With 100 days to go for the Asian Games, it is pertinent to look back at how the competition started 72 years earlier in India in 1951. From the very inception of the idea in 1947-48, Nehru was supportive of it. However, it was one thing for Nehru and the Congress to support the Asian Games, quite another to pay for it. India had just gone through the largest and bloodiest forced migration in history. Partition had created an estimated 20 million refugees—about a million came to Delhi alone—and crores were being spent on their rehabilitation all over north India. While Nehru had supported the Asiad but as he strove to enforce control in what was already a poor country, now facing a mass refugee problem, there was little left over for the Asian Games. The government, in fact, gave no aid at all. The Asian Games was to be India’s showcase for the world, but unlike the second Asiad of 1982, the first one was mounted purely through non-governmental money.
The Asiad did have the full patronage of the establishment, prime minister downwards, but that did not mean money. As the organizers scrambled to arrange the funding, the Games were first postponed from February 1950, the originally planned date, to November 1950; and then finally to March 1951. Later chroniclers would wax eloquent about how it was until then the ‘greatest carnival of international sport ever held in India’ but few knew how close it came to being abandoned altogether. Invitations had already been sent out in 1949 but Delhi just wasn’t equipped. ‘There was no stadium in Delhi, no cinder track, no equipment, no funds…’, it was argued. So bad was the situation that the gallant GD Sondhi who had taken the idea forward purely by his own initiative, now decided to quit in helplessness. Sondhi resigned from the directorship of the First Asiad on 13 April 1950 and it seemed at the time that his decision also signified the end of the dream.
What happened next comes from the memoirs of the man who stepped into the breach: Anthony de Mello, a founder member and then president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. De Mello faced a gargantuan task. As he recounted nine years later, ‘It was unprecedented in Olympic and Asiad history that a major sports meet would be staged without Government aid of any sort.’ As a comparative yardstick, the Philippines government spent £1,00,000 on the second Asiad in 1954 at Manila; the Japanese government built a new stadium in Tokyo for the third Asiad in 1956 and gave a grant-in-aid of £3,00,000; and the British built a new swimming pool along with a government grant of £6,00,000 for the British empire and Commonwealth Games at Cardiff in 1958. The Delhi organizers had no such help.
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What de Mello had, though, was influence; his own and that of the establishment. An Anglo-Indian born in Karachi, he had been educated at Cambridge and from the 1920s onwards had become one of the big movers and shakers of Indian sport. In the late 1920s, he was central to the formation of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, becoming its founding secretary. He also founded Bombay’s now iconic Cricket Club of India (CCI) in 1933 and just before taking over the Asiad job he had set up the National Sports Club of India (NSCI) in the same city. If anyone in India could organize an event from scratch, it was Anthony de Mello.
De Mello did two things as soon as he took charge. To solve the money crunch, he got his own NSCI to provide a loan of Rs 1 lakh for the Asiad. This was in addition to the funds he arranged from the CCI. This served as the seed money for the Games. Such are the ironies of history that the first Asiad was largely financed by money from two Bombay clubs: one focused only on cricket, which will feature for the first time in the Games in Hangzhou. De Mello’s second and more interesting move was to form an organizing committee consisting of some of India’s most influential personalities. The government may not have had the funds to spend on sport, but many in it believed in the Asiad. A way would be found. This is partly why De Mello took up the job in the first place. As he put it, ‘“influence”—if you like to call it that—brought us the Asiad village for the 1,000 athletes, managers and officials’. The only other direct governmental support, besides intellectual patronage, came in the form of exemption of duties on the sports goods of contestants, ‘half price’ railway tickets for their travel and cars for transportation.
Nehru’s government may not have had the money but many of its top officials and local notables shared a common vision. In the massive IOA documentation of the first Asiad, nowhere did we come across any note of bitterness about the lack of governmental funding. In fact, the overarching sense in the records is one of excitement, of the anticipation of what the Asiad would do for India’s standing and a general consensus that it had widespread support from all sections in India. Even Sondhi, who quit the Asiad Organizing Committee because of the huge odds, wrote sympathetically later about how Asia was ‘by and large…a poor continent’ and how it was understandable that it did not have the resources to spend on sport. Sondhi was clear that the Asian Games should not go ‘beyond our means and objectives’, and deprive ‘thousands, if not millions’ in the quest for nationalistic glory. Speaking at a seminar in the Philippines in 1961, the man who more than anyone else created the concept of the Asian Games, cautioned against incurring ‘heavy financial burdens’ in the search for prestige at the Asian Games. This was in some ways the true measure of Nehruvian India.
The Asian Games, so crucial to Indian aspirations and so tied into the Nehruvian vision, were not put together by Nehru’s government. They were created by a loose coalition of sports administrators, elites and government officials—all contributing what they could—in the service of a common ideal.