The move to limit the tenure of sports body chiefs has been praised, but some suggest Gill may have played the ball a little early.
A senior cabinet minister asked this question as she watched chiefs of various sporting bodies addressing the TV cameras, looking shaken and mutinous. They had just heard Gill say most of them had months left to retire from their decades-long sinecures.
Her cynical comment was: “Wait for them to rake it in now: they know they have no more time.”
The implication that sports bodies were money-making conduits for those who headed them is not new; the fact that the sports ministry’s widely-praised diktat will intensify the time-frame in which to do this was certainly novel.
Actually, all Gill’s ministry did was to restore a 1975 rule that specified a fixed tenure for sports bosses. That rule had been put aside by Uma Bharti in 2001 when she was sports minister.
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It took the sports ministry more than nine years, a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) and a Delhi High Court order to put a cap on the tenure of sports bosses such as Suresh Kalmadi, who has headed the Indian Olympic Association as president for 14 years and Vijay Kumar Malhotra of the archery federation (about three decades). In all, there are eight of them, and all of them are charged with “overstaying”.
Kalmadi, Malhotra and many other sports bosses — of the National Sports Federation (NSF) — will now complete the remainder of their terms and retire, according to a notification issued by the Union sports ministry earlier this week. Why didn’t Gill wait till after the Commonwealth Games to notify a rule that has had a nine-year hiatus? The minister said his actions weren’t dictated by a vendetta against anyone but by the interests of democracy and propriety.
Not that Gill has been known to be a stickler for propriety. After all, his Rajya Sabha nomination from the Congress party in 2004 does raise questions about the impartiality of his role as Election Commissioner (CEC) (1993 to 1996) and Chief Election Commissioner from 1996 to 2001. He recently won a second term in the upper House riding on the Commonwealth Games that he is tasked with organising.
His colleagues say — less than charitably — that there is little else to commend him to the ministership. His efforts to clean up hockey met with no success. It was the IOA that dethroned K P S Gill (no relation) from the Indian Hockey Federation and replaced the management of hockey with an organisation called Hockey India.
In court, the sports ministry said it would recognise Hockey India provided it held elections and implemented other procedural correctives. Hockey India did nothing of the kind and the sport ministry took no corrective action. Indeed, the Hockey World Cup that India hosted earlier this year caused former captain Pargat Singh to fear for the Commonwealth Games, so shoddy was the organisation of the event.
Having been awarded a Padma Vibhushan, Gill capped an IAS career (he has been secretary of agriculture, petrochemicals and chemicals, and pharmaceuticals at the Centre) with a tenure in the Election Commission with a decidedly grumpy T N Seshan as chief. That was in 1993, when the government decided to make EC a three-member body. He tried to bring some balance in the fraught atmosphere of Nirvachan Sadan though Seshan viewed him with deep suspicion.
There is no doubt that he has a deep love for sport. He has been involved with the Indian Mountaineering Federation for several decades, having been president of the organisation for at least one term. He was the first IAS officer to be trained in mountaineering, coached by Tenzing Norgay who conquered Everest along with new Zealander Edmund Hillary in 1953. So, he knows the rules.
But Gill is also adept at the rules of the political game. Among the Sikh community, it is well known that when a proposal was made to put up a statue of Bhagat Singh in Parliament, the initial proposal was to depict the freedom fighter in his trademark hat rather than the traditional Sikh turban. It was Gill who strongly advocated a turbaned statue and his suggestion was accepted. This may appear a trivial issue, but it is loaded with political meaning. Gill has also quietly lobbied to improve facilities in the Amritsar international airport and is on record as urging the government of Punjab to make the Nankana Sahib pilgrimage free for poorer Sikhs. This was pure, unadulterated Sikh politics.
Gill has, however, won praise from certain quarters for his forthrightness. Before the Beijing Olympics, for instance, sportsmen praised him for saying only sportspeople should be invited to carry the Olympic torch, not politicians and movie stars. This, though, attracted a scathing comment from Amitabh Bachchan who said: “He (Gill) is the sports minister. Who will dare to argue with him? They are the government.”
But he’s a great one for laments. In Kolkata to felicitate the 1956 Olympic football team, he deplored India’s low ranking in world football: “Sometimes the team is ranked 140… sometimes 120. I don’t know what has happened to Indian football. Now, it may even get beaten by the Australian school team.”
Yes, but whose fault is that?