Chinese, Indian style

Today, this column appears in one more city — our sister newspaper Deccan Chronicle makes its first appearance in Kochi. Inspired by the city’s famous Chinese fishing nets and Kerala’s renowned prowess in athletics, I thought this might be the occasion for looking anew at India’s ties with China — not through the prism of diplomacy or trade this time, but with an eye to our sporting differences, and what they reveal about our two countries.

It has become rather fashionable these days to speak of India and China in the same breath. These are the two big countries said to be taking over the world, the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western domination, the Oriental answer to generations of Occidental economic success. Several recent books explicitly twin the two countries. Some even speak of “Chindia”, as if the two are joined at the hip in the international imagination.
Personally, count me amongst the sceptics. It’s not just that, aside from the fact that both countries occupy a rather vast landmass called “Asia”, they have very little in common. It’s also that the two countries are already at very different stages of development — China started its liberalisation in 1978, a good decade-and-a-half before India, shot up faster, hit double-digit growth when India was still hovering around five per cent, and with compound growth, has put itself in a totally different league from India, continuing to grow faster from a larger base. And it’s also that the two countries’ systems are totally dissimilar. If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, especially in Kerala, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements, even assuming that agitations, political demonstrations and passionate landowners agree to let you acquire the land needed for the widening in the first place.
In fact, in case anyone wanted confirmation that twinning India with China is, to put it mildly, premature, one has only to look at the medals tally at the Beijing Olympics. China proudly ranked first, with 51 gold medals and a total of 100. You have to strain your eyes past such step-children of the global family as Jamaica, Belarus, war-torn Georgia, collapsing Zimbabwe and even what used to be called Outer Mongolia before stumbling across India in 50th place, with precisely three medals, one gold and two bronze.
This is not, in fact, a surprise. Whereas China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess. Where China lobbied for and won the right to host the Olympics within two decades of its return to the games, India rested on its laurels after hosting the Asian Games in Delhi in 1982, so that it is now considered further behind in the competition for Olympic host-hood than it was two decades ago. Where China embarked on “Project 119”, a programme devised specifically to boost the country’s Olympic medal standings (the number 119 refers to the golds awarded at the Sydney Games of 2000 in such medal-laden sports as track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing and canoeing), Indians wondered if they would be able to crack the magic ceiling of two, the highest number of medals the country had ever won at this quadrennial exercise in international sporting machismo. Where China, seeing the number of medals awarded in kayaking, decided to create a team to master a sport hitherto unknown in the Middle Kingdom, India has not even lobbied successfully for the inclusion in the Games of the few sports it does play well (kabbadi, for instance, polo, or cricket, which was played in the Olympics of 1900 and has been omitted since). Where China has maintained its dominance in table tennis and badminton, and developed new strengths in non-traditional sports like rowing and shooting, India has seen its once-legendary invincibility in hockey fade with the introduction of Astroturf, to the point where its team even failed to qualify for Beijing.
Forget “Chindia” — the two countries barely belong in the same sporting sentence.
What happened at the Olympics speaks to a basic difference in the two countries’ systems. It’s the creative chaos of all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood versus the perfectly-choreographed precision of the Beijing opening ceremony. The Chinese, as befits a Communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline. The objective was determined, a programme (“Project 119”) drawn up, the considerable resources of the state attached to it, state-of-the-art technology acquired and world-class foreign coaches imported. India, by contrast, approached these Olympics as it had every other, with its usual combination of amiable amateurism, bureaucratic ineptitude, half-hearted experiment and shambolic organisation.
In China, national priorities are established by the government and then funded by the state; in India, priorities emerge from seemingly endless discussions and arguments amongst myriad interests, and funds have to be found where they might. China’s budget for preparing its sportspersons probably exceeded India’s expenditure on all Olympic training in the last 60 years.
But where China’s state-owned enterprises remain the most powerful motors of the country’s development, India’s private sector, ducking around governmental obstacles and bypassing the stifling patronage of the state, has transformed the fortunes of the Indian people. So it proved again in the Olympics: the wrestlers, boxers, runners, tennis players and weightlifters who made up the bulk of the Indian contingent, accompanied by the inevitable retinue of officials, returned with just two bronzes amongst them, while India’s only gold — in shooting — was won by a young entrepreneur with a rifle range in his own backyard and no help from the state whatsoever. Young Abhinav Bindra was, at 25, the CEO of a high-tech firm, a self-motivated sharpshooter who financed his own equipment and training, and an avid blogger. He is, in short, a 21st century Indian. At one level, it is not surprising that he should have won India’s first individual gold in any Olympics since a transplanted Englishman competed in Indian colours in the 1900 Games. India is the land of individual excellence despite the limitations of the system; in China, individual success is the product of the system.
So “Chindia” is a myth. But the Commonwealth Games demonstrated that the Indian way can produce results as well. Not as single-mindedly or overwhelmingly as the Chinese, but impressively nonetheless. Those fishing nets dipping into Kerala’s waters prove that we in India can still adapt Chinese ways to an Indian style.

Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency