From the archives of WSN, I culled out an editorial written in April 2008, which chronicles the damage KPS Gill did to Indian hockey. My interest in the game of hockey was kindled during my visits with my father to witness hockey matches at the Bombay Hockey Association grounds, next to the Churchgate railway station in the hub of the city. The editorial is reproduced here without any change.

Five of the players who were part of the 1968 Hockey Olympics hailed from Sansarpur, the karambhoomi of a large number of joysticks men, recall a very touching tale about their return after winning the bronze medal. By today’s standards, it would have been a good achievement. With hindsight, it would have been a great achievement.

But in those days, standards were different. We hadn’t progressed so much. So winning a bronze was pretty down market, and heart breaking too.

 “We all returned in the dead of the night, afraid that we should not run into some villagers who will curse us for not being even finalists, and when I finally met someone, he asked me if that was how we learnt hockey. I was told to be ashamed, and I was,” Col Balbir Singh recalls, adding the fate of his friends (the other) Balbir Singh (Punjab Police), Jagjit Singh, Tarsem Singh and Ajit Singh was no different.

 Balbir Singh and his friends did not have a KPS Gill to defend them, or he would have proved that winning the gold was somehow a shameless thing. Since standards have since changed, the possible KPS line currently is that perhaps winning or even qualifying has become some kind of a shameless activity, so he has done everything in the book, and outside it, to destroy the very spirit of hockey.

 The man knows his business. Having destroyed the soul of human rights campaign in Punjab, having destroyed the very kernel of being a Sikh, having been convicted in a case of moral turpitude and remaining shameless about it, and having defended the grossest of the human rights violators like Ajit Singh Sandhu, this is the final disgraced adieu phase of KPS Gill, his moustache still rolled upward.

 If a man’s measure lay in the moustache, people would have found salvation in a bottle of gel. The banh-maror muchh-maror sardar-looking man has turned out to be a puny little fellow who rollicks in a mess that he creates with aplomb and has still to meet life and principle even decades after landing amongst us. Of course, the official Indian establishment needs him. Regimes always need fiddlesticks to kill the spirit of joysticks.

“If a man’s measure lay in the moustache, people would have found salvation in a bottle of gel. The banh-maror muchh-maror sardar-looking man has turned out to be a puny little fellow who rollicks in a mess that he creates with aplomb and has still to meet life and principle. Of course, the official Indian establishment still needs him. Regimes always need fiddlesticks to kill the spirit of joysticks.”

 The inglorious and unprecedented exit of the team even before the start of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing is a black-letter day for the sport. The team is out of the Olympic Games for the first time since making their debut at the 1928 Amsterdam Games.

 Somehow, Punjab and Sikhs have always closely associated themselves with the sport. The dribbling men with the curved stick, a white hankey covering the hairbun on the head told the world about the presence of Sikhs all across the world in pre and post astroturf period. From their debut appearance at Amsterdam under the peerless Dhyan Chand, the team reeled off six straight gold medals till the streak was broken by Pakistan at the 1960 Rome Olympics. In 1968 came the bronze and in 2008 the shame. There will be talk about rule changes and transition towards the more powerful European style of play, but the fact remains that it has been more an issue of management and less an issue of hockey.

 India has ensured that KPS became bloated, larger than life figure. So it has to park him somewhere. No state government wants him. The Centre’s attempts to foist him as a governor or a security advisor have been resisted by state after state. The Indian Hockey Federation was a convenient spot in the parking lot of bloated Indian figureheads, and KPS has stuck to his post like shame sticks to the devil.

To succeed, a sport needs success. To fail, and fail utterly, it needs a KPS Gill. Fix him anywhere, the man never lets you down, he ensures you never get up again. Aadmi hai ke self goal!

12 March 2008