Commonwealth Games Delhi India 2010 Commonwealth Games India

An estimated 140,000 families will be evicted to clear space for lavish facilities in Delhi that offer no lasting benefits

As we await the start of another great carnival of sport, uneasily suppressing our reservations about the possible benefits – or the lack thereof – to the great majority of the South African people from the 2010 World Cup, news arrives of a disturbing report into the next such event, also taking place in a corner of the former British Empire where the desperately poor vastly outnumber even the modestly affluent.

The Commonwealth Games, which begin in Delhi on 3 October, are already surrounded by concerns over security. Far more worrying than the possible threat to a few thousand privileged visiting foreigners, however, is a new report by the Housing and Land Network, an arm of the global movement Habitat International Coalition, suggesting that by the time the Games begin about 140,000 families will have been evicted from their homes to clear the space for the lavish facilities now compulsory for such events.

For 100,000 of those families, it is already too late. They have been moved out of their shanty towns and "resettled", a word which has a deceptively comforting sound. Usually the policy's victims find themselves relocated to distant places where the prospects of work are even more remote and there are no schools for their children. It is anticipated that a further 40,000 families will soon share this experience in order to allow athletes to demonstrate their prowess and commercial sponsors to advertise their wares to a worldwide audience.

Miloon Kothari, a former United Nations human rights expert, wrote the report and also discovered that "tens of millions of dollars" originally intended to fight poverty in Delhi have instead been used to fund the Games, whose budget is now around 20 times its original estimate, making the fourfold rise in the London 2012 budget seem almost like good housekeeping.

Back in January it was suggested by Kothari that the Indian government needed to be held accountable for "persistent human rights violations against the homeless" and "a clear violation of [its] commitments under constitutional and international law" to provide for its poor. Now the opportunity to present Delhi as a "world city" and to make money for those with their fingers in the pie appears to be taking precedence over such commitments, as it seems to have done in South Africa, where the "people's game" will be out of the reach of all but a tiny minority of the actual people.

Corruption and the immoral misallocation of resources are more easily spotted in developing countries, partly because that is what we expect to find. In the developed world we are less blatant in our venality – not least because of our inquisitive media. When we pander to sponsors' needs, whether they be soft-drinks manufacturers or television networks, the collateral damage is less obvious. But it is still present in the skewing of priorities and the tacit expectation that a good party will make people forget the problems undermining their society, such as the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

Those making the decision to hand a sporting event of global significance to a developing nation are not always entirely devoid of decent motives. But the downside, for the voiceless majority, is too great to be tolerated. The XIX Commonwealth Games will not significantly advance Delhi's progress towards membership of an international community. Instead it will increase the prosperity of a handful of globalised "partners", make a few already prosperous people even richer, and leave behind a few very costly facilities for elite sport, to be stared at by those whose homes and lives were destroyed to make it all possible.

Perhaps the time has come to stand back and think about where the recent explosion in festivals of sport has led us. Given that a decision to restrict the hosting of all such events to countries with existing facilities would be unacceptably discriminatory, a 20-year moratorium on all such events, until the world sorts out its finances and its priorities, might not be such a bad idea.
Holding fast to a uniquely pleasing rhythm

It was my good fortune to see Anderson Roberts and Michael Holding bowl in tandem in the 1970s but an abiding memory comes from an afternoon several years after their retirement, when they strode together into the pavilion of Melbourne Cricket Club in Kingston, Holding's home club, still enveloped in the sort of aura with which they struck fear into batsmen's hearts. It was like watching Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday entering a Tombstone bar, or Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker walking into a 52nd Street club.

Fast bowlers are quite a lot like jazz musicians. They all do the same thing, more or less, but each one has his own signature, immediately recognisable from beyond the boundary, created by the combination of physique, run-up, delivery and follow-through. An assertion that Holding was the greatest of all would draw fire from admirers of Harold Larwood, Dennis Lillee and others but he was without question the most aesthetically pleasing.

Fast bowlers' autobiographies seldom amount to much but No Holding Back, the great Jamaican's new effort, published this week, is substantial enough to remind us that he has also become one of the game's better television commentators. He is modest enough not to mention the bass-heavy 1976 reggae classic in which Prince Far I celebrated "the 'eavy, 'eavy bowlin' of a man called Michael Holding". If it's not in your collection, hear it on YouTube.
Diarra's drive to succeed ends in disappointment

Spare a thought for Lassana Diarra, who moved from Arsenal to Portsmouth looking for the first-team exposure that would secure him a place in his country's World Cup squad. A courageous decision worked out so well that Diarra won not only the approval of the eccentric Raymond Domenech but a big move to Real Madrid. At the weekend, however, the news emerged from France's training camp that a genetic disorder of the red blood cells, causing chronic fatigue, will prevent his participation in South Africa.

source >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/may/25/commonwealth-games-delhi