When an Excel sheet landed in my inbox from a random galaxy far, far away, the Pavlovian response said delete. Excel sheets are not my strong suit in any case, as they threaten to self-destruct like Mission Impossible messages if you hit some wrong key. But this one promised to contain a listing of the number of court cases connected to sport now on in India – naturally, it had to be attempted. Once its intricate cell biology had been deciphered, the Excel sheet clearly indicated a virus in the system.
Before going into details, full props to whoever was behind the eye-watering work required to arrive at this summary of the cases related to sport featuring state intervention that currently are in India’s courts. In district and sessions courts, consumer courts, high courts, various benches, central administrative and other tribunals and the Supreme Court. Our sporting landscape nationwide is a tangle of squabbles. Every possible sport you can imagine is taking a bite at a legal option: all the biggies plus also cycle polo, mallakhamb, jiu jitsu, carrom, dragon boat racing and archaic martial arts like silambam and sqay.
But how many squabble? What’s the number of our current court cases pertaining to sport? Of this Excel sheet’s list of 634 cases, 217 were marked as ‘ongoing’. The rest fell under various: disposed of (274), archived (48), appeal filed (34), decided/pronounced (5) and the rest unmarked. The list had case dates, numbers, brief history, petitioner, respondent, next date. The most recent cases were listed on February 17.
The one for the nearest hearing date was about a karateka called Shubham who has taken the Ministry of Communication to court alleging undue delays in his recruitment for the post of ‘postman’ last March, after being included in the provisional selection list. It has taken Shubam an RTI to discover that the reason for his rejection was the claim that his participation certificate from the World Karate Championships, Istanbul in May 2019 had not been submitted. Which he says is incorrect. On the same day, the Punjab and High Court admitted a case pertaining to inclusion in the electoral college of the Chandigarh Volleyball Association.
These 200-plus cases are being contested over elections (federation as well as state association), officials fighting for extended tenures, stays on orders about eligibility and ineligibility. There are disputes over jurisdiction, events, money of these events. Plus, there are athletes fighting for the right to compete, for themselves, against each other, against age fraud, and for the right to be protected and respected, and for their playing arenas to be safe. There is no confirming that these are the only ongoing sports-related cases in our courts. And while there may be more, it is certain that there are no less than the 217 on this list.
Let’s go a bit apples versus oranges here around these numbers: 217 ongoing cases – 26 filed just this year already – and 41 total Olympic medals. How or why do the Olympics come into the discussion? How can a sporting ecosystem whose legal disputes are related to governance, transparency, accountability, obsessive control and post-clinging (over say athletes rights, contracts or even over expansion of leagues and competitions) ever produce successive generations of athletes in an orderly and systematic manner who can contest for Olympic medals?
The Olympics also must enter this discussion because there is a very visible and audible push for India to bid for the 2036 Olympics. In November 2024, IOA through its president PT Usha sent a letter of intent to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Future Host Commission expressing India’s interest in hosting the 2036 Games. The letter did not specifically name a host city. In January, however, news emerged from an unnamed ‘official’ (no doubt instructed to pass on the information) about an original, and let’s admit very alluring, multi-city bid – various events for various cities. With the Indian Express reporting that there were ‘deliberations’ over making the Olympics “a movement for the full country” with Ahmedabad remaining the focal point of India’s bid.
Recently, IOC member Nita Ambani, speaking at the Harvard India Summit in Boston, talked about how 9 out of 10 of the largest economies of the world had hosted the Olympics, but not India. With respect, it must be mentioned that none of these nine largest Olympics-hosting economies of the world had as badly-governed, fractured and disputed sporting ecosystems like India. While China’s state-driven sports model is an authoritarian but effective one in terms of Olympic medal success, the other top 10 economies have organic, thriving sporting structures. Plus, Spain (Barcelona 1992) and Australia (Sydney 2000) that hosted two of the most memorable Olympics in modern memory are not economic giants, but their sporting structures are robust.
Even more than three decades after liberalisation, the majority of our national federations (NFs) have not bothered to even attempt to shed their dependence on our taxes for their functioning – and are still run badly. How many have successively conducted their world championships? How does the ad hoc and arbitrary decision by IOA to appoint, without notice, procedure or required consultation, an ad hoc committee to run the Boxing Federation of India (BFI) look?
Let’s note the presence of IOA treasurer Sahdev Yadav in the sports ministry’s newly-appointed six-member committee to revise norms for sports federation funding. Last September, Yadav clashed with Usha over allegations of financial misappropriation, each threatening the other with, what else, legal action. These are Olympic-bid India’s sports leaders.
As ongoing cases show us, Indian sport expends more energy over legal wrestling than in organising a consistent, burgeoning calendar of matches, events or leagues that give more game time to our athletes. These non-stop cases must have led those behind the draft of the National Sports Governance Bill 2024 to include the establishment of an Appellate Sports Tribunal. Which is meant to “handle all sports-related disputes in India, reducing reliance on civil courts and ensuring faster resolution of grievances. It will reduce multiplicity of court cases… and provide faster, cheaper and easier resolution of disputes.”
This bill was expected to be presented in Parliament during the last session, but after the conversations with stakeholders, at the moment there are no new sightings of its latest version. The New Indian Express reported that the NFs and IOA were not happy about the name of the Sports Regulatory Board of India and wanted it re-named National Sports Board. Why does the word ‘regulatory’ make sporting governors of Olympic-bid India uncomfortable? The fact that a bill around sports governance is delayed/diluted should surprise no one. Our ambitions are loftily Olympian but our administrative mindsets are tied in with entrenched political positions and the comfort of our slow courts. 217 ongoing court cases, 41 Olympic medals. Numbers never lie.
