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Wednesday, August 20
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Four attributes define "ungoverned territories" moving towards "failed states" status, according to Rand, a US think tank. First, the lack of state penetration evidenced by corruption, prevalence of informal economy and absence of effective state institutions. Second, the lack of monopoly of force indicated by illegal armed groups, criminal networks and population with access to arms. Third, the lack of border controls and fourth, external interference. By this yardstick at least some parts of India qualify to be termed as ungoverned territory since the government is unable to prevent terrorist attacks and has lost control of 150-165 districts in almost 14 states to Maoists.
We have totally neglected internal security. We have a million mutinies in various states. For instance, Manipur, a tiny state, is home to 35 insurgent groups. The Centre watches helplessly the spillover of regional turbulences like the Gujjar agitation or the Amarnath row. The state police on whom rests legal responsibility for law and order and crime control have atrophied into cheap bonded labour partly due to politicisation of the forces and also because several responsibilities unconnected with their basic charter of prevention/detection of crime/maintenance of law and order are entrusted to them.
The 1861 Police Act listed 22 responsibilities like cattle impounding and detection of street dirtying. The burden on the police was further increased by State Police Acts. Fourteen additional responsibilities were imposed by the Bombay Police Act, 1951, including tackling infectious diseases. Street patrolling is stopped in Mumbai to deploy officers for night vigil on ladies' bars. In Delhi, all police work is stopped for demolition duty under court orders. How will the police be able to keep a watch over inter-state terrorists if they have to do all these jobs? The burden is going to increase with looming non-traditional security threats like migration, food shortage, poverty and climate change, impacting crime and public order.
While other countries effected police reforms by diversifying security duties to lessen police burden to cope with new threats, we have been steadfast in retaining the colonial charter. The US could completely overhaul its internal security system within 46 days of 9/11, thereby preventing any terrorist act within its borders since then. All we have been doing is debating whether the concept of a federal police force, recommended after considerable deliberations by the group of ministers in February 2001, should be adopted.
The reasons why the state police are unable to tackle terrorism are many: Terrorism is borderless, professional and conducted by highly motivated cadres. On the other hand, state police units are fragmented, largely inefficient, slow to react, badly trained and highly politicised. Being posted in intelligence wings is considered a punishment. Police cadres are governed by tenure rules, which stymie efforts to tackle secretive terror units. Operational efficiency of police systems vastly differs from state to state. Even if the central agencies alert a particular police, there is no guarantee that follow-up action will be efficient.
Coordination between police units is hardly satisfactory. Interrogation reports are not shared promptly. For instance, Bangalore police sent a special officer to Madhya Pradesh only after the July 25 serial blasts to get interrogation reports of SIMI activists arrested in March 2008. The Gujarat government entrusted an IAS officer to liaise with other intelligence agencies only after the July 26 Ahmedabad serial blasts. Local political interference nullifies police action.
On the other hand, centralised operations against subversive elements had always produced better results. W H Sleeman under Governor-General Bentinck raised a small central force to suppress thugs using the metho-dology of a modern anti-terrorist force. He brought 4,500 culprits to trial between 1826 and 1849, obtaining extreme sentences for 3,504. This was the nucleus of the British Intelligence Bureau. Later, when IRA terror hit England, London Metropolitan Police's special branch, which had tackled the menace earlier, was designated as the nodal authority to detect and prosecute IRA terrorists all over the country.
The UK has six national police forces like SOCA and SCDEA to fight organised crime, Transport Police under Transportation Department and a Civil Nuclear Constabulary. Everything is not dumped on the 43 units of territorial police equivalent to our state police. The burden of policing and secu-rity is evenly spread over a large number of such forces, each with separate command and investigating powers in their respective areas. The same system exists in the US too.
Opponents to the idea of a federal police fall into two categories: state politicians who fear losing control over the police and the status-quoists in the bureaucracy and outside who believe that nothing will work in India. They quote instances of vacancies and unspent money in security branches to shoot down the idea. They forget that this is not an institutional inadequacy but a management and leadership problem. Such criticisms were voiced when the BSF, RAW, NSG and SPG were raised. That did not prevent these outfits from growing into very fine security forces. The SPG and NSG were functional within months or weeks of government orders.
None guarantees that a federal police would eliminate terrorism, but the scourge will be tackled better. It would also demand better accountability of central agencies, which are blamed for issuing vague intelligence alerts. The new federal police will collect intelligence and conduct anti-terrorist operations like Sleeman's unit or the FBI.
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Monday, August 18
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India's first individual gold medal at the Olympics has sent the nation into raptures. And why not? It has come after we've participated in 21 Olympic Games - if you don't count Norman Pritchard's two silver medals in the 1900 Games, which were till recently credited to British India - over 88 years.
That's not saying much for a billion-plus nation and an emerging economic powerhouse. India's solitary gold, however, brings into sharp relief something that many, including gold medallist Abhinav Bindra, have asked: Why on earth did it take so long?
The usual suspects are poor infrastructure, government apathy and lack of a sporting culture. All of these are regularly trotted out - and have in some measure contributed - to explain India's poor showing in sports. But can this change?
There are broadly two models that India can look to if it wants to improve its showing in the Olympics and in sports in general.
One is the spectacularly successful Chinese model.
We tend to forget that China's first Olympic gold medal came as recently as the 1984 Games. Since then China has catapulted to the top of the medals tally with 32 golds in the last Games, only four behind the US. It has managed this by strategically focusing on lower profile but medal-rich sports such as weightlifting, shooting and rowing besides its traditional strengths in gymnastics, diving and table tennis.
China has also focused on women athletes who are usually funded less elsewhere. In the Athens Games, women won two-thirds of China's medals. There is, however, a big problem with China's sports programme. Its blueprint for sporting success is a throwback to the Soviet era where young athletes were subject to brutal training regimes.
China has pumped in billions of dollars into its 3,000-odd state-run academies where children as young as six or seven years are inducted and trained with the single-minded goal of becoming champions. Many have described this system as a form of athletic servitude. This is, of course, very much part of China's efforts to assert national pride through sporting glory.
Indeed, as early as 1917 Mao Zedong had written, "If our bodies are not strong, how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?"
It's little known that China's supremacy in table tennis was the outcome of a conscious decision to develop the sport once the International Table Tennis Federation in 1953 severed ties with Taiwan. In 1959, China's Rong Guotuan became world champion prompting Mao to call the victory a "spiritual nuclear weapon".
The other model is the American one where there is no centralised system but a highly competitive school and university sports structure, which throws up great athletes. Since there is little involvement of the state, except for the government's funding of public colleges and schools and athletic scholarships, the US tends to excel in sports that are popular with Americans such as running, swimming or basketball rather than disciplines like shooting or archery.
In such a decentralised system, athletes can't be pushed beyond a limit. As Bela Karolyi, the coach of legendary Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci and later the US team, said of the Chinese methods, "Can you imagine if we plucked our girls out of their homes when they were five or six, then kept and trained them and never let them go home? We'd have a hundred lawyers knocking on our doors."
In Europe, countries like the former West Germany have long had a tradition of local sports clubs that nurtured world-class athletes.
But now that unified Germany has been slipping in the Olympic medals tally, it has revived the moribund sports schools of East Germany. The German government is pouring funds into elite sports schools to produce Olympic champions.
Other high achievers in Olympics such as Australia - which gets a disproportionate number of medals for its 21 million population - and Japan have also put in plenty of government money in sports programmes. Obviously, a centralised structure has its attractions.
In India, a coercive national sports machinery, such as in China or the former Soviet bloc, is neither desirable nor practical. Unlike rich countries, state-funded sports schools have had limited success in India. This is to be expected in a country where the state can't even provide basic education to all its citizens.
And though the Indian government does provide jobs as well as university seats to sportspersons, this is often seen as an end in itself rather than a means to sporting achievement.
Are we then doomed to be a nation of sporting failures, except for occasional success in cricket and hockey? Not necessarily. India could easily focus on a few among the 28 Olympic disciplines to help it make it to the medals tally.
Incredible as it may sound, India once had a robust club structure which threw up great hockey players, including Dhyan Chand, and footballers. There's no reason why they can't be revived. Private companies and trusts could easily pitch in as they've started doing in a small way in the last few years. And nothing succeeds like success. Just look at the rush for rifles in Punjab ever since Bindra won the gold.
There's only so much that the system -unless it's an authoritarian one - can do to improve a country's sporting achievements. Bindra won the gold without any government backing. A Michael Phelps or any of the Ethiopian or Brazilian greats who run or dribble their way out of poverty are not products of a national system. They are sportspersons with an exceptional hunger for success.
That is something that no government - coercive or otherwise - can produce.
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Sunday, August 17
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Now that the brief moment of euphoria arising from Abhinav Bindra's gold medal has passed, it's back to the usual caterwauling. A nation of 1.2 billion, just one gold, yada yada yada; when will things change, moan, groan, doggone. Of course, it's possible some little-known boxer or athlete could deliver another small dose of delirium before the games are over, but once we are done and dusted in Beijing, it will be back to that familiar addiction, cricket, where, although we have OD'd on ODIs, the national elation at our occasional victories is unsurpassed.
Tomes have been written on why we fare so poorly in Olympic sports, including one facetious explanation in this very column — we are a nation so laden with gold that we don't need all those flimsy medals. While that does not explain, fatuously speaking, why we don't win more silvers and bronzes, Australian cricketer Adam Gilchrist has unwittingly provided another out. The Olympics are stacked with sports outside our current national frame of reference, which consists almost exclusively of cricket, cricket, and more cricket.
The Olympian apartheid against this gentleman's game was brought home in a striking moment when i saw baseball, cricket's poor cousin according to the Indian legions, among the be-medaled sports in Beijing. For heaven's sakes, even beach volleyball makes the cut. So why not cricket, and for that matter indigenous sports like kabaddi, kho-kho, kalari payattu? After all, judo makes the grade. The Indian Olympic Association has a task on its hand as does the Left, the Right and the Centre.
Gilchrist's suggestion that Twenty20 cricket be included in Olympics raises another question — why stop at T20? Why not other versions — like Five5? And separate medals for individual batting, bowling and fielding feats. One reason the US and other nations come out on top is there are a bagful of medals in every sport, depending on distance, weight, and other metrics. Imagine if cricket were to have both team and individual medals, for men and women, including medals for different dimensions of the game, like in gymnastics, boxing, swimming, weightlifting and shooting.
Levity aside, there is one other way we can improve our medal count — legitimately. For a country that rails so much against outsourcing, the US is pretty good at attracting immigrant athletes. Turns out 39 of the 600-strong US Beijing-bound contingent are foreign-born, including its entire women's table tennis team (all Chinese). In fact, the US flagbearer at Beijing was Lopez Lomong, a Sudanese refugee. Trailing him were several other "foreigners" in the US team — Khan Malaythong, Mesinee Mangkalakiri, Sayaka Matsumoto and Abdihakem Abdirahman among them.
Also, in the team are two young men of Indian-origin. Texas gymnast Raj Bhavsar has already won a bronze in team gymnastics, and going by the speed with which our media descended on his kith and kin in Gujarat, we might as well add his medal to our kitty. No word so far about the other Indian — Rajiv Kumar Rai, who made it to the US badminton team. If we can cheer Shane Warne and his Rajasthan Royals, why not adopt foreign athletes?
It's all very depressing. Bindra's gold, admirable as it is, is not salve enough, and the proximity of Beijing and the advances made by China at a time when everyone is talking of Chindia makes it worse. All the talk of infrastructure and physical attributes etc, is so much poppycock given how some of the world's poorest countries end up with more medals. So, let's save the post mortems. The reason for our performance is probably right under us — that sunken hollow in the couch.
- By C. Rajghatta-STOI
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