Quest for power in sports federations  

Equations of convenience, garnering numbers, last-moment reshuffling of alliances and networking continue to be the operating principles in national sports federation elections. Sports administrators in India are generally viewed with cynicism and these processes often reveal the malaise in the system.

They show that development of sports is not the sole criterion when it comes to winning elections. Following a sports ministry diktat, 14 federations had to conduct elections before December 31. Most of them completed the process. The elections, however, were not without incidents. Like always, teething issues came to the fore.

For instance, in the Indian Golf Union, members changed state units or clubs just before elections. A glance at the electoral list showed that some members who reside in one state represented another. This was nothing but a method to exploit loopholes in the rule book. Going by the book, no rule was flouted. Yet, examples were set that can be emulated by others in future.

The story of the All India Chess Federation was another. There were fights between the factions led by the president and the secretary. Even though the secretary’s team defeated the president’s in the elections on Monday, there were allegations of coercion during last-minute parleys by the former. More intriguing was the fact that officials were elected from states where chess has little or no footprint.

The new president comes from Uttar Pradesh, where chess is not a flourishing sport. There are vice-presidents from Arunachal and Mizoram and joint-secretaries from Nagaland and Sikkim. Chess is virtually nonexistent in the Northeast, but their representatives were given positions just because they voted for a certain group.

The other group might have done the same, because that is the practice. In the Boxing Federation of India, the late entry of a political heavyweight led to the elections being postponed, to allow officials to work out fresh equations. Despite court orders, hardly any of the 50-plus national federations comply with the National Sports Development Code of 2011. One reason for that is, in their quest for power, officials are busy networking and bending rules instead of following them. The more they change, the more they remain the same.