Opinion | Columnists
Two countries, different aims
What happened at Olympics speaks to a basic difference in China and India's systems.
- By Shashi Tharoor, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 23:53 August 29, 2008
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 51 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 46th place 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 further behind in the competition for Olympic host-hood than it was two decades ago.
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 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.
Communist autocracy
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 programme, 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 organisation.
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.
But where China's state-owned enterprises remain the most powerful motors of the country's development, India's private sector 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 was won by a young entrepreneur with a rifle range in his own backyard who had no help whatsoever from the state. India is the land of individual excellence, despite the limitations of the system. In China, individual success is the product of the system.
Come up with a challenge that requires high levels of organisation, strict discipline, sophisticated equipment, systematic training and elastic budgets, and Indians quail. This remains as true inside the Olympic stadium as outside it.
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.
Shashi Tharoor, a former undersecretary general of the United Nations, is the author, most recently, of "The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century."
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