On top of black money, price rise and FDI in inflation, the government will now have another headache: whether or not to participate in the 2012 London Olympics. For India, the uneasy part about the sports extravaganza this time is that it is being sponsored by Dow Chemicals, the company that bought out Union Carbide in Bhopal where an industrial disaster in 1984 killed 15,000 people.
Come December 5, and the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) will vote whether to attend the Games or boycott them.
Interestingly, it isn’t the ruling Congress that is dilly-dallying. There is a division within the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party on the matter.
Two days ago, party leader and Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan opposed India’s participation in the Games. Addressing the assembly, which is holding the winter session, he said Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide had left in the state capital a legacy that the people of whole country could never be allowed to forget.
Chouhan’s party colleague Anil Dave, a Rajya Sabha MP from the state, has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, seeking a boycott of the Olympics.
Insiders, though, say they had written “twice or thrice” to Indian Olympic Association’s working president V K Malhotra (also from the BJP), asking him to take a stand and boycott the games. He has yet to respond, they add. Malhotra was not available for comment.
The ministry of youth affairs and Sports is cautious. Sources say they have a limited view on the matter. It is “improper” to mix politics and commerce with sport, an official says, adding that his ministry will be guided by the ministry of external affairs on this matter.
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In London, organisers are waiting to awaiting keenly to take note of IOA’s decision. British newspapers quote Tessa Jowell, the shadow Olympics minister who sits on the London 2012 board, as saying that the decision of the Indian Olympic Association to vote on whether to boycott the Games over links with Dow Chemical will be a “a very significant step”.
Athletes have also given a petition to the government seeking a boycott of the Olympics. The Supreme Court is hearing a case on how to enhance a settlement for the victims of the Bhopal disaster. While it does that, participating in the Games that have been sponsored by Dow Chemicals is shocking for many, even though as it looks today, the company is nothing like what it was 27 years ago.
Sebastian Coe, who heads the Olympics Organising Committee, concedes that the Bhopal disaster was a “terrible tragedy”, but says Dow Chemicals has “little to do” with it.
Dow were not the owners, the operators or involved in the management of that plant at the time of either the disaster or the settlement in 1989 that has been upheld twice by the Indian Supreme Court, he notes. “There are issues around this issue, but I am satisfied they are not issues that directly involve Dow,” Coe has told British newspapers.
Dow Chemicals has entered into a £7m sponsorship deal for the stadium wrap -- the fabric that wraps the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. The UK’s Jowell will be in Delhi next week and has sought meetings with the IOA and sports minister Ajay Maken.