There is something about controversies in India that is disheartening. The problem lies in the fact that as rituals of public debate and disclosure they are never complete. Consider the recent debates about Commonwealth Games.
The last round was sparked off by member of Parliament Mani Shankar Aiyar’s tongue-in-cheek statement that the monsoons are good for agriculture and bad for the Games. It was not clear whether he was being sport or spoilt sport. Indian Olympic Association president Suresh Kalmadi took the latter interpretation and declared not a single stadium would have come up if Mr Aiyar had been sports minister. A wag added that if it is buildings they wanted, Mayawati would have been the ideal choice.
Levity aside, one is first of all struck by the predictable nature of the debate. The script when structured reads as follows: Theme one is the China syndrome. The Chinese did a perfect 10.0 job on managing the Olympics and we cannot run the Commonwealth or even the Commonwealth Games. Implicit in it is the tacit or overt war between the two systems, about which is more livable and efficient.
If the global split is China-India, the local split is Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP loves to remind everyone that Atal Behari Vajpayee got India the Games and the prestige, while the Congress has vitiated it through its lotus-eating tactics.
In both scenarios the Commonwealth Games is only a site for wider ideological debates about preferences. Underwriting both is the sense of national identity and pride where botched-up Games will be seen as a sign of Indian incompetence. It is this that makes the beleaguered organisers dub the critics as anti-national. The nation state is too official and too serious a vector to allow criticism.
The reader or listener following the controversy begins realising that the facts are incidental, that regardless of content, every debate is dressed in the standard costume ball of oppositions. Predictably, if the nationalists are holding forth, the socialists cannot be far behind. Their demand is that sport be nationalised. But this is seen as either bureaucratic greed or ideological nostalgia.
The next move notes that the stadiums are meant for sporting events and not training. They smell like exclusive clubs from which local athletes are excluded. The debate now takes the standard democratic or populist twist with human rights group talking of displacement and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) talking about the lack of participation and consent.
All this is obfuscated by a clash of personalities with people wondering whether Mr Kalmadi wishes to outdo Juan Samaranch in terms of longevity of claims to a position. One wonders if his sense of sport extends to the possibility of giving some others a chance at running the sport. One then realises that control of sport adds to the possibility of politics as conspicuous consumption.
By the time the scenario is enacted, the controversy sounds like a B-grade movie. Only in real life there is no hero to convert the last two months into an exciting finale. The spectator begins wondering whether the rhetoric of politics even allows for genuine problem solving.
Look at it another way. The preparation of the Commonwealth Games is actually a minor development project. Project delays are standard and predictable. Project overruns are a habit as if a project without a cost-overrun would lose status. Development projects, like Indian marriages, expect things to be miraculously solved or papered over in the last minute. What one misses is a sense of competence, transparency and participation. Contrast this to the British preparation for the Olympics.
The British Olympic organising committee has a charismatic leader, a genuine success story, in Lord Sebastian Coe. Coe is a great athlete, two-time winner of the Olympic Gold medal. He inspires. In true marketing style he has even produced a book, The Winning Mind, about his vision of life and sport. Our politicians and bureaucrats who run sport look flabby, seedy, overweight and incompetent next to Coe.
As a leader, Coe has put into place vision, method, transparency and a system of feedback. He wants to regenerate the City and in particular East London. Whatever the eventual success, the goals are clear, articulate and transparent. Beyond the clarity of goals, there is the clarity of markers which highlights the standards of evaluation. The Olympic committee has professionals and experts but the ritual of management is not only a technocratic exercise.
Coe and his team offer it as a vision of a city, a regenerated, participative city. The plans are available and he has followed it up with elaborate discussions. The plan has its sceptics, particularly about the usability and access to sports facilities after the Olympics. But the vision of the Olympics is a vision of a city, the benefits it might expect as a result of such investment mounting to £9 billion. It is visualised as the greatest building project “since the Great Fire of 1666”.
Coe has already started a campaign for volunteers. He hopes that an auxiliary army of 70,000 volunteers will create a penumbra of excitement about the games, making it more participative. Predictably the corporations are joining the bandwagon with McDonald’s offering a training programme.
Meanwhile, Delhi appears like a city with its intestines hanging out. To add to it, we have no programme of participation, content with the reputation of being rude citizens. What one misses is the absence of an imagination, a sense of the civics of the sport, and national pride. Why does sports management remain the seedy monopoly of seedier bureaucrats and politicians? One misses the effervescence, the sense of sport about the Games. Can state and civil society combine to redeem the spirit of the Games? Or do we as a society play spoil sport to a great possibility, content to say “I told you so”.
One childishly wishes for the little miracle that redeems the current idiocy, the blame game which is the only sport Indians play well.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist