NEWSMAKER: Manohar Singh Gill

Elderly sportsman

Here's the irony. Top Bharatiya Janata Party leaders themselves admit that India could not have had a better sports minister than Manohar Singh Gill, who was sworn in last week.

But they were the first to attack the appointment for the impropriety it represented: Gill had been Chief Election Commissioner and, therefore, it was improper for him to accept a ministership. But having once accepted a Rajya Sabha nomination from the Congress, surely a ministership was just a hop, skip and jump away?

With the pressure of the Commonwealth Games, now months away, this is not the first time Gill will be called upon to soothe tempers. He served as Election Commissioner with a decidedly grumpy TN Seshan when in 1992 the government decided to make the EC a three-member body.

Gill, who had retired from the IAS, brought to bear a sense of balance in the fraught atmosphere of Nirvachan Sadan despite being viewed with deep suspicion by Seshan.

He has been involved with the Indian Mountaineering Federation for several decades, having been president of the organisation for at least one term. He was the first IAS officer to be trained in mountaineering, coached by Tenzing Norgay, who had conquered Everest along with Edmund Hillary in 1953.

A Padma Vibhushan awardee, he has been agriculture, petrochemicals and chemicals, and pharmaceuticals secretary at the Centre, is an avid cricketing enthusiast and nurtures a deep love for sports.

Mind you, Gill may be fair-minded but he is no babe in the woods. Among the Sikh community, it is a well-known fact that when a proposal was made to put up a statue of Bhagat Singh in Parliament, initially the proposal was that the statue would not have a turban.

It was MS Gill, who strongly advocated a turbaned statue and his suggestion was accepted. This may appear to be a trivial issue, but it is loaded with political meaning.

Gill has quietly lobbied to improve the facilities in the Amritsar international airport and is on record as urging the government of Punjab to help to make the Nankana Sahib pilgrimage free for poor Sikhs.