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With the second largest population in the world, an incredible pool of human resources and potential, you’d think that we’d be faring a lot better on the world stage when it came to sports and athletics. The sad truth is that very little from our ocean of human faces actually gets tapped, trained and supported by the government. In a country of cricket-lovers, very few other sports and athletics get the kind of endorsement and facilities or even attention of any kind.
The Sports Authority of India (SAI) did have a moment of enthusiasm though, back in the late 1980s when they decided to set up the Special Areas Games (SAG) Programme which was reportedly “intended to track down and develop talent by taking into account the specific factors of location and racial characteristics.”
Sounds quite a bit like profiling, but it gets a tinge more racist in its tone when you read that they intended to recruit members of India’s Siddi community, Bantu people of African descent that most in the country have little-to-no awareness about. It was SAI’s understanding that their ‘natural athleticism’ and ‘genes’ – that is, being African – would make them tremendous athletes, just like those performing incredibly well on the international stage. Putting it simply, there are African athletes and sportsmen on the global stage doing incredibly well, why not (finally) pay attention and get our own Africans into the arena as well?
It wasn’t all bad. The Siddis were finally brought into the national limelight, they were looked after, trained and groomed to represent the country – something that they took immense joy and pride in, after years of being shunned and kept on the margins of society for being ‘outsiders’. They were more empowered than they had ever been before.
Many of the scouted athletes went on to make and break records and bring home several accolades. One among them, and perhaps the most well-known is Kamala Babu Siddi who broke the record in the girl’s pentathlon in her first national athletics meet at the age of 15.
SAG ended up more of an experiment of trial and error. Where if person didn’t meet the mark, they would be replaced by another. With no real structure or planned-out growth, SAI eventually shut down, sending the young disappointed Siddi people back home.
Juje Jackie Harnodkar, an ex-athlete of the SAG programme recounts this entire experience as well as how he, among other former athletes and community members convinced the government and SAI to restart the programme in a documentary film by 101India. In the film, we listen to his first-hand account of the positive impact the programme had on the youth of the community and just how devastated they were when it was closed. He now helps trains a group of Siddi youth who are staying at the hostel with their eye on the 2024 Olympics.
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