as high as $15 billion — could set off a political backlash in a country with rampant food inflation and hundreds of millions of people living on less than $2 a day.
The games did create public interest in new sports in a country where attention is usually fixed on cricket. The Commonwealth Games is a competition among 71 nations and territories affiliated with the Commonwealth.
The usual powerhouses, Australia and England, again won the most total medals. But India improved strikingly, topping more than 100 medals for the first time and finishing second over all in the competition, as judged by the total of gold medals, 38. And it was the personal stories of some of the Indian athletes that captured the churning energy and grass-roots desire for a better life evident in so many pockets of the country. Deepika Kumari, the gold medal archer, grew up as the daughter of an impoverished auto-rickshaw driver.
India still hopes to host the Olympics eventually, even as the Commonwealth Games made clear the country had a long way to go to get there. Sandeep Dikshit, a member of Parliament and son of the Delhi chief minister, agreed that the problems with the games would affect India’s chance in bidding for future athletic events. But he sharply rejected any suggestion that India would lose its luster as an investment target or see its global influence diminished.
“I don’t think it is really going to make much of a difference,” he said in an interview at the athletes’ village a few days before the opening ceremony. “If people think a mismanaged games will hurt our growth, or that our private sector will not be welcomed in other places, or that Coca-Cola will not want to invest here — I do not think so.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting

 The New York Times


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