The Games He Plays

Suresh Kalmadi and his battle with White men over the Commonwealth Games.

In the year 2000, Pune hosted the Femina Miss India contest at the Poona Club. Lara Dutta won. Priyanka Chopra finished first runner-up. Shah Rukh Khan and Juhi Chawla were among the judges. Suresh Kalmadi was not a participant in the contest. Neither was he on the jury. Yet, when Kalmadi entered the venue, heads turned. Host Cyrus Broacha said: “Pune ka raja aaya.”

Almost a decade later, the king is beset with worry. All is well in Pune, the seat of Kalmadi’s power. But in Delhi, there are problems. The XIX Commonwealth Games in 2010, Kalmadi’s grand obsession and of whose organising committee he is the chairman, has been a source of embarrassment and stress.

The Games are extremely dear to Kalmadi. Delhi’s closest rival in the race for staging rights was Hamilton, Canada. If triumphant, the Canadians pledged $3.8 million as aid to the 72 Commonwealth member states. Kalmadi doubled the offer to $7.2 million. The result? Delhi: 46 votes, Hamilton: 22.

That was in 2003. Not much has been accomplished in the six years since. The budget, meanwhile, has ballooned. After India won the bid, the Delhi sports minister Vijay Goel said the Games would cost Rs 295 crore. This July, while presenting the Union Budget, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee raised the Commonwealth Games outlay from Rs 2,112 crore to Rs 3,472 crore. The total cost of the Games is now (this may not be good for your heart) almost Rs 75,000 crore. The pressure is on Kalmadi. The Games, to be held from 3-14 October next year, have to be worth the trouble.

“Like most administrators in Indian athletics, Kalmadi has been in office for so long that what people say does not matter to him,” says Ashwini Nachappa, the former runner and Olympian. “He does not want to let go. But now, he is facing a huge task. It’s going to be very tough for him.” (Kalmadi has occupied important positions in Indian athletics since the early 1980s. He currently holds seven of them, including the presidency of the Indian Olympic Association.)

“He is edgy. He knows he is sitting on a volcano,” one of Kalmadi’s colleagues says, “The Commonwealth Games will decide his legacy.”

Kalmadi, 65, had little to do with sport in his boyhood. He is an Air Force pilot by training. His rise in politics began in the Maharashtra Youth Congress, of which he was president over 1978-80. He turned the way of sports administration in the late 1970s, because someone asked him to.

“There was discontent over the leadership of the Pune District Amateur Athletics Association (PDAAA), so we went to Sureshbhai and suggested he take over,” says Pralhad Sawant, general secretary, PDAAA. Kalmadi did. In 1980, he also became president of the state athletics body. A year later, he became selection chairman of the Athletics Federation of India (AFI), though he had no athletic nous. His skill was organisation. Yet Sawant says, “The selection criteria in athletics—the timings and distances and heights—is definitive. Selectors can’t influence anything.”

This is a naive theory. Selectors can invent timings for favoured athletes. Maybe Kalmadi did stay away from matters pertaining to the finer points of athletics. What he did do, Sawant says, was something very simple, yet smart. “He gave tours and assignments to coaches and managers from all over India, not just Pune or Maharashtra. It won him support and goodwill on a national level. If a man is clever, he will please voters.”

Kalmadi’s parallel political career and his clout in the Congress enabled him to grow in Indian athletics and indulge his ambition, which is at times irrational (he thinks Pune can host the Olympics). He got Carl Lewis and Sergei Bubka to perform in front of Indian audiences. He started the Pune International Marathon and hosted several Olympic-model games. They didn’t always go off smoothly. At the Pune marathon, there is almost always confusion over the route. The huge budgets of events are also a subject of suspicion. People are certain a good percentage ends up in the pockets of organisers. But even critics concede that Kalmadi dreams big. They also admit that some events, like the 1994 National Games and the 2008 Commonwealth Youth games, resulted in improved facilities for Pune, the host.

Kalmadi loves food. Abhay Chhajed, Pune city and district unit president of the Congress, says he likes everything from misal to vada pav. And he works long hours. “We’ve finished meetings at midnight, and at six in the morning he wants to know the update,” says a colleague.

Like all autocrats, he rewards loyalists. Some have been given jobs at the Commonwealth Games. Some are sent on overseas trips. Others get a compliment in the presence of someone significant. Prahlad Sawant got both. He went to Beijing to attend an Association of National Olympic Committee (ANOC) meeting before the Olympics last year. (But he can’t get the name of the iconic Bird’s Nest stadium right.) At the Youth Commonwealth Games in Pune in 2008, Kalmadi introduced Sawant to Jacques Rogge, the IOC (International Olympic Council) president as “the man who brought me into sports”.

“Rogge then straightened my necktie,” says Sawant, now borderline emotional. “It was generous of Sureshbhai.”

The very vision, reach and people skills that are seen as Kalmadi’s assets, however, lead some to be disappointed with his performance as the boss of Indian track and field. The belief is that Kalmadi could have focused on developing athletes. Winning is more important than organising. “He had everything in his pocket,” says Ashwini Nachappa. “He has been an MP for years, It is alright to organise events. But… India needs to win more medals. We need an ‘A’ team, a ‘B’ team and a ‘C’ team.”

A senior journalist says, “Suresh Kalmadi is a necessary evil. We can’t do without a man like him. But he would be more valuable if he were more organised, less greedy for money and showed a little restraint. For example, he need not have called Mike Hooper (the Commonwealth Games CEO) ‘useless’ in public.”

The clash between Mike Hooper, a burly New Zealander, and Kalmadi was ironic. “They had a good rapport to begin with,” says a Commonwealth Games employee. “Hooper would often use his proximity to Kalmadi to get his way. He would say, ‘I’ll talk to Suresh’.”

Hooper had the reputation of being rude and condescending towards people from developing nations. His downside was evident to all, except Kalmadi. “Agreeing to Hooper was like allowing a British resident to prepare a daily report for the East India Company,” a CWG employee says. “Kalmadi was advised against allowing the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) to appoint him, but he did. That was his mistake.”

Hooper’s error was not understanding the nuances of the Indian way of functioning. Boria Majumdar, who is writing a book on the Commonwealth Games, says, “Kalmadi and the Organising Committee are answerable and accountable for the unpreparedness. But the Westerners are wrong in believing that the World Best Practice model, which is universally used in all kinds of missions, will work in India. It won’t. In India there is order behind all the chaos.”

The result of the spat between Kalmadi and Hooper was another appointment, another designation in a sea of titles. Kalmadi named Jarnail Singh as the OC’s CEO, while Hooper remains the CGF CEO. Singh’s entry has sidelined Hooper.

The Commonwealth Games are called the Friendly Games. Harmony is the goal and not fierce competition. It is somewhat amusing, therefore, to see the battle over Delhi 2010. Nonetheless, the consensus is that somehow, the city will be ready for the show. “We are a cellotape nation. We will patch things together with cellotape and make it happen,” a source says. That is the good news. The bad news is that we are bidding for the 2020 Olympics.

About The Author

Akshay Sawai