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Two Countries, Different Aims

By Shashi TharoorSunday, August 24, 2008; B02

It has become rather fashionable these days to speak of India and China in the same breath. These are the two big countries said to be taking over the world, the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western domination, the Oriental answer to generations of Occidental economic success. Some even speak of "Chindia," as if the two nations were joined at the hip in the international imagination.

But if anyone wanted confirmation that such twinning is preposterous, all they'd have to do is look at the medals tally at the Beijing Olympics. China ranks first, with a glittering stash of 47 gold medals. You have to strain your eyes past such stepchildren of the global family as Jamaica, Belarus, war-torn Georgia, collapsing Zimbabwe and even what used to be called Outer Mongolia before you stumble across my native India, in 50th place as of this writing with precisely three medals, one gold and two bronze.

This is no surprise. China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, but India has remained mostly complacent about its lack of sporting prowess. Where China lobbied hard for the right to host the Olympics within two decades of its return to the Games, India has rested on its laurels after hosting the Asian Games in New Delhi in 1982. This is widely believed to leave it even farther behind in the competition for Olympic host-hood than it was two decades ago.

Where China embarked on what its sports leaders call "Project 119," a program devised specifically to boost the country's Olympic medal standings (the number 119 refers to the number of golds awarded at the 2000 Sydney Games in what Sports Illustrated calls "the medal-rich sports of track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing and canoe/kayak"), Indians wondered whether they'd be able to crack the magic ceiling of two, the highest number of medals their giant country has ever won. Where China, eyeing the number of medals awarded in kayaking, decided to create a team to master a sport hitherto unknown to the Middle Kingdom, India didn't even petition successfully to have the Games include the few sports it does play well, such as polo, kabbadi (a form of tag-team wrestling) or cricket, which was played in the Olympics of 1900 and has been omitted ever since. Where China has maintained its dominance in table tennis and badminton and developed new strengths in non-traditional sports such as rowing and shooting, India has seen its once-legendary invincibility in field hockey fade with the introduction of AstroTurf, to the point that India's team failed to even qualify for Beijing.
Forget "Chindia" -- the two countries barely belong in the same sporting sentence.

What has happened at the Olympics speaks to a basic difference in the two countries' systems. China, as befits a communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline. It determined its objective, drew up a program, brought considerable state resources to bear, acquired state-of-the-art technology and imported world-class foreign coaches. India, by contrast, approached these Olympics as it had every other, with its usual combination of amiable amateurism, bureaucratic ineptitude, half-hearted experimentation and shambolic organization.

That's simply the way we are. It's the creative chaos of an all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood musical vs. the perfectly choreographed precision of the Beijing Games' opening ceremonies. If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in the thing's path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation payments. In China, the government establishes national priorities, then funds them; in India, priorities emerge from seemingly endless discussions and arguments among myriad interests, and funds have to be scrounged where they might. China's budget for preparing its athletes for these Games alone probably exceeded India's expenditure on all Olympic training in the last 60 years.

But where China's state-owned enterprises remain the most powerful motors of the country's development, India's private sector -- ducking around government obstacles and bypassing the stifling patronage of the state -- has transformed the fortunes of the Indian people. So it proved again in Beijing: The wrestlers, tennis players, boxers and weightlifters who made up the bulk of the Indian contingent, accompanied by the inevitable retinue of officials, returned with two bronzes among them, while the country's only gold -- in men's 10-meter air-rifle shooting -- was won by a young entrepreneur with a rifle range in his own backyard who had no help whatsoever from the state. Abhinav Bindra is, at 25, the CEO of a high-tech firm, a self-motivated, bespectacled sharpshooter and an avid blogger. He is, in short, a 21st-century Indian. At one level, it's not surprising that he should have won India's first individual gold in any Olympics since a transplanted Englishman competed in Indian colors in the 1900 Games. India is the land of individual excellence, despite the limitations of the system. In China, individual success is the product of the system.

My fellow Indians excel wherever individual talent is given free rein. The country has produced world-class computer scientists, mathematicians, biotech researchers, filmmakers and novelists, but the only Indian sportsmen who have worn the title of world champion in recent years have been a billiards cueist and a chess grandmaster.

Come up with a challenge that requires high levels of organization, strict discipline, sophisticated equipment, systematic training and elastic budgets, and Indians quail. This remains as true inside the Olympic stadium as outside it. When China built the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, it created a 400-mile-long reservoir that necessitated displacing a staggering 1.2 million people, all accomplished in 15 years and without much fuss (except for the usual silenced naysayers and jailed malcontents) in the interests of generating electricity; in attempting its Narmada Dam project, aiming to bring irrigation, drinking water and power to millions, India has spent 34 years (so far) fighting environmental groups, human rights activists and advocates for the displaced all the way to the Supreme Court, while still being thwarted in the streets by protesters from nongovernmental organizations such as the Save Narmada Movement.

That is how it should be: India is a fractious democracy; China is not. China will win the Olympic medals for many Games to come. But India, perhaps, might win some hearts.
tharoor.assistant@gmail.com

Shashi Tharoor is a former undersecretary general of the United Nations and the author, most recently, of "The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century."