by MITU SENGUPTA
This has been a turbulent week in India. On August 5th, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India released its final report on the 2010 Commonwealth Games, placing it before the parliament.
No one expected good news. The games, which were held in Delhi last October, have been under a cloud of corruption and mismanagement since last summer, when it was feared that preparations for the event would not be completed on time. The head of the organizing committee, Suresh Kalmadi, is already in jail on charges of racketeering (Kalmadi has claimed he is suffering from memory loss).
But the bad news is worse than that of Kalmadi’s impending dementia. The CAG’s 744-page report suggests that nothing short of daylight robbery has occurred. Slamming the organizing committee for being “deeply flawed, riddled with favouritism and bias,” it unleashes a torrent of ugly details.
The games cost a staggering $4.1 billion instead of the $270 million initially estimated. The revenue that was supposed to pay for the event amounted to a measly $38 million.
Extravagant contracts — from toilets and shuttlecocks to broadcasting rights and the Games Village — were awarded on the basis of a single bid.
The cost of ‘beautifying’ some of the poshest areas of New Delhi was $22.5 million (imported luminaries were used to improve street lighting rather than the cheaper domestic variety, adding $7.7 million to the bill).
The delays in construction that kept the country on tenterhooks until the very last moment were most likely deliberate: according to Rekha Gupta, the Deputy Auditor General, “the argument of urgency was used to obviate the regular process of tendering for award of contracts.”
The ghastly list rattles on, implicating the Prime Minister’s Office and the Delhi state government’s Chief Minister in the process. Resignations and criminal prosecutions are anticipated (the Prime Minister and Chief Minister are trying to absolve themselves with the argument that they cannot be expected to “micromanage” decisions).
Red Flags, Trumped by National Flag
The CAG has given Indians good reason to be angry — and judging by the news coverage over the weekend, there’s plenty of moral outrage to go around.
Yet no one should be shocked by India’s big heist. Given the opaque decision-making and suppression of voice that marked the foundational fabric of the Commonwealth Games, massive corruption was all but an expected outcome.
In May 2010, a seminal study by a Delhi-based NGO, the Human Rights Law Network, revealed that India’s bid for the event was never discussed in Parliament. Nor was there any public debate or opinion poll among Delhi’s residents as to whether the event should be held in their city (even so, the bid document claimed that “the entire nation supports the cause of the Games”). In fact, the government’s decision to bid for the Games was approved by the cabinet only in September 2003 — barely two months prior to the official announcement that Delhi had been chosen as the host city for 2010.
The Commonwealth Games were meant to affirm India’s ‘world class’ status and seal its reputation as a rising superpower (the bid document is littered with references to such goals, as were the lavish opening and closing ceremonies for the event). The executive’s unilateral decision to host the games was so easily accepted because it played to the hubris of India’s newly rich. It spoke to the ambitions of a relatively narrow segment of the population that has prospered disproportionately under India’s regime of neoliberal policy reforms, initiated twenty years ago. This ‘rising middle class’ — estimates of its size range from 50 to 300 million people — is the force behind India’s towering skyscrapers, luxury shopping malls and pristine gated communities. It is also a major political force.
The political party on whose watch the bid was made — the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — is widely seen as representing the interests and collective aspirations of this class (one may recall its campaign jingle, ‘India Is Shining!’). In 2003, the Commonwealth Games bid committee was reportedly awarded a ‘blank cheque’ by BJP Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was eager to secure the games in the run-up to the 2004 national election. But the bid was also supported by the Congress party, which led the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition to victory in 2004 on the claim that it (unlike the BJP) represented the concerns of the poor and marginalized. Glowing letters of endorsement were provided by two Congress stalwarts, the Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit, and the leader of the opposition, Sonia Gandhi.
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