Devangshu Datta: The torch of courage

Carrying a torch for somebody is a personal matter. But Carrying the Torch for the Olympics is something even world-famous athletes dream of doing. Like everything Olympic, CTT is an overtly political act. The Olympics was conceived as an entirely political event.

Read the original rationale set down by Baron Coubertin. He wanted the Olympics to be "a religion, to adhere to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection"; "to represent an elite, whose origins are completely egalitarian and yet imbued with chivalry"; to create "a four-yearly festival of the springtime of mankind"; and "to glorify beauty by the involvement of the philosophic arts".

Not much there about Citius, Altius, Fortius. A backdrop of people straining sinews to jump, run, and swim just creates an ideal ambience to showcase high-falutin' sentiments. Indeed, any political sentiment at all that can be tagged along with the Olympics is guaranteed high-recall.

It is always treated like a soap-box by every politician aspiring to be called a "statesman", which can be broadly defined as a pan-national politician. While being globally popular, it's also not so intrinsically popular as to be beyond interference. A politician can threaten to boycott or disrupt Olympics without facing a big backlash. Anybody threatening to boycott or disrupt the football World Cup would risk lynching by his own bodyguards.

One assumes the Chinese government catered for some protests by Tibetan Nationalists. They may have underestimated the levels of resentment and they certainly underestimated the sympathy that the Tibetan cause generates.

But they cannot have assumed a zero-protest Olympics. After all, the PRC bid for the Olympics to showcase the success of its own political ideology and policies. It would be naïve to have thought that dissenters would not piggyback to present another (rather different) viewpoint about the gloriously successful PRC.

Speaking personally, I disapprove of both the political systems locked in showdown. When it comes to communism, we've been there, done that and most of us know the T-shirt really isn't worth buying. The downsides of Godless totalitarian regimes scarcely need further elucidation.

But theocracies are rarely any better in practice. God-plus totalitarian regimes "" run by people who believe in their divine mandate "" are usually as politically repressive as the Godless ones. They interfere even more with personal freedoms.

Tibet was a theocracy and the government-in-exile remains one. The redeeming feature is that the divine ruler, from whom the power flows down, is an extraordinarily good, wise and prescient man. He is perhaps capable of managing evolution to a democratic and secular political system. The sad thing is that, it's unlikely that he's ever going to end up back in the Potala, giving the orders.

India has reacted with terror at the thought of incurring the wrath of the Chinese and hence, tried its inept best to muzzle the Tibetans. There are too many Indian business interests involved; the Chinese are richer; they have a bigger military machine; they could do what they did in 1962; they could punish us economically.

However, if push came to shove, the Chinese would probably not get involved in major punitive actions. It has more important items on the agenda. Getting into a major military scrap is something the PRC has also been wary about ever since the Vietnamese went eyeball to eyeball with them. Economic action would hurt them as much or more

Of course, one can never be sure in a game-theoretic situation like this and the costs of backing Tibetan nationalism could be high. One understands why Indian corporate associations have maintained studious silence and even why some corporates are alleged to have privately lobbied the government to cool off noises emanating from Dharamsala.

Nevertheless, kudos to Baichung Bhutia and Kiran Bedi for refusing to CTT. It's an act with overt political overtones and they're both sacrificing the dreams of a lifetime in refusing the honour. If only the Indian government displayed the same courage.