Saina, Sania, Preeja, Ashwini, Kavita, Humpy, Mandeep, Jwala…the list of sportswomen who have won medals and honours for India can go on and on. Kalmadi, Modi, Malhotra, Darbari…and the list of men who run sports organisations and associations and have earned disrepute for India can go on too. Women win honours, men win the dishonours! Nothing captured this ignominious gender imbalance in sport better than a visual last week of the president of the Indian Olympic Association, Suresh Kalmadi, patting a medal winning sportswoman on her cheek at the Asian Games in China. Ugh, she must have felt. I do the nation proud, and he has to compliment me!
True, this is a very simplistic and one-sided way of looking at the issue. There are many sportsmen who have earned great honours and done the nation proud. However, there are few women, with the exception of a Sunanda Pushkar, who get involved in the murky world of the business of sport. So the gender divide looks particularly galling when you watch rows of medal winning women having to give polite smiles to the rogue’s gallery of men who run the organisations and associations that enable them to compete. Perhaps a good way of altering this imbalance is to get a woman minister for sports. Why have a perennial spoilsport like Mani Shankar Aiyar or a self-important and bossy M S Gill running the ministry of sport? If a smart woman IAS officer like Sindhushree Khullar could be Union sports secretary, the time has perhaps come to get a woman sports minister. Someone like Kumari Selja, and she is from Haryana too — the land of all the sporting heroes and heroines of the Commonwealth Games 2010!
The impressive performance of Indian women in sports has the potential of altering the gender balance in favour of women in some of India’s more backward regions. If the new icons of Haryana are not just wrestlers and shooters but women who can run and throw a discus, it would help millions of young girls stand up and take pride in their individual ability. It is equally important that women are seen running the cumbersome organisation of sport. Of course, having women run these organisations is no guarantee against corruption, but it would certainly contribute to injecting greater self-confidence among young women. The idea that girls play, but men manage, can easily be erased if more women begin to manage as well.
The rise of women in a wide range of high-profile professions has greatly contributed to increased self-confidence among young women and girls. Women icons cutting across professions play a special social role in empowering their gender and restoring greater balance to gender relations both at the societal and family level. But there is a difference between women who excel in fields that are seen as a woman’s field of activity and women excelling in fields seen as male domains. Thus, it is one thing for India to be producing a lot of Sanias and Sainas, but quite another for it to produce Seljas and Sindhushrees! How much more proud India’s sportswomen would have felt at the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games if the medals on their shoulders were not placed there by the likes of a Suresh Kalmadi or a Vijay Kumar Malhotra but more by the likes of a Sheila Dikshit, a Kumari Selja or a Sindhushree Khullar!