Caste Manages Sports
By Amit Chamaria
05 October, 2007
Countercurrents.orgCommenting that the games like football and volleyball belong to reserve categories like SCs/STs may sound silly. But if one goes by the conclusions of the Thorat committee's recent report, it is not far from the ground reality. The committee constituted under the chairman of University Grants Commission (UGC), Prof. S. Thorat has recently submitted a comprehensive report on differential and discriminatory treatment being meted out to SCs and STs students by the upper caste people in the country's premier institute like All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The report carries details on how SCs and STs students are being given differential treatment in various echelons of the life that include sports too.
Certainly, the discrimination against dalits at the level of sports is not a new thing but it has always been kept shrouded. The mythological story of Eklavya, the Adivasi archer with his Brahmin guru Dronacharya has enough evidences of the discrimination against dalits. As per some bits of the story, Guru Dronacharya refuses the request of Eklavya for making a chance of competition with less talented Kshatriya-disciple Arjun. Even the story of Karna, half brother of Pandavas in the epic Mahabharata, is deemed lowborn, echoes similar sound.
Undoubtedly, sports are the vital part of life and entail the cultural aspects of society. Many dalit students have been quoted in the thorat's report alleging that they were excluded from the games like basketball and cricket. A bitter reality is that basketball, as a game, has been exclusively domain for the general category students in AIIMS's cultural events, christened as 'PULSE'. The report mentions that only 68 percent SCs / STs students participate in various capacities in the PULSE. Of them, about 80 percent participate as observers and volunteers and
only 11 per cent as competitors and 7 percent as representatives in any committee. The reason, reported for the lower participation in the categories of competitor and representative is two fold. One is the lack of representation of SC/ ST on the organizing Committee and second is it's the unfair working. The committee works in a biased manner to ensure that the SCs/ST students are not given due participation.Broadly, the reach of dalits and rural society to the sports is almost synonymous. The games which are easily available and do not attach much paraphernalia are popular in the rural society and so as among the dalits. Interestingly, the game like football and volleyball never attract a mass appeal and not even due attention of the media. Even the government does not give proper care towards these games even the country has a great potential in it. No doubt, adivasi and dalit can truly excel in these games. Since the games like cricket and tennis are elite sports so they easily hit headlines in the media. Cricket manages a big market and also commands a far greater influence in the media.
In India athletics, hockey, football and some others are physically intensive but deglamourised sports that invariably secure the participation of the people mainly from the under-privileged section. As situation prevails in the country, only upper class people can, truly, enjoy sports and Tendulkar and Sania Mirza like sports personalities can become icons and brand ambassadors for the products. The forgotten Indian archer, Limba Ram manifest such indifferences. It could not be characterized as a naïve comment that many dalits and adivasi can become icons in the events like archery if they were trained properly. India hardly manages a medal in this event in the Olympic games. Ironically, the sacking of Saurav Ganguly from the post of the captain of the Indian cricket team can rock the Parliament but the issues related to inaccessibility of a large promising population to the sports, hardly attracts any attention of the Parliamentarians.
In the nutshell, the report of Thorat's committee is enough to display the prevailing caste bias in the field of sports too. And it should be highlighted to understand that if these types of biases are evident in AIIMS, what one has to say about rest of INDIA.
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