The Beijing Olympic Games may be three years away, but UP Sports Minister R K Chowdhary’s gameplan is ready: make Indian sports caste and community-based and set up caste hostels to nurture this talent.‘‘Nats (roadside entertainers) have basic talent for gymnastics, while Mallahs, Kewats, Vindhyas, Nishads and Kashyaps are natural swimmers and divers. Similarly, Ahirs, Ghosis and Gaddis are natural wrestlers while Bahelias, Adivasis and Aherias have inherent talent for archery,’’ says Chowdhary.That may sound politically incorrect but the Minister thinks this hypothesis has been tested—in Athens. Chowdhary claims that the civil-rights struggle in the ’60s in the US prompted the Americans to recruit more African-Americans. Result: at the Athens Olympics, ‘‘the US won over 100 medals, of which one-third were won by Blacks. India won only one medal.’’The Sports Minister has already begun work on setting up caste-based sports hostels in UP—which he curiously calls ‘‘Diversity Sports Hostels.’’ In five years, he says, these hostels will start delivering international-level sportspersons.‘‘I will begin by setting up four hostels for the castes that I have already identified,’’ says Chowdhary, who says he’s currently reading a book titled Uttar Bharat ki Adim Jatiyan (Basic castes of Northern India).‘‘So far, we train the cream of society and succeed in shaping hardly one sportsperson (of international calibre). But if we start training on caste and community lines, we can shape hundreds of sportspersons every year,’’ says the Minister. His department, meanwhile, has already got cracking. On its agenda: an extensive population survey of castes and their ‘‘inherent’’ sports talent.The Minister himself is spending a lot of time these days in various libraries, reading up on his pet subject. Besides the book, Chowdhary says he’s been ‘‘surfing the net’’ to get more information about sports and races.The need of the hour, he says, is not building stadia in rural areas but providing ‘‘special opportunities to children based on their caste.’’‘‘We will motivate parents to send their children to these hostels. Backward and Dalit families usually prefer to treat their children as earning members of their family, instead of sending them to schools.’’
