By now, the reign of former Punjab top cop KPS Gill as headman (President) of the Indian Hockey Federation is acknowledged by all to be a disaster for Indian hockey. Coaches have been juggled up and down, players complain of ill-treatment and the national squad under-performs to an incredible degree. They did well in patches, but overall the performance has been roughly the same for the past many years: under-performing. The last disaster was the failure at the Olympic trials and the team failed to qualify for the Olympics, a disaster for Indian hockey of a very high level. And yet, when KPS Gill was blamed by a wide section of the press, former players and other people associated with the sport, he refused to take responsibility and kept on promising a better performance in the future.
The Government also shrugged its hands and claimed that it could not intervene due to non-interference in the activities of a sporting body, a claim that almost nobody believed. But this is how the matter rested, since Gill refused to step down and nobody else could force him to. This is how matters rested till a sting operation by a TV channel showed the powerful Secretary of the IHF (K Jothikumaran) accepting a bribe to get a player into the squad in a most shameful display; he was forced to step down. And this is when another Gill (MS Gill, the new Sports Minister) started applying pressure on KPS Gill to step down:
We have an obsession with cricket in this country. It is the most popular game, and maybe there are valid reasons for that. It has been marketed wonderfully, and people’s involvement in the game has been raised to such a high degree that when the finals of the Twenty-Twenty were taking place in South Africa, the roads in Delhi were deserted, and for the next 2-3 days, the newspapers had major sections covering the event. The players were heroes, welcomed by the state government on arrival in Mumbai, with the BCCI doling out large sums of money to the players. Now, so far, the BCCI is a body for cricket, and it can give awards. But the Government has to appear broad-based and fair to all sports, and yet we know that is such a fiction. So, we have the hockey players, who won the Asia Cup when no one expected, protesting against the doling out of money to the players by State Governments.
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