When Britain's Prince Charles declares the Commonwealth Games open tomorrow night, India will hope it marks the end of an unprecedented period of international embarrassment.
For the next 11 days New Delhi will host an estimated 6,700 athletes and officials from the former British Empire, with 71 teams competing in 17 sports. But what began seven years ago as an opportunity to showcase India's new-found status as a global power has gradually soured into a very public display of all that is wrong in the Indian political system.
From chronic delays, massive corruption and collapsing infrastructure, to terrorist attacks, outbreaks of disease and international condemnation of faeces-smeared rooms - it has sometimes felt like a conspiracy by the Delhi authorities to systematically eviscerate India's dignity. Where the stories have been most damaging is for India's obsessive tendency to compare itself with China. Right to the end, Suresh Kalmadi, the head of the Games' organising committee, has been telling anyone who will listen that facilities will be "better than the Beijing Olympics", apparently unaware of the chaos.
Barely mentioned is the fact that China is preparing to host another mega-event in just a month's time. The Asian Games, which is a considerably larger event than the Commonwealth Games, will take place in Guangzhou in November. Preparations at the city's 58 new or refurbished venues have apparently been running smoothly and finishing touches are being applied weeks ahead of the first arrivals. So what went wrong for India? It is not as if its capital is unaccustomed to large-scale events. In fact, it has twice hosted the Asian Games with considerable success.
"Delhi has many centuries of tradition of staging huge pageants and events," said Sam Miller, author of Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity."The durgas of the British period and the huge festivals of the Mughal period have made this a city that is almost famous for spectacle." But he says the attitude with which these Games were approached almost destined them to failure. "Many elite Indians kidded themselves that all this stuff about India roaring out of poverty was true. When the bid was made, there was this obsessional phrase 'India Shining' and everyone got caught up in that.
"As soon as you try to be the best in the world, you have to spend desperately over-the-top sums of money. The way it was organised meant it became a huge money-making racket for a lot of people." The first clear indications of the scale of the corruption emerged in July, with a report by the Central Vigilance Commission that examined 15 construction sites and found widespread evidence of inflated prices, poor quality work and doctored safety certificates. Many more cases of over-spending soon emerged, popular examples being the purchase of US$80 (Dh294) toilet rolls and $61 soap dispensers. Officials have denied all cases of corruption, but numerous cases are expected to emerge in court once the Games are over.
Beyond individual cases of corruption is the question of whether a sporting event was really the most pressing need for a city like Delhi. "This sort of development does nothing to address the real issues of Delhi," said Sanjay Kaul, head of People's Action, an activist group seeking better living conditions for the city's poor. "This city is incapable of catering to the basic needs of its people - health, housing, drainage, water. How can they dare to spend these huge sums of money on a few stadiums that will only end up being used for wedding parties."
In their bid to beautify the city, authorities have cleared hundreds of slum houses, leaving an estimated 250,000 people homeless. Thousands of workers on construction sites have been paid well below minimum wage while facing filthy and hazardous conditions. The collapse of a footbridge outside Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on Sept 21, in which 27 workers were injured, underlined the dangers of a last-minute rush.
The organisers retort that the Games will deliver a lasting legacy. As well as 17 new or improved stadiums, the Games also provided the impetus to complete the metro, a third airport terminal and 26 new flyovers. But there remains no satisfactory answers to how much money has actually been spent. The government has so far admitted to a budget of $2.1 billion, but independent organisations say the figure could be far higher. A Delhi-based NGO, the Hazards Centre, has placed the total at $11.8 billion.
The lack of clarity on spending has not only facilitated corruption, but also reflects a critical lack of direction from the top. "There was no centralised authority," said Boria Majumdar, co-author of Sellotape Legacy: Delhi and the Commonwealth Games. "You had a morass of government agencies, none of them talking to each other. That meant there was simply no accountability or transparency." The common conception is that since economic reforms set India's private sector loose in the early 1990s, the public sector has failed to keep pace, still wallowing in the inefficiencies of its socialist past.
But some argue that the public sector has not simply lagged behind, but has actually significantly deteriorated since the 1980s. "There has been an absolute decline in the standard of public institutions in the last few decades," said Bibek Debroy, an economist with the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. "If you look back to 1982 when we held the last sports event, you see that the capability of the public sector to deliver is not what it was. There has been a general collapse. I'm not sure that even without all the corruption we would have been able to deliver these Games successfully."
Unlike in China, where the ruthless efficiency of the state in driving economic growth could easily be transferred to the staging of an event, the Commonwealth Games demanded a level of competence from the Indian government that it has abdicated to the private sector for the past two decades. There is irony in the fact that India's public-sector failings should be exposed by one of the last vestiges of the former Empire.
"The Indian system was built on British laws," said Prem Shankar Jha, a leading Indian scholar and managing editor of Financial World. "In the 1930s, the British were fed up with getting caught out by all those pesky Congress lawyers, so they created laws that protected them against accountability. We see that same system at work today." On Delhi's streets, there is a deep sense of shame about the international humiliation its government has forced upon them.
Nonetheless, many will be hoping the next fortnight provides enough glamour to gloss over the travesties of recent months. "I've seen the opening ceremony rehearsals and it's fantastic," said Mr Majumdar. "The government may have made an absolute mess of this ... but miracles do happen. We need one."
