In an inspiring week in Indian Olympics history, when the country won its first track-and-field gold, when both our hockey teams uplifted our hearts, and when we got medals in hockey, weightlifting, boxing, wrestling and badminton, life went on in the country as if we were in the dark ages. During moments that did India proud, especially given how poor we have been in Olympics, many of our lingering carceral mentalities resurfaced as if they were on tap: one dialled X toll-free number and got back to Muslim-baiting; one pressed Y button and casteism got home-delivered.
Two men allegedly mocked at and created strife outside the hockey striker Vandana Katariya’s home in Dehradun, claiming that India had lost because the team had “too many Dalit players”. Locals listed experiences in the media proving well-entrenched caste bias in the area. It took a now-famous hockey team and player like Vandana to deliver a home-truth on the region she comes from. Is this the reward for playing for India? Can one even imagine what a younger Vandana must have gone through in her journey into the national team?
Through the Olympics fortnight, one sensed pockets of people who have clearly not been made to feel at home in India call out mainland India’s hypocrisies through skits and videos on social media. Indians toasted to Mirabai Chanu’s weightlifting silver. She was hailed as “India’s proud daughter”. There was at least one well-circulated video poking fun at Indian attitudes towards north-easterners, contrasting the appropriation of sports notables from the region while mainland India mocked their facial features or reserved racist jibes for them. It’s common in many parts of India, where people from the north-east live and work. What do they make of this pattern of sudden, sporadic love, when one of their community members brings India laurels?
Surely, this isn’t an Indian thing. Another old interview that recirculated was of Muhammad Ali recalling how a restaurant in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, refused to serve him for being black. Ali was 18 and had just returned with a gold medal from the Rome Olympics of 1960. Despite bringing such glory, elementary local truths didn’t seem to change.
Such experiences damage the individual’s relationship with their country and burn into them a sense of hollowness of their society and of the phoniness of nationalism. You give so much, you struggle so much, for the sport and country and yet it makes you never forget where you belong in its social hierarchy. It takes exceptional social blindness to not see this.
Even our brightest moments in the Olympics did not move us away from our realities. If anything, it animated and sharpened them more. Things latent in our society burst forth again, given there was so much occasion to surpass it. Rani Rampal, the hockey women’s captain, minced no words in condemning what happened outside Vandana’s home. But how can we evade the larger, widespread truth the incident signified?
Earlier this week, India’s most discredited police force in arguably India’s worst metropolis, watched on as a gathering spewed hatred and called for violence against Muslims. I thought of two fine fast bowlers now playing in the men’s team in England and thought of their ordinary backgrounds and the sweat and effort and talent and luck through which they fought their way into the Indian team, grabbed so many tiny chances to stay there, and how, of late, over the last many months, they have performed so wonderfully in cricket’s toughest format. I wish news of Jantar Mantar did not get to them. They are a small sample of the contribution of the people who profess their faith in Indian sport.
Babasaheb Ambedkar once wrote, “We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the basis of it, social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life”. Our politics in some form may appear democratic, but our society unambiguously isn’t. In Japan and England, we saw India ascend; in Dehradun and Delhi, its immediate descent.