Devangshu Datta: Ruing Delhi's event-hosting skills

The first time I was felt up by a man was around 3 am on a chilly November night in 1982. I was wrapped snug in a blanket, mellowed by a quarter of Old Monk, walking down to IIT Gate Crossing, intending to get my lips around a piping hot mooli paratha.

The perpetrator of this outrage was a young, and somewhat embarrassed cop. He seemed to find the act as distasteful as I did. However, as the most junior of the three specimens of Delhi’s finest who had been tasked to check out, and, if need arose, feel up passing strangers at IIT Gate, he had drawn the short straw.

So, it was his task not to reason why but to pat and grope away, while the other two asked inane questions. Admittedly, I may have seemed suspicious, given my long hair and beard, and a pervasive aroma of distilled cane juice. But when I confessed to my Bengali heritage, one of the older cops genially said Key dada, bhalo?, and waved me on to my tryst with parathas.

I have unfortunately been felt up by many men since, with varying degrees of politeness. The use of metal detectors makes it less, shall we say, intimate. But I will always remember the winter of 1982 as my initiation to Delhi’s riff on the police roadblock and frisk.

The heightened security was due to the Asiad. Buta Singh and his cohorts had realised terrorists could shoot up anything they cared to. Tragically, the perception was correct and the measures insufficient. The security that started with the Asiad bandobust never stood down. It became as permanent an Asiad legacy as the flyovers and buses.

Delhi-dwellers soon became just as inured to inane questions at checkpoints as they became blase about the new infrastructure. They pigged out at the ITDC hotels and relieved themselves on the walls of Nehru Stadium. They scrambled to get into DDA lotteries allotting the athletes’ housing complexes. They wangled memberships to Talkatora and the Siri Fort Range.

My memories of the 1982 Asiad are a little hazy. It has been 28 years, after all. But it amazes me that the event is now being recalled in some quarters as an efficiently organised blockbuster that went off without a hint of corruption.

I seem to remember a desperate last-minute scramble. About the corruption, most of the gossip from that era is still unprintable. But for years afterwards, one met shady contractors who’d got their first breaks during the Asiad. Nobody who’d been around in 1982 was surprised when Buta Singh was later embroiled in the JMM business.

It seems the CWG is organised much on the same lines. There are key differences, of course. One is that the city has developed traffic densities that make it impossible to construct anywhere without severe disruption. Still, I’d rather have some chaos if that’s the price one must pay for a full-service metro.

Another point. In 1982, India’s per capita was about Rs 270 (nominal). We were all trained by years of licence raj to stand in queues and wait for everything. We expected to be pushed around and ripped off by the powers-that-be.

There was no question of public scrutiny of how public money was spent, especially on a patriotic cause. Nobody knows who made how much during the Asiad. Given that roughly two-thirds of India’s current population was born after the demise of Mrs G senior, not too many people remember the gossip either.

India’s 2010 per capita is Rs 1,100-odd. The scale of corruption is, therefore, proportionately higher than in those pre-Maruti days. But civil society has also strengthened to a point where vigilante bean-counters can chase down every last entry in the CWG accounts. On the whole, Delhi has, I think, improved. It’s a pity that its event-hosting skills have not.