From the memoir: The policies Mani Shankar Aiyar introduced to make India a ‘sporting nation’

Our pathetic haul of medals, placing us, the most populous nation in the world, at the derisory 70th position of participating nations and teams in the Paris Olympics 2024, has only further proved how right I am in wanting India to become a sporting nation before it takes to being a sports-hosting nation. Having seen a stop being put to wild imaginings of making India, at an obscene cost, a host of dazzling international sports events, I concentrated my energies on what I regarded as a far more important national goal – that of making India a “sporting nation”.

I decided on drawing in the other department of my ministry, the Department of Youth Affairs, as also my other portfolio, the ministry of Panchayati Raj. Between them, they had the required grassroots instruments and infrastructure to help make India a sporting nation.

I launched a new initiative, called the Panchayat Yuva Khel aur Krida Abhiyan [PYKKA] (in English, Panchayat Youth Sports and Games Movement). The Panchayati Raj ministry was to work with state governments to persuade village panchayats to set aside a portion of village land for building modest to elaborate sports complexes to which the village poor would have easy access. The youth affairs department, for its part, was to arrange expert sports training through its nationwide Nehru Yuva Kendra (NYK) branches. I wanted panchayats rather than schools to be involved, for school coverage was limited and most rural schools just did not have the land for sports grounds. I was confident the NYK director, Dr Shakeel Ahmed Khan, had in him the dynamism and organizational ability to undertake this onerous task. There was an extant Indian model for organizing regular programmes for sports practice at the panchayat level, which had been in operation for years in Tamil Nadu. On a single acre of land, it provided access to seven different sports disciplines. I used that model to describe how PYKKA might work. The scheme also envisaged competitive sporting events organized by the panchayats, in association with sports federations, at the local village, block and district levels to actively hunt out emerging sports talent while giving ample exposure to our hitherto largely deprived youth for sports activities. We managed to get the Planning Commission to set aside Rs 1,500 crore for PYKKA in the next Eleventh Plan period.

My confidence in the youth affairs department to rise to these new tasks was based principally on the excellence with which the NYK Director General, Shakeel Ahmed Khan, had organized in 2007 the 150th-anniversary celebrations of the uprising of 1857, the “First War of Indian Independence”. The celebration was begun at Meerut, where the sepoys had revolted against their British officers, before marching to the Red Fort in Delhi to get the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar to lead them as the symbol of India’s liberation from the British East India Company. Bahadur Shah was a reluctant participant, but eventually agreed to play his role. We, therefore, ended the youth procession from Meerut (in which I walked several miles with the youngsters) at the Red Fort. I had roped in Rajeev Sethi, my very creative friend from Apna Utsav 1986, to stage a multicultural show in the clearing before the Red Fort ramparts to highlight different facets of the First War of Independence.

Work on the events had been initiated under the overall guidance of Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, who was eagerly looking forward to addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Fort – as the prime minister did every Independence Day. I did not comprehend the importance Arjun Singh attached to playing an ersatz PM – a post he spent all his political life hankering after. Therefore, in my naive, blundering way, I had separately met the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, to invite her to the event. She readily agreed to attend and not to speak, in keeping with her husband Rajiv Gandhi’s injunction that speeches should be eschewed at cultural performances. It was only on seeing Arjun Singh’s face fall when I told him of this that I realized how keen he was to speak from the ramparts of the Red Fort, which he would never have been able to do otherwise. In the event, a compromise was effected: Sonia would attend the function but not speak, while Arjun Singh would deliver himself a short address. Notwithstanding Shakeel’s repeated entreaties, I stuck to the Rajiv line that speeches and culture did not go together and did not exercise my right to deliver an address from the fort ramparts. I don’t think Arjun Singh ever forgave me for my trespasses, but life went on. Rajeev Sethi’s show was, as expected, spectacular and a thundering success. This persuaded me that the NYK and its hundreds of branches all over the country could be relied on to execute their responsibilities in the plan I was drawing up in my mind to harness panchayats and the NYKs, along with the sports federations, in a massive countrywide endeavour to transform India into a “sporting nation”.

I was also impressed with the organisational abilities of Sailesh, the Joint Secretary who headed the youth affairs department, as demonstrated in his handling of camps of scouts and guides, and in sending large youth delegations to China, Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Korea, in addition to receiving youth delegations in India. I also readied a team in the panchayat ministry. Between them, I trusted Shakeel and Sailesh, in coordination with Injeti Srinivas, joint secretary in the Sports Department and the Panchayati Raj ministry team, to launch PYKKA.

I complemented PYKKA with the drafting of a new “National Sports Policy”, in which I sought to draw on the experience of others. I had been much impressed on a visit to Cuba, where dedicated sports facilities and training for the ordinary poor had converted Cuba within a handful of years into one of the world’s greatest sporting nations. I had also learned on visits to Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and China how they were extending facilities to ensure “Sports for All”. Joint Secretary Injeti Srinivas returned from France with a detailed manual of the French law governing the provision of sports facilities to the young and the way the law was implemented.

Drawing on these inputs, I wrote the draft of the policy myself and then submitted it to my officers – a reversal of traditional practice. They made useful suggestions, which I incorporated. My draft contained a critique of how the sports federations misspent their resources. They picked up talent they had done nothing to create, discover or nurture, and squandered their resources on participating in sports events abroad or, worse, in organizing glitzy mega events in India instead of discovering and nurturing sports talent at the grassroots.

I also pointed out that in consequence, in terms of medals won, our performance was dismal, and just about the world’s lowest in per capita demographic terms. I believed the root cause for this was that instead of concentrating on making India a “sporting nation” by widening the base to include all young boys and girls in rural and urban India, the sports federations were more attracted to the false glitter of domestic and international competitive events.

They should, I felt, recognise that most schools did not have the grounds to make sports facilities available to students. But we could leverage the PRIs and the countrywide network of NYKs to work towards the agreed but unattained national goal of “Sports for All”.

I then recommended that, as in Cuba, special sports training should be provided to promising young sportspersons of proven talent (alongside regular schooling), so that they were given every opportunity to hone their sports skills, bearing in mind that a gymnast might be no more than twelve when her abilities might become world-class whereas, say, a footballer would not be at his peak till late adolescence or early adulthood. It was also necessary, I felt, to widen the net of public support from our cricket obsession to other sports disciplines. I also emphasised the importance of cultivating indigenous games like kho-kho and kabaddi.

Finally, I underlined the need for the new “Sports Policy” to afford opportunities for youngsters with disabilities, girls and women, and socially disadvantaged sections of our society to take to sports and games without discrimination.

I predicted that if such a policy to make India a sporting nation were adopted, institutionalised and adequately funded, we would soon see glory in international sports arenas. If we continued with what we had, our sports performance would continue in the same rut to which it had been reduced.

Most of the heads of our score or so sports federations were pot-bellied politicians with long-abandoned connections to the sport concerned. When I circulated the draft of the new “Sports Policy” to them, I was sceptical of how they would react, especially as all the sports federations were affiliated with the IOA. They were leaned upon by Kalmadi to not cooperate with me. In the event, I received only one set of comments from my old friend and political associate, KP Singh Deo, a trim and athletic brigadier in the territorial reserves, but his comments were too negative for my purposes. He basically argued for the status quo to be maintained and the sports federations to be left to their own devices. The others simply did not reply.

I was not too surprised.

Eventually, I persuaded Vijay Malhotra of the BJP, who was the longserving and much-respected vice president of the IOA, to meet me with a representative delegation of the federations. Before that could happen, I was relieved in April 2008, while abroad, of my ministerial responsibility for sports. My draft “Sports Policy” remained on the anvil and was never submitted to the cabinet.

Thus ended my association with a ministry that should never have been entrusted to me. But that is not the end of the story. For, a few weeks before CWG 2010 was to be kicked off, I was caught in the middle of a media exposure of how ill-prepared we were for the Games.

Excerpted with permission from A Maverick in Politics: 1991–2024, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Juggernaut.