As light shines on hockey, and...

IN 2021, before Tokyo happened, we’d stopped dreaming of a return to hockey glory. We’re a young country — the median age is a little over 28 years. The last Olympics medal India had won in hockey was the gold in 1980, 41 years previously. In 2021, most of the young India had no recollection of that gold. The kids of the 1980s and thereafter have memories of only the ritual of hope and humiliation they went through, along with the Indian team, watching hockey at the Olympics. Personally, the most terrible memories of hockey in that time include India finishing 12th among 12 teams at the 1986 World Cup, the hope and heartbreak given by the Balkishan Singh-coached team at the 1992 Olympics, the late goal by Poland that knocked India out of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, when the team was merely 100 seconds away from the semifinals…

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By 2021, we’d forgotten that we were once proud of hockey. When India won bronze in Tokyo, some people wondered: “What’s the big deal? Didn’t we win much bigger medals in athletics (gold by Neeraj Chopra) or weightlifting (silver by Mirabai Chanu)?”

Such was the collective amnesia regarding India’s past in hockey.

Every country, every people must have something to be proud of. For people of the developing world, sport is often the only source of pride. That was true for India, too, right after Independence. Hockey brought Independent India pride in 1948, with gold at the London Olympics… Something to brag about for a new country that was devastated by, in the long term, colonialism and uninterrupted loot, and famine, war effort (on behalf of the British!) and Partition violence in the short term. Sport, though of little practical help in rehabilitating truamatised and displaced people, did help — it is a strong anti-depressant, for both the spectator and the player.

Through indoctrination, and genetics, we’re attuned to harmony in groups, and it finds its most joyous expression through sport, and even more through triumph in sport. Hockey gave great joy to newly-independent India. Most of the joys that hockey brought India are now forgotten. How can there exist public consciousness of a victorious hockey team of the 1960s or 1970s if over half the population is less than 30 years old? It was 48 years ago that the Indian team became the world champions in hockey, eight years before the cricket team did, after all. But bronze in the Tokyo Olympics has reignited hope.

Second time lucky?

India is now hosting a second consecutive World Cup, and the third since 2010, after hosting just one in nearly four decades from the inaugural one in 1971. In the last few years, with European economies going through difficult times, sponsorship and financing for hockey dried up, but India remains a plentiful supplier of cash. As the International Hockey Federation (FIH) CEO, Thierry Weil, explained in 2019, India’s financial input was a factor behind the decision to award a second consecutive World Cup to the country. “Actually it was decided taking into factor India’s commercial relevance and high financial contribution. FIH needs financial revenues. India did an extremely good job of putting everything on table,” Weil said.

This raises the question: should national pride — and building up soft power through the use of sport — be given higher priority than the needs of an impoverished people? The Odisha government had estimated the bill for the 20-day tournament to be Rs 1,098 crore. This is a staggering 16 times the cost of organising the last World Cup, also held in Odisha, in 2018. The outlay for the construction of the Birsa Munda Stadium in Rourkela and renovation of Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar was Rs 875.78 crore. Of the total funding, Rs 136.82 crore comes from the District Mineral Foundations (DMF), and activists are upset about this. The DMFs, set up in 2015, raise funds from mining lease-holders and are supposed to use them for development, to improve the lives of people in regions impacted by the mining industry. NGOs looking at the spending patterns allege that, contrary to the DMF rules, local communities are not being involved in decision-making on spending; they also allege — surprise, surprise! — corruption and lack of auditing.

Should such massive, and possibly dubious, spending on sport be made in a state that’s not even in the top-30 among India’s states and UTs in the Human Development Index ranking (2019)?

That’s a difficult one — national and state pride vs cost. It’s an old question, and most governments across the world have figured out that spending money on hosting big sports events — a declaration of ‘arrival’ — makes financial and political sense. When India won bronze at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Odisha’s contribution was hailed, for the state had been sponsoring the national team since 2018. Soon after the Tokyo bronze, Odisha decided to extend the sponsorship until 2031. A World Cup medal in this period, or perhaps another Olympics medal, will convince at least the fans that spending huge sums of public money on hockey was justified. But also, it would not be imprudent and incorrect to ask: “Pride at what cost?”