Every major global sporting event provokes a flurry of introspection about India's dismal sporting ability despite its population of 1.2 billion. Through several iterations, the received wisdom is that, excluding cricket with its colonial legacy, India is not a sporting nation: our people are unfit, our diet is all wrong and we lack mental strength.
It is odd, however, that commentators fail to see the link with an intrinsic socio-economic weakness in India: lack of access to opportunity for the bulk of its population. If anything, our poor performance on the global playing fields is a reflection of the deep inequalities that afflict India.
As in education and health, access to sporting facilities (and opportunities) in India is open to a minuscule proportion of Indians - the rich and the middle class. They get to play golf, tennis and football in expensive schools and clubs with their exclusionary rules. Schools for the poor never offer these facilities.
Most play these games purely as a leisure activity. With riches in information technology, investment banking, doctoring or lawyering beckoning, few consider sports as a career option, especially when it is likely to end at about age 36. Those who have been successful in the global arena, like Abhinav Bindra, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi or Vishwanathan Anand, come from relatively well-off families that can afford to bankroll their sons' ambitions or institutions (like the Army or the Railways) that are inclined to do so.
In general, countries do not draw their sportspeople from these ranks. The dominance of world sport by the United States, Australia and Europe with their small and shrinking populations is but one reflection of their relative equality of opportunity.
Globally, sports has traditionally been the poor, urban man's vehicle for upward mobility and identity. Football, for example, is an acknowledged poor man's game in its twin meccas of Europe and South America, its ranks drawn from the working classes.
There is logic to this. In spite of a generally unhealthy diet, these young men are superbly fit as a result of the hard physical labour they expend in mines, shipyards, factories and construction sites. Often living in the equivalent of chawls, football helps them work off their angst, as the biographies of scores of stars from Pele to Zidane can confirm. In their book Soccernomics Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski provocatively suggest that the English team suffers a lack of quality because the nation is becoming richer, so the ranks of the working class are thinning. This could well explain Brazil's decline, too.
The opportunity to practise and hone skills lies in the parks, the commons and the open lots. For the ones who show potential, there's the promised land of the top leagues with its fabulous wealth-creating opportunities. But access to public playgrounds and playing facilities has been the critical first step on which the private football industry evolved a century and a half ago. Relatively recent institutions like football academies, which subsidise promising youngsters through school, evolved from this unique public-private partnership.
The preponderance of African-Americans in American sports is another example. The traditional racist view is that African-Americans somehow have sporting talent in their blood. It is nothing of the sort. Like their counterparts in European football, they, and poor Caucasians and Hispanics, generally do the kind of heavy lifting on which societies are built, acquiring the stamina and muscle mass that top sports demands. Sports was a viable career only because conventional white-collar careers were closed to them at one time, just as few European investment banks, corporations or law firms are likely to hire African immigrants to fill their executive ranks even today. As importantly, they get to practise - the basis of sporting success - in courts, batting cages and urban spaces that are open to the public.
In India you only have to look around you in any city to see that we do not lack a growing cohort of strong, fit, young men with potential. They can be found in factories, on construction sites, mending roads, transporting heavy household goods on carts, plying cycle rickshaws (imagine the strength of hand-pulled-rickshaw men, surviving on a diet of salt and sattu, who now operate only in parts Kolkata!). Given the right diet and training, who knows how many hidden world champions we have lurking among our urban poor.
But their access to sports is all but zero - with common lands being gobbled up by upscale urban apartments and the absurd Sunday "Raahgiris" reserved for the residents of said apartments. Forget about developing a professional sporting industry, the critical first step of equal access to opportunity is missing. In fact, in creating English Premier League-like structures in a range of sports, we're going about it the wrong way.
Perhaps there is hope. The Bharatiya Janata Party's manifesto had this to say on the matter: "Sports have [sic] a direct relation to fitness, good health and productivity. India has not fared well in sports, and needs to invest for promotion of sports in an organized manner." The starting point would be creating playing facilities that are open to everyone. Only Britain ever won anything on the playing fields of Eton.
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