The apparent success of the G20 summit in New Delhi in September this year no doubt spurred Prime Minister Narendra Modi into envisioning India as host of the 2036 quadrennial summer Olympic Games, which timeline is a bare 13 years away. If India does actually bid for the Games it will be commendable only as a show of the BJP government’s confidence that it can pull off such a gigantic global event. In reality, however, India has not a spitball’s chance in hell to be accorded such privilege.
In the main because the International Olympics Committee (IOC) is ever so picky about where these Games are staged and values the optics of a first class, First World site, perhaps, more than it does the actual competitive physical exertions on the fields of play (as long as they pass off without controversy!). Countries aspiring and eager to host the Games have to meet — and this is an unspoken condition — First World standards not just in the necessary infrastructure — massive modern stadia, large sized swimming pools, a world class velodrome, etc., but for the society to reach that level as well. Even if India is able to afford the price tag — just the sports infrastructure cost China $20 billion 15 years ago, the First World Western public social standards (of cleanliness, of law and order, etc) is a hurdle India cannot cross. It is not as if all that’s required is for the Central and Delhi governments to do what they did for the G20 conference — potemkinise parts of the city the foreign dignitaries would transit for the duration by clearing the underpasses of beggars and destitutes, filling some potholes, giving a new coat of paint to road dividers, placing flower pots at every turn, etc.
Speaking of flower pots — the lack of any basic civic sense or respect for public property in the population, which the IOC puts much store by — remember they prize Western social sensibilities, was evidenced on the day after the summit when whole families — and these did not appear really impoverished, descended on the roads and traffic roundabouts and simply ransacked whatever was not bolted down. The flower pots gracing the roads in Lutyen’s Delhi, for instance, were emptied by these scavengers of the mud and the flowering plants right where they were placed, who then happily decamped with the plastic pots they plan to put to better use. All this activity was, mind you, in full view of the media and no police anywhere in sight! The Times of India next day carried a page one picture of a smiling mother and son carrying away their loot. That photo and the accompanying story would by itself be a disqualification for an appalled IOC, if everything else was on the up and up, which it isn’t.
This might hurt Modi’s amor propre, but the hints of First World prosperity — the metro railways, ‘cyber hubs’ in many cities, notwithstanding India does not remotely meet the eye test of a coming power. Motor past the new airports in the country and one is plunged into the trademark Indian over-populated urban chaos with no urban planning worth the name, decrepitude, filth, and traffic jams everywhere, with lane driving an entirely alien concept to most Indians taking to the road. Whence, two lanes are converted to five with every bit of space occupied by every sort of wheeled vehicle imaginable jostling to get ahead, even as people nonchalantly breathe air so foul IOC board members would baulk at overflying the country let alone landing to take in the scenery.
India is nowhere near a developed state — the absolute prerequisite for any winning Olympics bid. It is still only a slightly improved version of the socialist Third World country it has been since 1947. Little substantive change has occurred because, despite Modi’s election promises of thinning the government and minimizing the government’s role, the sarkari hand is still heavy with everyone who somehow manages to get on the public payroll being guaranteed a life of relative ease and a career doing little except further gumming up the works. As cogs in an over-large brain-frozen bureaucratic state not much more is expected of him. Hardly surprising then, as many have argued, that every caste and sub-caste is agitating for ‘sarkari naukri’ for their youth, and a reservation quota for the purpose. This hankering for government jobs (to wit, Maratha protests) may be reducing even a once vigorous and economically vibrant free enterprise-minded Maharashtra state to a coastal variant of benighted Bihar. “It is all very well to speak of a market-led society”, writes Sanjay Srivastava in the Indian Express of Nov 2, 2023, with Modi’s electoral plank in mind, “but if this happens in a context of an overweening state presence in everyday life, no one is silly enough to actually believe it.”
An overweening government is why India will forever remain under-developed, its people used to government doles wanting more and more freebies until the productive portion of the economy sinks under the weight of the cost of government and the monies it ladles out in the form of unending subsidies and synthetic job creation by padding its rolls. And why the country’s bid for Olympics will continue to be dismissed with barely concealed contempt.
In Asia, Japan had its coming out party as a phoenix rising from the ashes of abject military defeat in World War Two in 1964 with the Olympics and marked the occasion as a technological power by inaugurating the Shinkansen (Series 0, Hikari) ‘bullet train’ speeding at 130 mph — then the fastest in the world . When Seoul had its Olympics in 1988, it marked South Korea’s similarly accelerated ascent from absolute penury and the devastation of war to economic powerhouse and First World state — the first of the ‘little dragons’ to come to the fore. Ten years later, China at the 2008 Beijing Olympics (and with the Winter Olympics last year) spectacularly showcased its all round prowess and new found status as the peer-rival to the United States. The Games also were a salute in kind to the foresight of the ‘Great Helmsman’ — Dengxiaoping who exchanged Maozedong’s ‘Red Book’ for good sense and unleashed the private sector and individual enterprise.
For India’s bid not to be perfunctorily rejected therefore necessitates India’s first making the steep climb to become a genuine developed country in all respects. The rate at which India is actually progressing, however, and realistically speaking, even a bid for the 2060 Olympics — when the population is expected to stabilise around 1.6 billion people — appears a bit optimistic.
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